Hey Hive!
We're back with more of our home cooking! If you're unfamiliar with this series, it's where I showcase some of the food we've been making at home since we've been cooking a lot nowadays! Also I'm running out of content so yeah gotta make the most of it!
So the other day, Sean cooked up a surprise for me in the form of a hotpot feast! I'm sure everyone knows what hotpot or steamboat is, but for those who don't, it's basically a cooking method that originates from China, prepared with a simmering pot of soup stock at the dining table. With the hot pot simmering with flavoured broth, raw ingredients are placed inside the pot and cooked similar to fondue. (Source: Wikipedia)
I guess hotpot is kinda like the Asian version of fondue, but probably healthier? Anyway, Sean bought a couple of different flavoured hotpot broths from none other than Haidilao! I'm sure everyone knows of Haidilao; I mean they're pretty renowned for being a hotpot brand with over 768 chain restaurants in China, Singapore, U.S., South Korea, Japan, Canada and Australia. They pride themselves on quality service while delivering healthier, safer and nutritious food. (Source: Haidilao)
Here in Singapore, Haidilao always has a long line of customers waiting outside their restaurants so we've actually never tried Haidilao before. Well that and, it's also pretty pricey. So we decided to cook it ourselves at home and see how the broth is! Anyway, most of the raw ingredients are basically stuff you can buy in the supermarket anyway. And with the lockdown in place now we can't eat out in restaurants so this will be like bringing the restaurant to our home, sort of.
Hotpot typically isn't eaten with any staples since it can be a main dish on its own, but since the soup is really hot we made some plain white rice and Sean also got this pack of vermicelli noodles to eat with the soup.
For the raw ingredients, we got some meat in the form of pork and beef shabu shabu!
Sean bought these 2 packs of meat for only 8 dollars! And it had quite a large quantity too. This was after we took out the meat we were going to use for our hotpot. And it looked pretty legit shabu shabu too!
We also got some tofu which was pretty much made for hotpot. They even had a picture of steamboat on the packaging.
We also got some enoki mushrooms and Chinese cabbage, aka Wong Bok, which we sliced up into smaller pieces and washed.
So after prepping all the ingredients, we set up the table with our steamboat pot and induction cooker.
And once the water was boiling, it was time to cook! We decided to try the Mushroom flavour hot pot sauce this time and dumped it in with some of the enoki mushrooms and wong bok!
Once we got the wong bok boiled and soft we tried eating our hotpot with rice and the soup base was actually really tasty! It did have a mushroom taste but wasn't too strong and it tasted pretty savoury and healthy too!
The rest of the ingredients meshed really well with the broth too. And it didn't affect the taste of the hotpot soup at all! The meat was nice and tender albeit a little plain but still good!
We also had this special beancurd skin roll to accompany our steamboat! It was nice and crispy and I think they're normally eaten by dipping it into the soup first, but I don't like crispy things to get soggy so I just lightly dipped it on the surface of the soup before eating it so there's the taste of broth while still retaining its crispiness.
Overall, it was such a scrumptious meal! We were so full and could barely finish all the ingredients we prepped! And we only prepped half of them for this meal!
What a delicious and healthy hotpot too! With so much vegetables and no oil, it was truly satisfying and you don't feel guilty after! I tried to finish most of the soup we prepared until there were just dregs at the bottom and I was so stuffed after that!
Hotpot is definitely perfect for cold weather, but unfortunately we don't have that in Singapore so we'll just have to make do. But it's still a super yummy meal regardless so give it a try the next time you're craving some healthy soup!
Thanks for reading!
To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!
