Steamboat (food)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Steamboats refer to a variety of dishes eaten throughout East Asia, where ingredients are cooked in a simmering pot of broth at the table, usually communally, similar to a fondue.
Typical steamboat ingredients include thinly sliced meat, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, tofu, noodles or seafood. The cooked food is either eaten with a dipping sauce, or sometimes as a soup.
In many areas, steamboats are often eaten in the winter.
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[edit] Varieties
[edit] China / Mongolia
Chinese steamboats are known as hot pot, or sometimes Chinese Fondue. Huo Guo (Traditional Chinese: 火鍋; Simplified Chinese: 火锅; pinyin: huǒguō) is the Chinese name for hot pot, where huǒ means "fire", while guō refers to "pot".
It originated in Mongolia[citation needed] and spread to the south during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906). Later, the northern nomads who settled in China enhanced the hot pot with such meat as beef and mutton, and southerners did the same with seafood. By the Qing Dynasty, the hot pot became popular throughout most of China.
The cooking pot is often sunken into the table and fueled by propane, or alternatively is above the table and fueled by hot coals. The ingredients are loaded individually into the hot cooking broth by chopsticks, and cooking time is brief. The food is then dipped in a sauce before eating.
- Beijing - Different kinds of hot pot can be found in Beijing - typically, more modern eateries offer the sectioned bowl with differently flavored broths in each section. More traditional or older establishments serve a fragrant, but mild, broth in the Mongolian firepot, which is a large brass vessel, which is heated by burning coals in a central chimney. Broth is boiled in a deep, donut-shaped bowl surrounding the chimney.
- The Manchurian hot pot (Traditional Chinese: 東北酸菜火鍋) uses plenty of Chinese sauerkraut (Traditional Chinese: 酸菜) to make the pot's stew sour.
- Sichuan hot pot.
- In Cantonese style hot pot, a raw egg is sometimes mixed into the condiments.
- In Xishuangbanna, near Myanmar, the broth is often divided into a yin and yang shape - a bubbling, fiery red chilli broth on one side, and a cooler white chicken broth on the other.
- In the Taiwanese hot pot, people eat the food with a dipping sauce consisting of sacha sauce and raw egg yolk. The use of thinly sliced red meat in hot pot probably originated from the nomadic Mongolians.
[edit] Korea
- Jjigae - Korean steamboats are very hot and spicy, perfect for warmth in harsh Korean winters. The ingredients are stewed in a spicy soup flavoured with chilli bean paste or salted shrimp paste.
[edit] Thailand
- Thai sukiyaki - Steamboats in Thailand were Chinese-style hot pots at first, catering mainly to Thailand's sizable ethnic Chinese community. However in the 1960s a restaurant chain called Coca opened its first branch in Siam Square, Bangkok, offering a modified version of the Chinese hot pot under the Japanese name of Sukiyaki. (Although it only vaguely resembled Japanese sukiyaki, it was a catchy name for it because of a Japanese pop song called "The Sukiyaki Song" which was a big worldwide hit at the time.) In this modified Thai version, diners had more options of ingredients to choose from, each portion being considerably smaller in order to enable diners to order many more varieties. The spicy dipping sauce was catered for Thai tastes too, with a lot of chilli sauce, chilli, lime and coriander leaves added. This proved to be a massive hit, and it wasn't long before other chains started opening "suki" restaurants across Bangkok and other cities, each with its own special dipping sauce as the selling point. Today the MK chain is the most popular in Thailand with 122 restaurants across the country and 8 in Japan. Coca is making a rapid spread abroad too, already serving Thai suki in 24 outlets across Asia and Australia and further outlets planned in the US and Europe.
[edit] Japan
Japan has a wide range of steamboat dishes, collectively known as nabemono. They can be divided into styles where the ingredients are simmered in a light flavoured stock and then dipped in a sauce before eating (like chinese hot pots), and where ingredients are stewed in a soy sauce based or a miso-based broth. There are many varieties; below are some of the more popular ones.
- Mizutaki - chicken pieces simmered with other ingredients in stock and served with a dipping sauce such as ponzu. A traditional speciality of Fukuoka, but eaten throughout Japan for hundreds of years.
- Yosenabe - various meats, seafood, tofu, mushrooms and vegetables stewed in a soy or a miso flavoured broth.
- Sukiyaki - thinly sliced beef, negi, tofu, ito konnyaku (jelly-noodes), shungiku, various types of mushrooms and other ingredients, simmered in a shallow cast-iron pot in soy sauce, sugar and mirin and dipped into a small bowl of beaten raw egg by the diner before eating.
- Shabu-shabu - similar to Chinese hot pot. Thinly sliced beef simmered in a potful of stock along with tofu, mushrooms and various vegetables, and served with a variety of dipping sauces such as ponzu. Ingredients such as pork, chicken or seafood are occasionally used instead of beef. Chinese hot pot was introduced to the Japanese during their colonial rule of Manchuria, and upon their return to Japan following the end of the war, they recreated the dish replacing lamb with beef which the Japanese were more familiar with .
[edit] Comparison to Fondue
While not exactly a type of hot pot or "steamboat" fare, the Western dish, Fondue, may be compared to the hot pot. Like the hot pot, fondue is also served with a pot and various food that is used to dip in the soup or dipping sauce.
