Chong Qing Chicken Pot is chicken cooked with onions and spices in a claypot. It comes fully cooked ready and to eat with rice/noodles and other dishes. But because the chicken pot has so much flavor, after the chicken is eaten, broth is added to turn it into a hotpot(steamboat, shabu shabu).
Or you could do what I do, which is to turn it into a hotpot immediately. First as soon as the chicken pot arrives at the table, I pick out all the chicken pieces and have the wait staff add soup stock to it. While the soup is boiling, I order hot pot like items to be cooked into the chicken pot. I prefer veggies such as wintermelon, corn, fried tofu, napa cabbage, because they absorb all the flavors of the broth and spices.
Be patient and let the soup simmer for 3-5 minutes to get the full flavor of the soup before dumping any of the raw items in. Check out the chicken pieces I stashed on the left hand side of the picture.
This is what the pot looks like with all the ingredients dunked in. I generally order just veggies to put into the hotpot but you can also order beef/pork/lamb/fishballs etc. Cook them to your desired firmness for vegetables. Most meat and seafood only takes a minute or two to cook in the pot when the pot is boiling. As for the chicken, I dip my chicken into the pot to warm it up before I eat it. It has a different flavor from all the other items in the pot which is why I like. I order my chicken pot medium spicy. Do not order the spicy if you are a first-timer!
I always have to drag hubby there since he is not a fan of spicy food or hot pot. I really enjoy this and try to have it once a month. Be sure to give this a try if you like spicy foods and if you like to try new cuisines.
In Hong Kong you can or the Chong Ching chicken pot at: 來來重慶雞煲, 11/F, Kyoto Plaza, 491-499 Lockhart Road, Causeway Bay. 2891-9017. Opens at 6pm-2am daily. Reservations are highly recommended especially in winter. There is no English name of the restaurant as it is highly local. There are other locations scattered around Hong Kong, but the Causeway Bay location is the easiest to find. It is right across the street of the Causeway Bay MTR, SOGO exit.
Other points of note: (1) The restaurant has English menus, which is weird as it does not have an English name. (2) Quite clean as well.
sapha sapha is Cantonese for wishy WASHy and I think that the Japanese operatives observed biAng biANG noodles in Xian which is so named for the noise when it hits the water so they came up with shabu shabu in trying to make hotpot their own – but no Cantonese would name food they want to sell to people as – sapha sapha
Did you know the North Point Shanghainese INVENTED shumai to sell on the street when they first arrived in Hong Kong and needed to make survival money? That’s why the ingredients are easy to find but it’s become a staple of dim sum, hasn’t it? Eileen Yin Fei Lo wrote about it.
Thanks for all the background info. I had no idea. I love history in general but never really delved into culinary history.
How’s the bing in HK now? Is it hard to find? I remember the simple condensed milk and red bean bing I used to get from Ren Ren on Bayard Street before you were born. Did you have any of the Japanese version with vanilla ice cream instead of condensed milk when you were in Hawaii? I think bing is closest to the first iteration of the Chinese invention of ice cream which must have influenced the Italian creation of gelato.
It is hard to find the simple condensed milk and red bean bing. I have only had it an old style dessert shop in Causeway Bay called Galaxy Cafe.
I did not have the Japanese Version with vanilla ice cream because I dislike vanilla and ice cream. =)
I also think that the Mediterraneans and Persians MUST have traded with China much longer than previously believed because phyllo dough and pasta is really our type of thinking i.e. water and starchy mash to make a sheet of … paper whilst the Egyptians were using papyrus. All those dough wrapped foods that spanned the globe and back again – pierogies, spaetzles are knife noodles using our invention of metal graters – hello, Cuisinart, all the Turkish cuisine on Gourmet Diary of a Foodie and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations – it couldn’t have just been Ghenghis Khan’s descendants dropping the stolen ingenuity as they made their way westward.
wow, who knew a simple post about hotpot would open a floodgate – I must have a hotpot pulse point.
(sorry for the loquaciousness)
You must have a hot pot pulse point!
I hear where you are coming from, it would be great if some historian wrote down where certain foods originated from as that would be fascinating read to me at least.
In general though, I think all cultures borrow/steal from each other just different products. TV was invented in America, but the Japanese took it to another level, and China is making cheap copies.
I remember back when I lived at my aunt’s place in Shanghai and she bought a China brand TV to save money. It was about 1/3 the price of a Japanese model. It was insane that the plasma TV overheated itself after 1-2 hours depending on the temperature of the room and that you either need to turn the TV off after 1-2 hours or have a fan directly blowing at it.
I have a package of the original rice krispies from Sichuan – they used to sell them freshly made in Chinatown. The packaging has a drawing of Egyptian design because that is reportedly where the sa yong originated from and Persian merchants bought the snack to China.
It’s nice when we benefit from outside influences because it seems the majority of the time, we are on the giving end. But I guess John Basilone’s repeated reenlistment and Eric Liddell trump everything.