Hey guys, we're halfway out the door (thus the relatively odd posting time) going to Yunnan and Guizhou for a couple weeks - y'know, "research" :) So forgive me for slacking on the notes a little... might edit some in later, but yeah. We did want to give you guys a heads up on where this historical information generally came from though, so I figured I'd at least copy our 'sources and further reading' discussion from over on the Substack here as well: 1. The recipe itself was adapted from “重庆菜谱” by The Revolutionary Committee of Chongqing Food and Beverage Service Company (重庆市饮食服务公司革命委员会). 2. Most of our historical bits were based on the writing of Lin Wenyu (林文郁). He wrote a book on Chongqing hot pot (火锅中的重庆) discussing the history and origin of Chongqing hot pot in detail, which is widely cited in other books and academic papers. This article in the Chongqing Morning Post is a very decent summary of his work: epaper.cqcb.com/html/202304/22/node_006.html 3. Lin Wenyu extensively cites the work of Li Jieren (李劼人), whose books are a very good source for understanding Sichuan around the first half of 20th century. On a similar note, Chengdu Tonglan (成都通览) by Fu Chongju (傅崇矩) is another good source about the life in (especially Chengdu) around the turn of the century... we actually cited this book in our recent Sweet Water Noodle (甜水面) video. 4. Unfortunately, the above is only available in Chinese. If anyone has any suggestions on further reading in English on the matter, I’m all ears. 5. The absolutely gorgeous historical map from the video can be downloaded here in all its 28075 x 13889 glory: mega.nz/file/QaMR0DQA#x_WXVtL-edE6UyhgWO1DNk4N3iIhclD4gxblOm8sL1A 6. Oh! And while it's of course easily google-able, the pair of Wang Gang recipes are here... the base: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gJqhjNGJ08zRYIU.html and the pot: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ps6afdGBz6eUeqM.html Be sure to follow us on Instagram if you don't already, we'll be updating it quite a bit when traveling! instagram.com/chinesecookingdemystified/

Chef Wang, man. His videos deserve to be archived in museums for cultural preservation purposes!

Wow, eating Sichuan Hot Pot in a white shirt. THAT takes real guts.

For anyone like me who fixates on inane things, her shirt says "A cat will be your friend, but never your slave"

I love learning about food history. Do more "old" recipes! Along with the history lesson of course 🙂

You devotion to the anthropology of chinese food is amazing!! It is not a monolith or even a two cusine place. It is thousands of diverse ways of existing together!

Over-rice-ability is such an excellent criterion for dishes.

"Gastronomical SM session" - 😂😂😂 what a line!

All else aside, to think of the hotpot as “a Ma La smörgåsbord” made my swedish heart beat faster! What A beautiful expression

I love the drawings so much and I unironically think they add so much to the retention of the history.

Incredibly interesting learning about the origins and this style of hot pot. Up until seeing this, i always thought hot pot was "all about the dipping sauce" so this showed me another way of how it can be enjoyed. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!

"Fluvial" means of or found in a river, btw. I was unaware, so I went a-googling, and figure others may not know yet either.

I tried your recipe, omg!!!!!! This is the best hotpot I have ever had!! Better than the restaurant and store bought soup base 🤯❤❤❤❤❤

I wish this came out sooner! I tried making my own hotpot base this holiday season with a homemade mala chili oil. It came out great, but was a bit more complicated than it could've been, nowhere near as complicated as Wang Gang's though. At least I was able to make my first homemade chili oil, and I don't think I'd ever regret having tasty hotpot!

Slightly different but the Korean hotpot place near me uses green tea to top up the base which lends a fantastic flavour to things

I've never tried that style (I think), but for the more Chongqing restaurant style, I definitely second your recommendation of brain. I also love quail eggs and lotus root in it.

Very valuable video. I’ve always wanted this dish but have never found a reasonable home recipe. Thanks!

Stephs shirt is so cute! also while never having done hotpot before, this older approach certainly seems far more accessible

Thank you for both the culinary history lesson and the appreciation for home cooks being unable to replicate some restaurant food at home. Sometimes “close enough” may have to suffice, but can still be delicious. Thanks also for your entirely reasonable stance on spiciness. Somehow we’ve arrived at a place where eating extremely spicy food is a flex, which is just silly.

I love the drawings ^^ nice video once again

What a recipe. 1972? You're right, this is some food history. Food and culture and I love this kind of thing.

Just so you know, I have not been able to stop thinking about this video since I watched it. I'm not even a huge fan of Sichuan hotpot! The recipe is great and I'm looking forward to introducing it to my family, but you have to know you BLEW my mind when you used the laozao/jiuniang this way. I've never seen it used like that in all my years of being a Chinese person and watching my family cook Chinese food!

I really appreciate videos about hot pots. If you follows Chinese social media in any capacity, you'd know many, especially the cheap restaurants don't use chef wong methods, they just use some a mixture of chemical known as one drop of incense that don't contain any beef. Making your own is the best way to get a good product

Man, anytime I watch these videos I just fell in love more and more with Chinese coulture :) awesome food, great video!

Another great video! Nice work!😃

Fortunately, at lease in the US, the soup base for modern hotpot can be bought in many Asian grocery stores.

Thank you for this. I avoid making mala or sichuan style hot pot at home because it's a pure pain in the ass to eat at home. But this approach is literally making me want to try it at home! :)

Thank you for these videos.

I love the (presumable) hand drawings!

Nice tabletop charcoal burner. I was given a Thai bucket charcoal burner for Christmas. I am looking forward to some outdoor cooking adventures in the coming weeks

You can't use phrases like "gastronomical SM session" without warning. I've just decorated my laptop screen with the tea from my mouth!

Great video as usual!

Another fascinating lesson! I'm not sure I'll have the spoons to actually try this myself, but at least i have a better idea of the kind of dipping sauces I might want to try next time i go out for hotpot

wow i am finally gonna do hotpot at home. super approachable as always

Cooking and history nice

I was not prepared for such a casual "try it with brains" recommendation at the end of the video. Love it! (not sure it's available in markets in the Netherlands though...) Cheers!

Celsius frying Temperatures, Love it! Thanks for that Detail.

man I fckin love you guys. been waiting for this for some time now to drop. greetings from turkey

Awesome video

Interestingly enough, the recipe I had been following for a Sichuan style hot pot base that I got from Omnivorous Cookbook is fairly similar to this, though it might have more spices and chilies in it

I LOVE history! in the west, far east history is so hed to find reliably... thank you

I have always wanted to try Sichuan hotpot!!!

Ooooooh man, this looks lovely.

I love Steph's shirt! 😍

We’re lucky enough to be able to buy quite easily the ready-made 海底捞 hot pot soup bases 😝

Great as ever. Regards

I need to get my hands on Mao's little cook book

The "Sichuan" style hot pot in Taiwan is very different from the actual ones in Sichuan. This recipe is actually very similar to the ones you find in Taiwan.

Love your outro music.

my local large Asian Grocer has 'instant hot pot' mixes. I haven't tried them, mostly because I'm unemployed. I just go there for the inexpensive ramen and occasionally spices.

Once the world got a hold of chili peppers they went ballistic.

The videos are awesome and I love the little history lesson, but I would appreciate it if you could explain more of WHY certain ingredients are being used. For example, I am interested to know that the fermented rice adds to the flavour and/or texture of the dish. As someone who is not familiar with many of the ingredients used, I'd like to know not only what they are and where to find them, but also what they bring to the table. Thanks!

From time to time i thought NileRed was narrating this video HAHAHHAHA

Steph eating a red, oily meal in a white shirt is braver than any marine

Looks like its time to buy one of those tabletop induction stoves

She is adorable!!!

wow this was good!

0:10 As one quote from Mao said. "You can't be a revolutionary if you don't eat chilies."

I love Sichuan hot pot, but doing it at home is very tricky!

Thanks for the sesame oil + msg idea!

Korean sikhye isn’t really fermented rice. It’s usually a sweet barley water that has cooked rice in it. Most forms in the US are going to be the canned drink which is pretty sweet.

you know it's good when Mao approved this recipe himself

I'll try it this way next time. I normally use Fuschia Dunlop's recipe.

Cool🎉, you could even just go water; soy sauce, Chinese wine, sesame oil, chillies, garlic, Ginger, onion, left over chicken bones or shrimp shells, whatever really than the stock would flavour with the ingredients you used, pretty simple really. Cheers🎉

I'm pretty sure that the dripping you can buy in UK supermarkets is basically the same as tallow

I love hot pot but I found out most of the premade bases use broad beans which my partner is allergic to. I might take you up on this one! When it's nice out again in Canada I want to have a backyard hot pot party. 😎

Thanks for bringing us the people's hot pot

Fantastic! Question: is there any source where you can find old, traditional Chinese cookbooks, translated into English?

If I ever open a spicy hotpot restaurant, I'm calling it "Gastro SM Session".

8:06 Dog walking around next to a hot pot.. he is not aware of the danger.

love chinese food its the best in the world .

Who drew these cute little stick figure images? They are adorable

Would vegetable or mushroom broth be a good alternative to the stock?

I always wanted to make hot pot, but I've never had a chance, so I'm curious, after finishing eating what u do with broth?

"gastronomical SM session" You better copyright that because someone is gonna swoop in on that one.

can you share the link to wang gang's second video thanks

Hi, I really love your content. I was at the china for the 9 weeks at Thaicang and I really loved three dishes: frist three fortunes made of eggplant, potatoes and peppers. Second it was some sort of appetizer it was some cucumber with garlic. Third was beef with pepper and onion and it always came in aluminum foil still warm. Don’t you have some recipes of this dishes ? Or do you know them? I will really like to make this dishes to my father because he is really big fan of Chinese food.

I used to love spicy food, but it seems like after taking antibiotics my stomach became unable to handle anything spicy so now I'm stuck with mild. Wish there was a way to fix this.

I love watching my Nordic brethren cook oriental food🫡OKOkOk8888OK

whats the purpose of adding the sweet fermented rice in the hot pot bases?

What is that metal thing in the background in the shots where she's eating? Almost looks like a fermenter, but maybe a water boiler?

is there a reason you seem to have stopped recommending indian mustard seed oil as a sub for caiziyou?

Now I understand why you have to tell people how to “properly” eat Chinese food or they would just do it the western way which would appear “silly” but Since only the cooking needs to be authentic, the correct way of eating is not strict, millions of Chinese residents (young people especially) can’t hold their chopsticks right, old recipes won’t tell you exactly how much ingredient to add but “add appropriate amount” one dish has many way of eating and cooking with same result. No Chinese would judge you from enjoy food your own way.

So basically a butload of season😮my in the broth then blanch the meat and veggies? Sounds good

A cat will be your friend. Hello, from Pennsylvania.

Can we add simple five spices to the broth?

Definitely going to try this but would welcome ideas for vegetarian components if anyone has them?

hmmmm you can taste great leap forward

Your spread at 8:49 looks delicious! Where I'm neither a fan of offal nor anything above an American medium, I would adjust the spice and do mostly veg, fish balls and tteokbokki, with some thinly sliced (Korean) beef and maybe some boneless, skinless chx. As always thanks for the history and a doable home version. Are you precooking potatoes, daikon and lotus r letting them sit in the broth to cook?

Did you guys have the potatoes and daikon prepped in some kind of water before adding to the hotpot?

Souped Up Recipes has a great video for making restaurant style hot pot base. It has a lot of spices, and there are a LOT of steps, but (!) it can be made in advance and frozen for later use. Also, the base can be used in other dishes to be served over rice. Your recipe here, however, will likely be our base this weekend. We don’t need to feed a lot of people - just the two of us, and simple homestyle dishes are just easiest for us right now.

👍👍

So, and this is a weird question I know, what does each step in the complicated modern hotpot base actually add? Like, how does the base taste if you just use fried whole chilies or just a fried re-hydrated chili paste instead of a mix of both? What happens if you add the aromatics later or don't use tallow, etc?

How can I get my hands on this book lol

A like for the "old" cookbook.

What do you guys think of the recent boom of the mala hotpot trend in Thailand as Chinese expats in BKK? I wonder how authentic or different it is compared to the original 🤔

I know a Chinese friend whose family fled during the Mao's regime, he told me that hot pot is the only food that fed his family but you literally never know what you'll get. The meat range anywhere between insects to literal human parts and they never questioned or complained they were all just grateful for some proteins in their meals

It was a very good hotpot ... but next time we put the peppercorns into some kind of tea sack, to remove them from the broth after cooking. It was good at the beginning but in the end it wasn't fun anymore. The spicyness level was really good and the broth had such a good aromatic but the peppercorns were a burden in the end. Next time we consider the tea bag or filtrate the broth ... even though I liked the broth except for the corns.

People weren't worried about posting a picture to instagram in 1972, so i believe the food is probably better.

What kind of brains do you recommend? It’s illegal to get ox brains in the UK due to the mad cow epidemic a couple decades back