Hotpot
Hotpot, or Huo Guo, is hugely popular in Sichuan as an everyday dish to be shared with friends.
In Sichuan, Hotpot is a very popular local flavor and can be found at every corner of the cities.
People gather around a small pot boiled with gas filled with flavorful and nutritious soup base. You have a choice of spicy, pure and combo for the soup base. Thin sliced raw variety meat, fish, various bean curd products and all kinds of vegetables are boiled in the soup base. You then dip them in a little bowl of special sauce. Be careful since the spicy soup base is burning hot.
We like it very much, but is it same to foreigner? Hehe…. Let’s check what Jan said.
The hotpot is terrifying. Waiters place a large gas burner on your table, fire it up, then stagger over with what looks like a bronze kitchen sink, brimming with liquid, and set it on top of the flame. This is the hotpot itself, which is split into two sections, rather like a foot spa.
On one side, there's a mild and fragrant soup with a chicken stock base, which waiters top up from a soup kettle as it is consumed or evaporates. The other side contains a volcanic brew of oil, Sichuan peppers, vicious-looking dried chillies and big white peppercorns, all churning furiously on top of the flame. The Sichuanese call this stuff "hot and numbing", for reasons that soon become obvious. Even leaning over to inhale it proves to be a mascara-melting mistake.
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