Patron Exclusive Recipe #21 Coconut Chicken Hotpot (椰子鸡火锅)

Hey guys, how's it going? It's been a very weird and kinda crazy time in the past two weeks, it's literally a staycation that I never left the building... We've been whipping stuff up using food stock and limited supplies forced us to be creative. I've been posting pictures on Instagram regarding the stuff we cooked, you can go check it out if you're curious: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/cookupinlockdown/.

So for this week's Patron recipe, I wanna show you how to make a chicken hotpot using coconut water. 

Traditionally, there's this soup dish in which people would put some poultry in coconut and making a double-boiled soup using the coconut water. The result is pretty amazing, full of natural sweetness from the coconut water and super soothing.
There's a little eatery in Guangzhou that makes this kind of double-boiled coconut soup and got mentioned in Michelin's Bibendum guide a couple of years back: 达杨原味炖品. We've been going there forever and it always has a queue, even at 11 pm on a cold winter night. You can imagine how popular this kind of soup is.
So I believe coconut chicken hotpot is a dish that derived from that soup. I can't really find the exact origin of the hotpot, but it got popularized in Shenzhen in recent years then later spread throughout the country. Being next to Guangzhou, it's highly possible a restauranteur saw how much people loved it and thought to him/herself "I wonder how people would like it if we turn into hotpot, which is a way of eating that everybody loves". And there you have it, the super-popular coconut chicken hotpot. (Great invention btw, lol.)
Being how awesome it is, the ingredients are very simple, let's get started.
(A side note, I made this with my dad when we were at my parents during Lunar New Year, so I only took one final picture. Apologies for not having illustrations for the process, but I'll find stuff online to showcase how to deal with certain steps.)

 **Ingredients** (Serves two-eight people, depends on how big your chicken is and what else you put in the hotpot)

Soup base:

1. Young coconut, 3-4, depends on the size. We want at least 1-liter coconut water. 

2. Chicken, the freshest ones available. You can also use chicken wings and thighs if you don't want to chop the chicken yourself. We had 8 people for dinner that night and used a 3kg chicken. So depends on how many people you want to serve, I'll say about 500g bone-in chicken per person is about right. 

3. Ginger, 2 inches, peeled.

4. Water chestnut, 6 pieces, peeled. (You can sub it with a small chunk of daikon.)

5. Dried red dates, 2 pieces.

6. Goji berries, 10 pieces.

7. Licorice root, 2 small pieces. 

Note that water chestnut, dried red dates, goji berries, and licorice root are only used to accentuate the sweetness of the coconut water. Skip if you don't have them.

Dipping sauce (the amount given below makes for a serving for 2 people, please multiple it if you're serving a bigger party. Or you can make a bit more in case you want some more dipping sauce when eating.):

1.  Finely minced fresh sand ginger, or regular ginger, 4 tbsp.
So sand ginger provides a very distinct flavor in the dipping sauce, however, given it's widely unavailable in the west, ginger would work just fine in the dipping sauce.  

2. Finely chopped cilantro, 3/4 cup.

3. Finely chopped scallion, 1/2 cup.

4. Soy sauce, 1/3 cup.

5. Oyster sauce, 1/4 cup.

6. Drinking water, 1/2 cup.

7. Sugar, 1 tbsp.

8. Salt, 1/2 tsp. (Add a bit more to taste if it's not salty enough for you.)

9. Optionally, a sprinkle MSG. 

10. Get a couple of lime, cut into wedges. Slice some Thai Bird's Eye chili into 1cm sections, Put them in separate bowls. These two ingredients are for final sauce-assembling when eating. (See note on dipping sauce assembling.)

Other items to put into hotpot:

So what else you want to put into the hotpot is totally up to you. I'll list out some of our favorites that work quite well with this flavor profile. 

a. Napa cabbage, daikon, carrot, or any vegetable that has a natural sweetness.
b. Shellfish. Like shrimp, clams, etc.
c. Mushrooms, any mild tasting mushrooms.
d. All kinds of tofu, seitan, konjac, etc.
e. Asian style meatballs. The frozen sort that's available at Asian supermarkets, like beef ball, fish ball, firm fish tofu, fish cake, etc.  

(This kind of frozen fish ball and stuff.)

f. Thin lamb/beef slices.

(Something like this is perfect.)

f. Noodles! Of course, finishing up a hotpot with noodles or rice noodles to absorb all the awesome flavor is the best way to finish a hotpot meal. (See note on noodle handling.)

Below is a picture of a classic home cooking hotpot meal that showcases the components to put in. (I was trying to dig out some old pics of our hotpot meals but I have none...given how many many hotpots we had.)

**Process**  

1. Open the young coconut and collect all the water. This is a pretty clear demonstration. One suggestion is that you can put the coconut on top of a wet towel to prevent sliding, and be precise and forceful with the cut. Also, be careful with your fingers.

2. Use a metal spoon, scrape off some flesh from inside the coconut. About 2-3 tbsp is enough, mix the flesh with the coconut water. Set the water aside.

3. Chop up the chicken with a bone cleaver if using a whole. Here's a pretty slow and clear demonstration of the more traditional way of chopping a chicken: slow-mo. And this is a less seen but equally effective way of chopping: fast pace. Or of course, you can use just wings and drums and cleave it across the bone if you don't want to chop it up yourself. Set the chicken aside after chopping. 

4. Wash any vegetables, mushroom and/or shellfish that you're using. Drain, arrange on a plate to make it look all pretty and set aside. For the meat and meat/fish balls, just lay them out on a plate and set aside.

5. Prep all the aromatics listing in the dipping sauce section, mix the aromatics (except the lime and chilies) with all the seasoning and water, mix well and set aside.

6. Time to eat and we can assemble the hotpot base. Grab a pot with a volume of 3L, pour in the coconut water, top it up with some extra water to make the total liquid amount equals to 2 liters. Add the water chestnut/daikon and/or the dried red dates and such into the liquid, bring it to a boil. 

7. When water is boiling, add in the chicken, bring it back to a boil, cover and let it cook on high for 8-10 minutes, do 10 minutes if you have more chicken. Don't crow the pot. We had a 3kg chicken and cooked the chicken in two batches. 

8. Now we can serve the very first round. Bring the pot onto your portable stove, keep the heat at the lowest it'll go, start to enjoy some soup, and dip the chicken in the dipping sauce eat. If it's simmering heavily, shut off the heat as we don't want the chicken to overcook. Just turn the heat back on periodically to keep things nice and steamy.
For this kind of light broth hotpot, we don't season the broth in the pot but season it to taste with salt in our own bowl if we find it a bit too plain when drinking.
The soup tastes the best after the first round cooking the chicken, the taste would got muffed up a bit after putting in other ingredients. 

9. After finishing the first round, do a second round of chicken cooking as mentioned in No.7 if you still have another batch of chicken. Then again, finish the chicken and enjoy some soup. If your chicken is finished in one round, then just start putting in other food.

10. After finishing all the chicken, it's time to tackle the other ingredients. Now keep the water at a heavy simmer, add in whatever you fancy, let it cook till done, and enjoy! For meatballs/fishballs, after it's been floating for a minute, it's ready to be eaten. For meat, once it changed color, it's good to go. For veggies, just cook it to your liking.

 Note on dipping sauce assembling:

When you're ready to eat, scoop some dipping sauce into your own bowl for dipping, squeeze in some lime juice and top it up with some chilies. The amount of lime juice and chilies added in the dipping is totally up to you, so play with it and find the ratio you like.
Dip the chicken and the other food in the dipping sauce and eat.
As for the soup, we usually just drink it straight or with a touch of salt, it's eaten separated from the dipping sauce.

Note on noodle handling:

• a. For rice noodles, pre-soak them for 2-3 hours so that they get soft and you can cook it directly in the hotpot broth.  
• b. For fresh non-alkaline noodles, there're two ways to handle it. You can either cook it in a separate pot, rinse under cool water, toss it with a bit of oil to prevent sticking, then give it a quick dip in the broth when you want to eat it.
  Or you can cook it directly in the hotpot broth but it'll inevitably thicken the broth and make it cloudy, so definitely do it at the end of the meal if you're opting for this method. 
• c. For dried noodles or alkaline noodles, pre-cook it according to the instruction on the package, rinse under cool water, toss it with a bit of oil to prevent sticking, set aside. Quickly dip it in the hotpot to reheat and absorb some of that soup when you're ready to have some noodles.

Note on adding water when water level is low:

• Water level will go down as you eat, when you think there's not enough water, add in some hot water back in the pot to about the level you started with, let it boil for a couple minutes and continue putting stuff in to cook. 

Hotpot is really more of a style of eating than a dish per se. It's a great way to have a scrumptious and plentiful meal without too much cooking/prepping involved. We often do hotpot at home when having a bigger group of people. Some of our favorites include Sichuan spicy hotpot, coconut chicken hot, laksa hotpot, Guizhou fermented tomato sour hotpot with fish, Teochew beef hotpot, Teochew/Fujian style satay hotpot, the Cantonese clear water hotpot, Shunde's famous congee hotpot ... just to name a few. 

I hope this post gave you a somewhat general idea of how to assemble a hotpot. Hopefully, soon we'll be able to do a video on hotpot and further discuss the logic and formula of this vastly popular eating form that seems to be loved by every single Chinese person. 

Alright, time to cook up our "lockdown" dinner, see you next week.