Huopiao niurou: Yunnan's ultimate beef hotpot
Celebrated in September or early October, every year’s Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival heralds two things: the forthcoming late autumn, and a right time to start eating boiling and spicy hotpot.
As one of many beef hotpots across China and a local version specific to southwest Yunnan’s Baoshan, it brings genuine warmness to people’s stomachs when the weather turns cold, and has always been an ideal choice for commensality — which means eating together with others.
Huopiao niurou, a spicy beef hotpot specific to Yunnan’s Baoshan, is something you might have never tasted or even seen before. Red and boiling broth with a few dried chili peppers on top is the very first impression it leaves to eaters.
As a signature dish of this area, it has been primarily distinguished from other hotpots around China by its unique container: a colossal hand-made copper pot—typically with a straight and long handle.
One pot of such, unsurprisingly, can only be created by experienced local coppersmiths through several thousand times of hammerings, trimmings and grindings. This incredible craftmanship which stems from the long-standing food practices and everyday life of Baoshan people has been celebrated as a local intangible heritage.
Today, as people’s livelihood improves and technologies in the kitchen keep advancing, gas stoves and electric ranges have become more common than ever in Chinese households.
In Baoshan, however, families and restaurants are still accustomed to cooking with charcoal, especially when they come to prepare huopiao niurou. The locals believe that copper pot and charcoal are the two keys to make the beef tenderer and more aromatic, and the broth more scrumptious.
To make an ultimately delicious pot of huopiao niurou, one needs to have a good cut of local beef from Baoshan at hand.
Having simmered the beef slices in the copper pot for a few minutes, local cooks start to pour in a variety of ingredients, sauces and spices, including gingers, shallots, dried chili peppers, fermented red bean paste, fermented chili bean curd paste, as well as fennel, black cardamon, star anise and nutmeg. It’s worth mentioning that huopiao niurou not just consists of sliced beef, but beef offal.
After enjoying the beef, people in Baoshan would add some vegetables into the pot that is still boiling. Cabbage, lettuce, spinach, mint, potato, tomato and Chinese yam are the most common ones.
Moreover, Pickled radish cubes have been a decent companion of huopiao niurou in the eyes of locals, as they can help neutralize the greasiness and spiciness of the hotpot.
Writing by Guo Jianli; trans-editing by Wang Jingzhong