Chengdu vs. Chongqing: Unraveling the Differences in Mala Hot Pot

Friends who are also sharing a hot pot cannot choose at will. They must be people who can be honest with each other and enjoy drinking and partying. If you are eating a spicy hot pot and sitting at the same table with someone who ordered spicy or heavy hemp, he repeatedly complains that the spiciness is too high. You cannot enjoy yourself after drinking Jiannanchun or Luzhou Laojiao!

Although the temperature in Beijing is as low as minus 5 degrees Celsius and in Tokyo it is minus 3 degrees Celsius, the lowest temperature in Hong Kong is only 15 degrees Celsius. It is hard to imagine that residents of such a hot city love hot pot so much. In recent years, the charms of roasted chicken, mutton stove, and ginger duck have waxed and waned, while old and new restaurants serving pickled cabbage and white meat and mutton-shabu-shabu have continued to leave new food memories in the city, especially the tiny hotpot enjoyed alone. Rare in the world

Chongqing Hot Pot

Chongqing hot pot, also known as Maodu hot pot or spicy hot pot, has two theories about its origin:

One theory is that it originated from the riverside. At that time, poor people had no money to buy meat, so they threw animal offal into the pot and added chili peppers. Several people sat around to keep warm and ate it. Another theory is that it originated from the dining habits of riverside workers. Each person had to have their unique grid, thus forming today's hot pot style.

The origin of the Maodu hot pot can be traced back to the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China. It originated from a cheap "Shuiba Kuai" vendor that dock workers along the Jialing River and Yangtze River liked to eat. The so-called "Shui Ba Kuai" refers to cutting beef offal such as tripe, liver loin, and beef blood into thin slices, placing them on different plates, stewing them with spicy butter, and eating them. After finishing, press the empty plate to check out. You can buy eight pieces for one copper plate.

The so-called "Maoxuewang" and "Mao" refer to the third stomach of the cow, also known as cow louver; "Xuewang" refers to cow blood, but nowadays, duck blood is often used instead. Since the 1990s, Maoxuewang has become independent from hot pot and a specialty dish combining multiple ingredients such as tripe, yellow-throated crispy pork, and eel.

Chongqing hot pot flavor types

Traditional Chongqing hot pot does not add spices, only peppers, Sichuan peppercorns, ginger, green onions, etc. It is now divided into four main flavor types:

"Mao-flavor type": Emphasizes the flavor of beef and adds bean paste, retaining the more traditional taste characteristics;
"Paste type": The taste is close to the old-style Chongqing hot pot, with a strong chili flavor;
"Savory type": rich in umami flavor;
"Lychee flavor": Lychee has a more intense sweetness and is more prevalent among Chengdu people.

For Chongqing locals, the rich butter hot pot is the most traditional dish. There are currently two types of butter hot pots:

One is the more conventional pure butter hot pot, which is mainly salty and delicious;
The other type is more prevalent among young people. The butter flavor is less intense than the old style, but the taste is more decadent, and you will have a sweet aftertaste after eating it.

Authentic Chongqing hot pot characteristics are: the first bite should be spicy and spicy, the second bite should be fragrant, the third bite should be fresh, and the fourth bite should be sweet. It is not a simple pursuit of spicy food but a complex process of changing taste levels. !

Jiugongge hot pot

People would gather around the table in poor times to share a hot pot. For this reason, a design was created that was divided into four compartments, allowing each family to have its area for cooking. Later, because different ingredients require different cooking times, the nine-square grid design appeared to allow for more precise cooking control.

Chongqing hot pot differs from Jiugongge but has a more refined and systematic design. The nine-square grid includes a "cross grid" and "four-corner grid," each with different functions:

The cross grid is in the middle and has the most substantial firepower, suitable for quickly cooking hairy tripe, duck intestines, etc.
The cross grids on the top, bottom, left, and right have even firepower, making them suitable for cooking general ingredients such as sausages, chicken gizzards, etc., for 2-10 minutes.
The four-corner grid has smaller firepower and is suitable for slow-cooking ingredients such as Nashua, xuewang, etc., for more than 20 minutes.
This sophisticated design allows the Chongqing hotpot to fully use different firepower zones to cook the best taste of other ingredients more effectively. This reflects the wisdom and innovation of Chongqing hot pot culture.

How do you think you could eat Jiugongge hot pot?

Before eating hot pot, you must wait for the pot to boil for 1 to 2 minutes to allow the foam on the surface to completely dissipate, and then place the ingredients into the cross and four-corner grids, respectively. After the hot pot boils again, adjust the heat until only the center pot remains boiling, and then start to cook the tripe and duck intestines. Only put some of the ingredients in the pot at a time, and don't always turn up the heat. Otherwise, it will cook and dry out. You can keep the fire simmering and don't add extra soup base to taste the best flavor.

The rich and scalding butter of Jiugongge Hot Pot encapsulates the chili peppers' aroma and the Sichuan peppercorns' spiciness. The taste was mediocre initially, but as the chili peppers and Sichuan peppercorns blended in the pot, it gradually became richer. The nine-square grid design makes eating more convenient, unlike a big pot like a Chengdu hot pot, where you often can’t find the ingredients.

Chongqing hot pot often adds bowl after bowl of ingredients to the pot boldly. But the order of pouring is very particular. First is the most critical goose intestine. The standard method is to pour it into one piece, like the noodles below, rather than one piece. Next is the hairy belly. In addition, an indispensable and essential ingredient for Chongqing hotpot restaurants is fried crispy pork, which they cannot survive without.

In addition, before other dishes are cooked, the middle rack of Jiugongge hot pot plays a vital role; that is, it is used to rinse the tripe. The correct way is to rinse the whole tripe 15 times, then move it to other grids and dip it in more oil, such as garlic and sesame. This is the best way to eat it. For this reason, Chongqing hot pot restaurants often use longer chopsticks.

Chengdu hotpot

The Chengdu Plain is called "Western Sichuan Bazi" in the Sichuan dialect. Because the local water system is developed, it nourishes the local food culture. The famous Dujiangyan irrigation project created local people's dependence on water, shaping the characteristics of the Chengdu hot pot.

In the past, this area mainly relied on water transportation, promoting food culture integration along the river basin. In the section of the Yangtze River from Luzhou to Chongqing, there is a dangerous shoal called Xiaomi Beach, where boatmen often anchor for the night. To ward off the cold, they cooked on-site, and this simple practice became the prototype of the Sichuan hot pot.

Later, this practice spread to the Xiaomitan area to Luzhou and Chongqing and developed into the local characteristic of Chongqing hot pot. Some scholars also suggested that the Sichuan-Chongqing hot pot originated from the Zigong Saltworks to meet the dietary needs of local salt workers.

What is the difference between Chongqing hot pot and Chengdu hot pot?

Chongqing hot pot uses butter to stir-fry the bottom, which makes it taste rich and mellow; Chengdu hot pot uses rapeseed oil to stir-fry the bottom of the pot, making it taste delicate and soft. In addition, many Chongqing hot pot restaurants will expressly indicate that they are "old hot pot," this is also a significant difference between Chongqing hot pot and Chengdu hot pot. The old hot pot must meet the two conditions of using butter and old marinated oil at the bottom of the pot. Use large pieces of butter, and after the butter melts, add vegetable oil, onion, ginger, garlic, chili, and Sichuan pepper for seasoning to make a red soup. Bottoms are often used over and over again.

Chengdu hot pot is mainly based on mandarin duck hot pot. The red soup uses rapeseed oil as the base, beef bone, chicken soup, stir-fry five spices, and spicy bean paste. After it is completed, it is called "hot bonsai." The white pot specializes in using wild red mushrooms. You need to boil a pot of white soup with chicken, duck, and stick-bone pork knuckle for more than 5 hours, and then add the pre-cooked comprehensive mushroom soup.

Although it is popular in Chengdu, Yuanyang hotpot was invented by chefs in Chongqing. It was a dish entered into Chongqing's first cooking competition in China in 1983. It was initially called "Double Flavor Hot Pot." It was named and designed by Yan Wenjun and produced by super chef Chen Zhigang. One of the judges that year was Aixinjueluo Pujie, the younger brother of the last emperor Puyi.

Another way to divide it is into a clear oil hot pot and a butter hot pot. In addition to butter, as mentioned above, the Chongqing hot pot has a higher ratio of oil to water, many of which are 100% pure. Since most of the Chengdu hotpot pot bottoms are disposable, the proportion of oil is relatively low due to cost considerations.

A hotpot is a unique way of cooking in which the chef does only two-thirds of the work, leaving the remaining one-third to the customer. Because the ingredients in a hot pot are only semi-finished products, customers need to scald them in the pot themselves.

Hot pot ingredients are divided into three major categories:

Chunks of meat need to be cooked for a long time, such as meatballs, beef slices, etc.
Sliced ​​meats, such as tripe, beef liver, etc., must be cooked in a fast scalding method of "seven ups and eight downs."
Vegetables and starchy ingredients absorb oil more efficiently and will affect the soup, so they should be placed last.
The principle of the "seven up and eight down" scalding method is that oil and soup have different specific heat capacities. Thus, the ingredients flow at various temperatures, producing a unique taste.