How to cook Nabe Ryori, or hot pot in Japanese style.

Nabe -Chanko Nabe-

Date: Nov 14th, 2008

Referring to my post on Nabe Ryori, I’m here writing how to cook Japanese hot pot cuisine in this page. As I already mentioned in my post, we can choose from several different variation of Nabe soup and combination of vegetables, meat or fish, and rice or noodle until we finish last drop of the soup.

How to cook Nabe Ryori

1) Buy your favorite soup. (wonder if you can get it at oriental supermarkets or Japanese food markets…) I may write how to cook the soup at home when you cannot get prefixed one. If you wanna know please write to me from “about” page.

Prefixed Nabe soups are usually like
-Chanko Nabe (most common, basic & original one with either miso, soy sauce or salt based soup.)
-Ishikari Nabe (miso based Nabe, best suited with salmon)
-Kimchi Nabe (using Korean Kimchi and Kimchi based soup. Needless to say, it’s a litte spicy.)
-Soy milk Nabe
-Curry Nabe

2)Prepare the ingredients needed for the Nabe Ryori you chose above. You may wanna try as you like! There’s no rule. Enjoy your combination of the ingredients! But just for your reference, vegetables recommended for Nabe Ryori are

-leek or onion
-Chinese cabbage
-garland chrysanthemum
-Shiitake mushroom
-Shimeji mushroom
-carrot
-Japanese radish

Meat or fish recommended are

-chicken or chicken meat ball are most popular, basic and secure for all.
-sliced pork back ribs especially for Kimchi Nabe
-If you want Sukiyaki or Shabushabu, that’s some different story from what I speak here.
-cod, shrimp or oyster are good if you prefer fish. Salmon is good for miso based soup, which is also known as Ishikari Nabe with ingredients like potate, onion, Shimeji mushroom & cabbage with a tiny slice of butter. This sounds more Western oriented and maybe easier to try both in terms of taste and the collection of ingredients.
-Tofu (bean curd) is good for any occasions!

After you eat up all these ingredients, which one of the following are you gonna choose from?
Imagine which one you wanna eat, and prepare it.

-steamed rice with beaten egg　to be simmered in the soup that is left in the pot.
-rice cake to be simmered in the soup that is left in the pot.
-Udon noodle or Ramen to be simmered in the soup that is left in the pot.
You will see how delicious any of these are, because as you may have realized they are absorbing the soup that contains the extract from the vegetables and meat or fish you boiled besides its original taste.

3) Prepare a big pot and pour the soup into it for boiling.

4) Cut the ingredients adequately.

5) When the soup gets boiled, put meat or fish first, then comes Tofu, hard vegetables, soft vegetables, and keep simmering over medium heat until everything gets boiled.

6) Dish out and eat until finally you add steamed rice, rice cake or noodles inside.

Baked and simmered mochi (rice cake) looks like this in the soup. It may look weird if you’ve never tasted before, but believe me it’s just so good!

Well, there are too many to write about when it comes to Nabe cuisine. So I will post about other kinds of Nabe sometime later. As you can see, the photos show my cooking Chanko Nabe with mochi (rice cake) version. Next time when I fix some different kind of Nabe, I’ll be happy to share the photos with you!