It's really cooling down. The wind blowing outside the window is like a knife. In this weather condition, not eating hot pot can be said to be an act of disrespect for winter. But today I don’t want to talk about the kind of Sichuan pot that is so spicy that it makes people cry, nor the kind of Northern hot pot that makes you feel satisfied when you add mutton in it.
I want to talk about medicinal hotpot .
It's not the kind of perfunctory thing that just throws in a few wolfberries and puts aside two pieces of Codonopsis pilosula and dares to claim to be "health-preserving". It's the kind of pot that, literally, as soon as you smell it, your internal organs will be soothed, with warmth.
In fact, I am biased against medicinal foods.
When I was a child, medicated food was equated with bitterness, and I always felt that it was the "torture" prescribed by the old Chinese medicine doctor. Boiling roots and turf into soup, and then holding the nose and drinking it down.
One year, when passing through Jiangxi, I passed by a welfare center and saw old people sitting together. A copper pot was making a beeping sound, and the heat covered the windows with a layer of white mist. They said that the pot was boiled with angelica root and wolfberry, and it was a medicinal hot pot prepared for the Chinese New Year.
At that time, there was a ninety-year-old grandmother, sipping soup, squinting her eyes, and said a sentence, which I still remember to this day:
"What's cooked in this hot pot is not the ingredients, it's the real care."
Hold. Just this sentence boiled down all my prejudices against medicated food.
“Two-way rush” of food ingredients
Medicinal hot pot focuses on the "compatibility". It is not a random stew, but a state of perfection between the ingredients and the medicinal materials.
Look at this recipe:
Ginseng, astragalus, angelica, wolfberry, red dates, licorice.
It sounds like the kind of medicine you get in a Chinese pharmacy, but with butter, watercress, and fermented glutinous rice, it becomes something else.
I tried it at home. When the full pot of clear soup gradually turned into amber color, and the unique mellowness of angelica root and the fresh fragrance of beef wafted out, I realized at this moment that this was not medicine, but soup. It is the warmth that can be drunk into the belly.
The legendary stilted beef
Later, I checked the information and found out that the most famous ancestor of medicated hot pot is called Qiaojiao Beef .
In the 1930s, there was an old Chinese medicine doctor in Leshan, Sichuan. He would brew Chinese medicine and use it to relieve those living in poverty. He accidentally saw cattle offal thrown away by rich families floating in the river, and he felt it was a pity, so he picked up the offal, washed it carefully, and finally threw it into a medicine pot for boiling Chinese medicine.
The result?
The soup is extremely delicious. Those who had no seats squatted at the door, crossing their feet and eating profusely.
"Tiaojie Beef" has been passed down like this.
Disease prevention and treatment? That's just incidental. What can really be engraved in people's hearts is that scene, the feeling of being saved by a bowl of steaming soup when a person is at his most depressed.
Stop treating medicated diet as a myth
But you also have to tell the truth.
Not everyone is suitable to eat this. If you have a yang-heat constitution, acne appears on your face, and your throat seems to be on fire, and you insist on taking herbs with aphrodisiac effects, it will undoubtedly add fuel to the fire.
Experts from Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine put it very clearly:
People with yang deficiency who are afraid of the cold can eat whatever they want;
Don't touch people with yin deficiency and strong fire.
There are some hot pot restaurants that, under the banner of "health preservation", just add a little Codonopsis pilosula and wolfberry to the soup base to double the sales. What's more, they use flavors to blend the so-called "medicinal flavor".
You say this is health care? This is the wallet of the merchant.
Just do it yourself, it's not difficult
It’s actually not difficult to do it yourself.
Bottom of the pot : Make the base of clear soup, add flavor with butter, stir-fry bean paste and pickled chili until red oil is produced.
The following are medicinal materials, including 5 grams of ginseng, 10 grams of astragalus, 15 grams of angelica, 15 grams of wolfberry, 20 grams of jujube, and 5 grams of licorice. They are packed in gauze bags and boiled separately. It takes 30 minutes to boil about 500 ml of medicinal liquid.
Ingredients for shabu-shabu include thinly sliced beef, beef liver, tripe, fish balls, dried slices made from tofu pressed with soy milk, thinly sliced potatoes, edible fungi such as oyster mushrooms, and vegetables such as spinach.
Dip : Don’t make it too complicated. Dark soy sauce, sugar, balsamic vinegar, sesame oil, just stir well.
The key point is: don’t pour the liquid all at once, add it as you eat.
What you eat is pot, what you drink is life
To be honest, who needs that stutter these days?
What's missing is the relaxing feeling of sitting together and not bothering to wipe your glasses even though the heat has burned them .
The best thing about medicated hot pot is not what it can supplement.
It's what slows you down.
Watching the beef liver change color in the soup, waiting for the potatoes to cook until they become sandy, and listening to the slurping sound of the soup.
While chatting, the chopsticks fought, and the dipping sauce spilled on the clothes without even bothering to wipe it off.
A few final words
Don't boil the medicinal materials for too long, as they will become bitter.
Don't put it in your mouth right after you take it out of the pot. It's not your esophagus that's going to be burned, it's your life.
The ingredients must be fresh, that’s the bottom line.
Also, if you make this pot of medicated hot pot one day, remember to fill it with a bowl of soup before turning off the heat.
No dipping, no topping.
Just a mouthful of original soup.
When you swallow it, you may be stunned for a moment. That is not the taste of medicinal materials, nor is it the taste of meat.
Decades ago, when the old Chinese medicine practitioner from Leshan, Sichuan was squatting by the river, looking at the poor people holding bowls and drinking soup with their feet crossed, what he was thinking in his heart:
"I can save just one."
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