How to cook Chicken Hotpot 🍲 〜鶏の水炊き〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taiji's Kitchen. Today I'm going to show you how to make chicken hot pot or in Japanese we call it tori no mizutaki. This is probably one of the most popular nabe dish or hot pot dish that is made in Japan. So today I'm going to show you my variation of sauce that I kind of invented through the year of my own cooking. So this is not particularly typical sauce for this dish but I think it's very delicious and you don't have to put that extra work for that. But if you want to make it simple then you can just use a regular ponzu sauce or Those are also perfectly fine. I think most people eat with these sauce in Japan. If you want to give my version a try that's also great. Then let's get started. Here are the ingredients for chicken hot pot. Obviously I have chicken but if you make it with other meat or other fish then you have hot pot for that. And for the vegetable I have here daikon, white radish, carrot, tofu, this leftover from the other nabe that I made, an oyster mushroom, spinach. Here I have shimeji mushroom. I was very happy to find this in the Asian store but if you can't get this you can use any kind of mushroom. So for the sauce I'm going to be using a lot of scallion, a piece of ginger and a clove of garlic. And for the seasoning soy sauce and mirin. If you don't have mirin then it can be easily substituted with sugar. And for the broth I'm going to be using a strip of kombu kelp. So let's start preparing the ingredients. I'm just going to cut into bite-sized pieces. It's comfortable eating. You may think that this is quite a lot of spinach but the leafy vegetable they'll just kind of shrink when they get cooked so this is good enough. What's that? Let's cut the daikon radish. So kind of the key thing about the daikon radish, the bottom part tends to be a little bit tangier, a little bit bitter. So you want to use this end part for cooking and you want to use the top part for if you want to make some dish with raw radish. So this tends to be a little bit sweeter. So I'm going to use the bottom part for today. Cut a part that I need. I'm not going to peel everything off. I'm just going to peel the part that's kind of a little darker. Otherwise we usually don't peel this. And then I'm just going to cut into bite-sized pieces. And the carrots I'm probably just going to use half of it. And oyster mushroom you just need to kind of separate into pieces. And shimeji mushroom, quite a lot so I'm going to probably use just half of it. For the shimeji mushroom you want to take the bottom off here. So this is finished preparing. Then let's make the sauce. I'm gonna cut off the end. If some scallions are not fresh enough then you might want to peel off the outer layer like this. If it looks dry then you want to take out the outermost layer because when it's dry then it gets fibery and then it's not so comfortable having that chewing that in your mouth. So you might want to just take out the outermost layer here. And then you have a fresh layer inside. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut these into small pieces. If you can't cut the scallion like this then it's not really a big problem but just try to cut as thin as possible. Then I'm gonna put in the garlic and the ginger. You don't have to put the garlic and the ginger if you don't want to. I don't think it's quite traditional but I like to put it in because I think it'll give a little more layer, a little more spice, a little more kick to it. So in here you need a garlic smasher and then I'm gonna smash this in here and then the ginger as well. So this may look like quite a lot of scallion but when they get soaked in soy sauce they'll give out the juice and shrink so don't worry about that. And then here I'm gonna put in three tablespoons of soy sauce. Here I'm gonna put in two tablespoons of mirin. Oh barely enough. All right and then I'm gonna give a good mix and then we're gonna let it rest for about 10 minutes or so until the scallion soaks up the soy sauce. So let's cut up the meat. I usually cut up the meat at the very end so that I don't have to wash the cutting board in between. So just kind of bite-sized pieces. So this is about 200 gram of chicken. I usually measure for meat or fish about 200 gram for one serving. Oh yeah I almost forgot so I'm just gonna cut this also into yeah somewhat bite-sized pieces. So this is finished for all ingredients. So I totally forgot about the broth so that's something that you should do in the very beginning. So in a pot I'm gonna put in a strip of kombu and then to just speed up the process I'm gonna pour some hot water. About two cups of water depending on how much people you're serving and how big the pot is. So in here I'm just gonna already put in the daikon radish and the carrots because they're gonna take a little bit longer time to cook. And then I'm gonna turn the heat to high and then bring this to boil. So right before this comes to boil I'm gonna take out the kombu. Then I'm gonna put in the rest of the ingredients. Two different kinds of mushrooms, tofu and the meat. I'm not gonna put in the spinach yet because this just needs a little dip at the very end. And then we're gonna let it cook until it comes to boil. So this has come to boil. I'm gonna put in the spinach. Once this has come to boil again this is finished. Let's eat. Okay let's turn the heat on and let's eat. Oh this is looking so good. So as you can see the scallion is getting really soggy. So this is perfect. And then actually in the sauce I'm gonna put in two tablespoons of the soup from here because it'll be a bit too strong if you only have soy sauce. So turn the heat to low. Okay let's eat. Oh this is looking so good. And this is also great because I'm cooking right in front of me right when it's ready. Let's eat this. So this chicken is looking really awesome. Dip it in the sauce. Itadakimasu! Oh this is so good. Oh this is so good. This sauce just matches chicken meat so great. I think in Japan people don't put carrots in here but I like to put it in just kind of give it a color to it. So good. The garlic and the ginger in the sauce is just kind of gives that punch. This is really great. This mushroom. Let's try the enoki mushroom. So it's quite surprising how differently each mushroom tastes. They each have very distinctly different flavor but still within the mushroom-ness. Mushroom is just perfect for this kind of nabe hotpot dish. And the spinach. So I didn't get the tofu. So once you get used to using chopstick you can hold tofu like this. If you can't it's okay you can just kind of stick it. It's actually not polite, not good as a Japanese manner but don't worry too much about it. The important thing is that you enjoy eating. Let's see what else we got. Come on meat. Oh this is looking good. This is so delicious. Oh this is just so divinely delicious. This is also perfect with to go with rice. Oh the sauce is just great. Oh this is so good. So I don't know if you noticed all the ingredients that's put in in this sauce contains a lot of umami. Soy sauce, mirin and scallion, garlic and ginger they also all contain umami. So this can't be anything but savory. Let's put in the second batch. I'm going to turn the heat to high. So I also cut up the kombu kelp that we use for the broth and we're just going to put this in as well and eat it as the ingredients. So this is boiling. I'm going to turn the heat to medium. So there's a way to tell when chicken is ready. So as you can see this it's kind of round because meat does shrink when it gets heated but there's juice inside so they kind of start looking a bit round and when it gets too cooked then they start to shrink again. But this is really good. All the juices contain. Only the outside is cooked so they shrink but the juice is contained inside and yet cooked all the way through. So try to get the meat or chicken when it's this like round form. This is so juicy. Perfect. So this is also a good example. I don't know if you can get the feel of it. It's kind of round. Itadakimasu. So juicy. The best part of this nabe is that one it takes very little time to prepare but two you get to eat the ingredients right at the moment when it's perfectly cooked. Not overcooked, not undercooked and never cold. So this is just perfect. I love nabe. So delicious. Oh this is so delicious. So one last very important thing. Don't ever ever ever throw this soup away. This is a great broth. All the goodness from all the ingredients is just kind of all put in here and this soup. So never ever throw this soup away. This is so good. So delicious. What you can do is you can make just regular soup out of this. A lot of people also put in at the end udon or ramen noodle or just rice in there and then make like a risotto. But what I usually like to do is I use the sauce and then put in here in the sauce and then drink this as a soup. This is so savory. I really really recommend it when you make nabe like this. Excuse me for slurping. Oh this is so good. So good. Oh so delicious. And as you can see there's no waste at all whatsoever. That's how we try to eat. Oh that was totally delicious. I'm totally full. So as you saw making this chicken hot pot is really easy. You just need to cut the ingredients and then put it in a pot. Cook it together and then you have it. If you want to be lazy you can just buy the ponzu sauce or mentsuyu sauce that's just also great. If you want to give that a little effort then I recommend making this sauce. This is so savory. I just highly recommend it. So I hope this video gave you some new idea for your cooking. If you like what you saw please hit that like button and please write anything in the comments below. I'm always happy to hear your feedbacks, questions, requests and I look forward to see you in the next video. Bye!