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I ate some East Asian dish recently and it looked something like this:

Hot Pot

[image source: http://www.thetabletopcook.com/images/tabletop-cooking-homemade-taiwanese-hot-pot.jpg]

I had never eaten anything that looks like it. I was confused, is it a soup with some solids added to it?

I want to know about nomenclature for this type of food and how they would be classified (not according to taste, but according to how they look/are arranged/are mixed).

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user13107
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  • Why would it not be some sort of soup? – Catija May 26 '15 at 03:15
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    Can you explain more about the actual food you had? How was it served, how was it prepared, what was in it? – Catija May 26 '15 at 04:35
  • Also, the general question seems way too broad for a single question, so I'm just going to edit it out. Trying to describe all the possible kinds of food is simply too much to cover. – Cascabel May 26 '15 at 04:55
  • The key thing to note about the picture you found is that the pot is on top of a hot plate - it's being cooked at the table, with people adding the individual pieces of food to the pot then grabbing them when they're ready. It's a cook as you go thing, not a single dish served as is. Is that what you had? Or just something that looked similar? – Cascabel May 26 '15 at 05:00
  • About the classification: [Q: Difference between soup and stew](http://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/20958/23376) – Ching Chong May 26 '15 at 06:16
  • @Jefromi yes, what you described is correct. – user13107 May 29 '15 at 07:45

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It's a hot pot or steamboat as we call it in Malaysia. It's a clear soup made from stock. Raw ingredients are gradually added to it as it simmers. Soup and the cooked ingredients are fished out when they are done (each time when the pot boils). At the end, you are left with a rich, delicious soup that has flavours of all the ingredients intermingled and it is usually eaten with noodles.

Going by this, it would be classified as a soup or broth. It wouldn't be a stew as flour has not been used to thicken it.

riddler
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It's definitely a kind of soup or stew.

The image you picked specifically calls it a "hot pot".

http://www.thetabletopcook.com/images/tabletop-cooking-homemade-taiwanese-hot-pot.jpg

Hot Pots are classified as "stews" according to Wikipedia:

Hot pot (also known as steamboat in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Brunei), refers to several East Asian varieties of stew, consisting of a simmering metal pot of stock at the center of the dining table. While the hot pot is kept simmering, ingredients are placed into the pot and are cooked at the table. Typical hot pot dishes include thinly sliced meat, leaf vegetables, mushrooms, wontons, egg dumplings, and seafood. Vegetables, fish and meat should be fresh. The cooked food is usually eaten with a dipping sauce. In many areas, hot pot meals are often eaten in the winter during supper time.

But I'd argue that they're more soup-like. They remind me a lot of a Mexican dish called "caldo de pollo/res", which is literally "chicken/beef broth".

From the definition of "stew":

Stews are similar to soups, and in some cases there may not be a clear distinction between the two. Generally, stews have less liquid than soups, are much thicker and require longer cooking over low heat. While soups are almost always served in a bowl, stews may be thick enough to be served on a plate with the gravy as a sauce over the solid ingredients.

Your image, and this one of caldo are very broth-y, which is why I think they're more like soup.

Caldo de Res

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Catija
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  • But if it's hot pot, you fish the food out of the broth to eat it, right? Maybe you eat the broth when you're done, but you're not eating all that as a bowl of stew, it's more of a method of quickly simmering things at the table. – Cascabel May 26 '15 at 04:20
  • @Jefromi I've never actually had a hot pot, so I don't know the method. I'm going on what Wikipedia calls it. The OP didn't say anything about the process of the food at the restaurant, so it's possible it wasn't a hot pot at all, it just happened to look like an image of a hot pot. :P – Catija May 26 '15 at 04:23
  • Ah right - if they were served a bowl all prepared like that, maybe not hot pot, but similar! – Cascabel May 26 '15 at 04:34
  • Based on evidence outside the pot, it is very much a "hot pot". Wouldn't call that a stew though. And in some place you drink the liquid after cooking all the raw food item as soup to finish – TFD May 26 '15 at 07:40
  • @TFD But the image doesn't belong to the OP... he/she found it on the web as an approximation of what was had. At this point, we don't know that the OP had a hot pot or just some sort of soup that had a bunch of stuff in it. – Catija May 26 '15 at 07:44
  • @Catija Since the OP has provided very little information *beyond* the image, we kind of have to answer about what the image is. If OP has extra info, it might be better to post as a new-but-related question, with either a new question, or stating some specific differences between the dish they had and the dish that they have found a picture of. – starsplusplus May 26 '15 at 14:33
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That is certainly a stew. I might further refer to that as a hot-pot if the ingredients were raw before added to the broth, particularly if it's cooked at the table.

Jolenealaska
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That particular dish looks to me like Chinese hot pot, or a similar Asian hot pot (not to be confused with Lancashire hotpot, which is a kind of stew!).

The main feature of the dish is that you have a pot at your table with a burner underneath, and a number of raw ingredients which you add to the broth and pull out at your own convenience. These may include meat, root vegetables, leaf vegetables, noodles, eggs, seafood or fish.

I would argue that it's not a soup or a stew, because the components are fished out and eaten, and are the main part of the dish. You can optionally drink the broth when you are finished, and I guess you could call that part of the dish a soup (though I would say "broth" to connote the thin-ness), but the dish as a whole is just hot pot. You don't call it a stew when you boil ravioli, right? ;)

From Wikipedia:

Hot pot (also known as steamboat in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Brunei), refers to several East Asian varieties of stew, consisting of a simmering metal pot of stock at the center of the dining table. While the hot pot is kept simmering, ingredients are placed into the pot and are cooked at the table. Typical hot pot dishes include thinly sliced meat, leaf vegetables, mushrooms, wontons, egg dumplings, and seafood. Vegetables, fish and meat should be fresh. The cooked food is usually eaten with a dipping sauce. In many areas, hot pot meals are often eaten in the winter during supper time.

starsplusplus
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As far as I concerned it's Tom Yum Soup

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tomyumsoup_85069

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_yum

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