Japanese Sukiyaki Hot Pot: Sweet, Savoury and Nothing Like Chinese Hot Pot | 日式寿喜烧：甜咸的一锅，与中国火锅完全不是一回事

The Quietest Pot on the Table

You already know hot pot. You may have read last week's article and know that a Thai soup can be a hot pot too. Both of those pots have something in common: they are loud. There is steam, there is a bubbling surface, there is a broth deep enough to submerge things in, and there is usually a good deal of noise and negotiation about who is putting what in next.

Japan has a pot that is the opposite of all of that. It is shallow. The liquid in it is barely a layer — a dark, glossy, amber-brown film that the ingredients sit in rather than swim in. When it starts to work, it does not roar. It murmurs. What comes off it is not chilli and not smoke, but something sweet and savoury at the same time, like soy sauce that has been softened with sugar and warmed with rice wine. The vegetables keep their colour. Nothing is drowning.

That pot is Sukiyaki, and this article is about why it is one of the most satisfying meals you can put in the middle of a table — and why the fact that it works nothing like a Chinese hot pot is exactly the reason to try it.

It also has to be said clearly at the start, because a lot of confusion exists about this: Sukiyaki is Japanese. It is not a Chinese hot pot, and it is not a variation of one. It is a Japanese nabemono — a one-pot dish — and the two traditions are parallel roads that have occasionally glanced at each other across a narrow sea, not one road that turned into the other. Honesty about that is more interesting than blurring it, because the differences are the whole point.

What Sukiyaki Actually Is

Sukiyaki is a Japanese dish cooked at the table in a shallow iron pan, most classically with thinly sliced beef and a small group of vegetables, in a sauce that is far more concentrated than any broth you would use for a Chinese hot pot. The diners cook it themselves, in batches, reaching in with chopsticks as it finishes, and eating straight from the pan or from a small bowl in front of them. It is a social meal, a winter meal, a meal that is often eaten at home and often eaten at restaurants where a specialist does the cooking for you.

The name gives you a clue to its origins. The yaki part is related to grilling or pan-frying — the same element you find in words describing dishes seared on a hot surface. The older forms of the dish were, in many tellings, cooked on a flat iron plate or a ploughshare heated over a fire, with very little liquid, the meat and vegetables cooking against hot metal as much as in sauce. That is why the modern version, even when it is cooked in a pan with sauce in it, still behaves more like pan-cooking than like boiling. It is a dish that was born on hot iron and still thinks of itself that way.

The word nabe, in nabemono, simply means pot. Japanese cooking has a whole family of these dishes: a pot on the table, a shared cooking liquid, a set of ingredients and a set order for adding them. Sukiyaki is the most famous member of the family internationally, but it is one dish within a larger tradition, and that tradition is Japanese through and through.

Two ways of building it

If you read about Sukiyaki in Japan you will find two broad approaches, and they are worth knowing because they explain why the pan looks the way it does.

In the Kansai tradition — the western part of the country, around Osaka and Kyoto — the meat is cooked first. The pan goes onto the heat, a few slices of beef go in and are seared, and only then are the sauce ingredients added, often simply sprinkled and poured in a little at a time around the meat. The vegetables follow and cook in the liquid the beef has released alongside the seasoning. The whole thing is built up in the pan, in a sequence, in front of the people eating it.

In the Kanto tradition — around Tokyo — a sauce called warishita is mixed first, in a bowl, and then poured into the pan over the arranged meat and vegetables. It is tidier, more predictable, and it is basically the way a bottled Sukiyaki base is designed to be used today.

Both end in the same place, and both rely on the same small set of ingredients, and both keep the liquid deliberately low. The difference is a matter of sequence and temperament rather than of what ends up in the pan.

The Four Things That Make It a Completely Different Pot

This is the heart of the article. If you take only one thing from reading this, take these four differences, because they are the reason Sukiyaki feels like a discovery rather than like a variation on something you already cook.

Put those four together and you have a meal that shares a table format with Chinese hot pot and almost nothing else. That is what makes it worth its own article. Anyone who tells you Sukiyaki is "Japanese hot pot" and leaves it there is describing the furniture and skipping the food.

Why Chinese Hot Pot Is Rarely Sweet, and Why This One Is

British cooks sometimes assume that a soup or broth should be savoury, and that sweetness in a savoury dish is a mistake or an accident. Both Chinese hot pot and Japanese Sukiyaki would disagree with that, but they disagree in opposite directions.

Chinese hot pot tradition, across the Sichuan, Hunan, Guizhou, Cantonese, Yunnan and northern schools, is built on salt, chilli, fermentation, animal fat, aromatics and sourness. There are sweet elements in Chinese cooking — sweet and sour fish, sweet soy glazes, the caramel edge on braised pork — but the hot pot pan itself is a savoury instrument, and a broth that tasted sweet would read as odd against a table of raw meat and vegetables and a bowl of chilli dip. Sweetness simply is not part of the job description of the pot.

Sukiyaki inverts that. Its sauce is built from four things, and one of them is quite literally sugar:

• Soy sauce. Deep, salty, fermented, and the backbone of the whole thing. It is what makes the sauce that dark amber brown.
• Mirin. A sweet Japanese cooking wine made from glutinous rice. This is the ingredient that British cooks usually have no equivalent for. It brings sweetness, but not a plain sweetness — it brings a rounded, slightly caramelised sweetness with a trace of alcohol and a faint savoury depth behind it. That is the layer people can taste but not name when they try Sukiyaki for the first time.
• Sugar. Some versions use it openly, added to the pan or mixed into the sauce. Even where it is not written into the ingredient list, a good bottled base is balanced with it, because without sugar the soy sauce would sit too hard on the palate.
• Sake, or a similar rice wine. This provides the liquid part of the sauce, the aroma that rises off the pan when it first heats up, and a light acidity that stops the sweetness from becoming cloying.

Mix those four and you have warishita, the sauce that defines the dish. It is thin, dark, glossy and clear rather than cloudy, and it tastes like nothing else in the kitchen: sweet first, then deep savoury, then a warmth at the back of the throat that comes from the alcohol cooking off, and after that a lingering saltiness that keeps you reaching for the next piece.

In practice, this is also the reason a bottled base is so useful. Getting warishita right by hand means having mirin and sake in the cupboard and calibrating sugar against soy by taste, which is a fine thing to do once and a nuisance to do on a Tuesday evening. A concentrated Sukiyaki base has that balance already worked out. All you do is dilute it to the strength the label asks for and pour a shallow layer into the pan.

One important practical note that follows from all of this: because the sauce is concentrated and sweet, it reduces and thickens as it cooks, and it can catch on the bottom of the pan. This is not a broth you boil hard for two hours. It is a sauce you keep at a gentle simmer and top up as you go, and that single piece of knowledge is the difference between a good Sukiyaki and a pan of scorched soy.

The Two Pots Side by Side

If you have cooked Chinese hot pot before, this table is the fastest way to understand what changes when you set a sukiyaki pan on the table instead.

The Bowl of Beaten Egg, and Why It Is There

Now the part that surprises nearly everyone the first time. In the traditional serving of Sukiyaki, each person is given a small bowl with a raw beaten egg in it. When a piece of beef or vegetable comes out of the pan, it goes into the egg, gets turned over once, and then goes into your mouth. The egg is not cooked. It is used as a dip, and it is one of the defining features of the dish.

The reasons for it are entirely practical, and once you understand them, it stops seeming strange and starts seeming clever.

• It cools the food. Sukiyaki ingredients come off a pan that is hot enough to sear. Straight into the mouth, they would burn. The raw egg, sitting at room temperature, drops the temperature of the piece instantly and makes it edible the second it leaves the pan. In a meal where each piece is eaten as it finishes, that matters constantly.
• It smooths everything. Raw egg has a very particular mouthfeel — silky, slightly thick, coating the tongue rather than sliding off it. Meat that goes through it comes out slicker and more tender in the mouth, and the texture becomes a real part of the pleasure rather than an afterthought.
• It carries the sauce. A thin, sugar-thickened sauce does not cling hard to a piece of vegetable the way a chilli oil does. The egg wraps around the piece and holds the sweet-savoury flavour on it, so every bite is seasoned rather than just the first one.
• It softens the intensity. Sugiyaki sauce is strong, and the egg acts as a buffer, exactly the way a portion of plain rice does next to a spicy Chinese dish.

How to Cook Sukiyaki at Home in Britain

The good news about this dish is that it is one of the easiest table-cooked meals in the world to run in a normal British kitchen, because the difficult part — the sauce — is the part that comes out of a bottle. What you are doing at home is essentially three things: diluting a base to the right strength, arranging ingredients on a table, and cooking in batches in a shallow pan while everyone eats.

What you need

• A Sukiyaki hot pot base. This is the whole foundation. It is a concentrated sauce, not a stock, and it is what makes the pan taste like Sukiyaki rather than like soy sauce with vegetables in it.
• A shallow pan. A wide frying pan or a shallow sauté pan with decent sides is genuinely fine. A cast iron skillet works beautifully. You do not need a specialist pot. The one thing that matters is that the pan is wide enough that ingredients can sit in a single layer rather than piled up, because in Sukiyaki you want surface contact, not depth.
• A portable heat source for the table. A gas ring, a portable induction hob, or a tabletop electric hot plate. This is the one piece of equipment that changes the meal most, because Sukiyaki is at its best when the pan is in the middle and everyone is cooking their own pieces right off it.
• Chopsticks and small bowls. One bowl per person for the egg dip, and one for rice if you are serving it.
• A ladle or small jug for topping up the sauce as you go.

The dilution step, which is where most people go wrong

Follow the packaging. A concentrated Sukiyaki base will tell you how much water to add, and the ratio it gives is the one to use — it has already been balanced for sugar, salt and acidity, and adjusting it by guesswork is a good way to end up with something either harsh or thin. Mix it in a jug, taste a drop of it, and have the jug on the table for topping up later.

Then, and this is the key point of the entire article in practical terms: do not fill the pan. A Chinese hot pot is filled deep because the broth is the cooking medium and the ingredients need to be submerged. Sukiyaki wants the opposite. You are aiming for an even layer of sauce a centimetre or so deep — enough for the ingredients to sit in and draw from, not enough to cover them. If you can still see the tops of the vegetables, you have got it right. If they are swimming, pour some back out.

The order of play

1. Heat the pan, then lay in the aromatics. Long batons of leek or Japanese long onion go down first, along with the thick white bases of the cabbage, cut into wide pieces. These take the longest and they also scent the pan as they start. Let them soften and take on colour for a minute or two.
2. Pour in a shallow layer of the diluted sauce. It should sizzle when it hits the pan. Let it come to a gentle simmer, not a rolling boil.
3. Add the ingredients in batches, not all at once. Add enough for the first round or two of eating, arranged in their own little areas of the pan rather than stirred together. In Sukiyaki the arrangement matters because each ingredient cooks at its own speed, and the traditional serving keeps them separated in the pan so people can take what they want.
4. Eat as you go. Each person takes a piece when it looks ready, dips it in their egg, and eats. The pan is not left to finish; it is kept going and topped up. Add more sauce when the layer gets low, and more ingredients when the pan empties.
5. Keep the heat moderate. This is the most important technical rule in the whole dish. A hard, rolling boil drives off the aroma of the mirin and reduces the sauce to something salty and syrupy in minutes. A gentle simmer keeps the sauce glossy and balanced all the way through the meal. If the pan starts to catch at the edges, turn the heat down and add a splash of sauce.

One more thing worth knowing: as the vegetables cook, they release liquid into the pan, and the sauce naturally becomes more dilute and more vegetable-flavoured over the course of the meal. That is a feature, not a problem, and it is why seasoned Sukiyaki cooks top the pan up with fresh sauce rather than water as the meal goes on. The flavour of the pan evolves from the meat end toward the vegetable end, and the last few rounds taste different from the first. In a Chinese hot pot, the broth mostly stays where you set it. Here it develops.

Serving alongside

Sukiyaki is traditionally served with plain steamed rice in a separate bowl, and that is worth doing. The rice gives you something neutral between the intense, sweet-savoury mouthfuls, and it is where the last of the egg dip usually goes. A simple pickled vegetable on the side, or a small bowl of miso soup if you want to build the meal out further, both work well. A cold, clean drink — a Japanese lager, a light green tea, or something dry and crisp — suits the sweetness of the sauce far better than anything heavy.

What Actually Goes Into the Pan

Traditional Sukiyaki has a fairly short ingredient list, and the discipline of that list is part of why it tastes so coherent. Almost everything in it plays well with a sweet soy sauce, and nothing in it fights the sauce.

The plant side of the list, which is the side we can talk about in detail, is where most of the cooking actually happens:

• Cabbage. Chinese leaf or a firm white cabbage, cut into wide, chunky pieces. It softens, sweetens and releases water into the pan, and it is the single ingredient that changes the sauce the most as the meal goes on.
• Japanese long onion or leek — negi. Cut into long diagonal batons. It goes in first, takes the longest, and turns soft and sweet. British leeks are an excellent substitute and are in every supermarket all winter.
• Shiitake mushrooms. Fresh or rehydrated dried. They bring a deep savoury note that lifts the soy sauce, and they are one of the traditional ingredients that makes Sukiyaki taste like itself rather than like a generic stir-fry.
• Enoki mushrooms. A tight bundle of long, thin white stems, trimmed at the base and dropped in whole. They cook in under a minute and add a delicate texture that contrasts with everything else.
• Firm tofu. Cut into blocks. Pressed firm tofu holds its shape in the pan and soaks up the sauce in a way that softer tofu cannot. This is one of the ingredients people remember most from a first Sukiyaki meal.
• Shirataki noodles — also called konjac noodles. These are made from the konjac plant, which makes them a plant-based ingredient, and they are one of the classic Sukiyaki additions. They arrive in a pack of liquid, need a quick rinse, and they take on the sauce beautifully while staying almost impossibly slippery and light. If you have never cooked with them, a Sukiyaki pan is the best possible introduction.
• Chrysanthemum greens — shungiku. A leafy green with a distinctive, faintly herbal, faintly bitter edge that cuts through the sweetness of the sauce. It is traditional, and if you can find it, use it. If not, a handful of watercress or spinach added right at the end of each round does a similar job.
• Udon noodles, held back until the end. See the next section.

Traditionally, the list also includes thinly sliced beef. That is the classic pairing and the ingredient the dish was built around: beef sliced very thin so it cooks in seconds in the shallow sauce. We do not sell it, and we could not ship it to you if we did. Buy it at your local supermarket, or better, ask a butcher to slice a piece of well-marbled beef thinly on the machine — a good butcher will do this properly, and it is the difference between beef that melts into the sauce and beef that chews like a shoe. British supermarkets increasingly sell pre-sliced beef for stir-frying or for hot pot, which is a very good shortcut when you want one.

If you would rather keep the whole pan plant-based, it works remarkably well. Firm tofu, mushrooms, cabbage, leek and shirataki cooked in a good Sukiyaki base, with udon at the end, is a complete and generous meal, and the sauce does not need meat to make its point.

Finishing With Udon

Do not skip this. Of everything in this article, this is the part we would most want you to take away, because it is the moment when a very good meal becomes a memorable one.

When the ingredients are gone and the pan is nearly empty, what is left is the sauce: reduced, darkened, thickened, and now carrying the flavour of everything that has cooked in it — the sweetness of the cabbage, the depth of the mushrooms, the fat and savour that came off the beef, all of it concentrated into a shallow pool at the bottom of the pan. In Japan this is considered by many people the best part of the meal, and there is a reasonable case that they are right.

Turn the heat back up a little, add a splash of fresh diluted sauce if the pan looks dry, and drop in a portion of udon noodles. Fresh or vacuum-packed udon is best; dried udon works but needs pre-cooking first, which slightly changes the effect. The noodles only need a couple of minutes. Turn them once or twice so they pick up the sauce on all sides, until they are glossy, dark and coated.

Then eat them straight from the pan with chopsticks, with whatever is left of the egg dip if you have any, and standing up is entirely acceptable because you have already been sitting down for an hour. The noodles come out sweet, savoury, slippery and rich in a way that only happens when starch meets a sauce that has spent an entire meal developing. In a Chinese hot pot the noodle finish is a good idea. In Sukiyaki it is close to the reason for the whole exercise.

Who This Pot Is For

Sukiyaki is not for everybody, and it does not need to be. But it fits a particular kind of evening better than almost anything else, and it is worth knowing whether that evening is yours.

• People who already love Japanese food. If you eat sushi, ramen and gyoza regularly, Sukiyaki is often the next thing people discover, and it is a very different expression of the same kitchen — less about raw precision and more about warmth, sugar and slow cooking at a table.
• People who do not want heat. This is a genuinely mild dish. There is no chilli anywhere in a classic Sukiyaki. If someone at your table cannot handle spice, does not like it, or is cooking for children, this is a pot that everyone can share without negotiation or a second batch.
• People who want something warm, sweet and filling in autumn and winter. The sweet-savoury, glossy character of the sauce is cold-weather food in the most direct sense. It is what you want on a dark evening in November when a light, bright broth would not do the job.
• People who want a different kind of hot pot. If you have done the Sichuan thing and the mushroom thing and the tomato thing, this is the one that will feel genuinely unfamiliar. Different flavour direction, different technique, different rhythm of eating.
• People cooking for a table that likes to do things themselves. Like all pot dishes, this is a meal that works because everyone participates. It is a good format for a small dinner party, and a surprisingly good one for two people on an ordinary evening, since the pan is small and the pace is unhurried.

It is less suited to a very large group, because a shallow pan cooks in batches and feeding eight people out of one of them is slow work. For a crowd, a deep Chinese hot pot with a big broth is the better tool. For four people and a winter evening, Sukiyaki is hard to beat.

The British Kitchen Version: Shopping and Logistics

Everything you need for this meal is available in an ordinary British supermarket run, and that has not been true for very long. Here is what to expect.

From Sainsbury's, Tesco, Waitrose, Morrisons or a local Asian grocer

• Cabbage. Chinese leaf is stocked in most large supermarkets now, usually near the lettuce. A firm white cabbage is an easy substitute and often better value.
• Leeks. In season and cheap all through autumn and winter. Cut into long batons rather than rings.
• Shiitake mushrooms. Fresh in the chilled section of larger stores; dried in the world foods aisle, which is often more reliable and rehydrates in twenty minutes in warm water. Keep the soaking liquid and add it to the pan — it is pure flavour.
• Enoki mushrooms. Very common in Asian grocers and increasingly in larger supermarkets. Look for them near the specialist mushrooms.
• Firm tofu. In the chilled vegetarian section of nearly every large supermarket, and in every Asian grocer.
• Shirataki (konjac) noodles. Asian grocers reliably; larger supermarkets increasingly. They come in a sealed pack with liquid, keep for months in the cupboard, and cost very little.
• Udon noodles. Vacuum-packed fresh udon is in the world foods aisle of most large supermarkets. Dried udon is even more widely available.
• Pasteurised eggs for the dip, if you want to follow the traditional serving and are cooking for anyone in a higher-risk group.
• Steamed rice to serve alongside, if you are not already cooking it.

Timing

This is a ten to fifteen minute pot once the base is in the cupboard. Mixing the sauce takes a minute. Chopping the vegetables takes ten, and it is the only real work. If you are using dried shiitake, add twenty minutes of soaking time to that, which you can do while you chop everything else. That puts a full Sukiyaki dinner on the table inside half an hour of deciding to make it, and the eating itself takes as long as you want it to.

Leftovers

Leftover Sukiyaki sauce can be a lovely thing, but it needs handling with a bit of care because it has had raw meat and raw egg near it. If there is sauce and vegetables left in the pan at the end, cool it quickly, get it into a container and into the fridge the same evening, and use it within a day or two. Do not keep egg dip that has been sitting on the table — that one goes down the sink.

Reheated leftover sauce is excellent cooked down with a fresh portion of udon, or spooned over rice with a fried egg on top. It does not need fresh ingredients to be worth eating; it has already spent an evening collecting flavour. Reheat it gently rather than boiling it hard, because it will reduce and turn salty fast if you push it.

Buying a Sukiyaki Base in the UK

If the idea of calibrating soy sauce, mirin, sugar and sake by taste on a weeknight does not appeal — and it does not appeal to most people, including most cooks in Japan, who buy bottled warishita too — a concentrated Sukiyaki base is the answer. It is the one ingredient that turns this from a project into an ordinary dinner, and it keeps in the cupboard for months.

What you are looking for is a base with the specific sweet-savoury character described in this article: dark, glossy, clear rather than cloudy, balanced rather than simply salty. A base that is nothing but soy sauce will taste flat, and a base that is mostly sugar will taste like syrup. The balance is the whole product.

This is also, in practice, the answer to where to buy hot pot base in the UK if you want something that is not a chilli oil, not a Sichuan mala blend and not a tomato pot. The category has widened a great deal in Britain over the past few years, and a Sukiyaki base is one of the most useful things to keep next to the soy sauce.

Article 17, and Where the Series Goes From Here

Our World Hot Pot section opened with Tom Yum, and the story there was about adoption: a broth from outside China that the Chinese hot pot table took in and made its own. Sukiyaki is the other kind of story, and it is worth saying plainly that the two are not the same thing. Nobody absorbed Sukiyaki. It is Japanese, it was developed by Japanese cooks for Japanese tables, and it has stayed Japanese. Where it has travelled, it has travelled as itself.

What makes it relevant to a series about hot pot is that it arrives at a similar answer from a completely different direction. Both traditions decided that the best way to eat is to put a pan in the middle of the table and cook dinner in front of the people eating it. Chinese hot pot got there with deep broth and a table full of dips. Japan got there with a shallow pan, a sweet-savoury sauce, a bowl of egg and a packet of noodles. Same instinct, opposite execution, and the food that comes out of the two pans could not be more different.

That is the argument for a section like this. Hot pot is not one dish and never was. It is a way of eating — shared, slow, cooked in front of you — and once you see it that way, you start to notice that a great many food cultures arrived at it independently, each with their own sauce and their own rules. Some of those pots influenced each other. Some, like this one, simply grew up alongside.

Next in the section we will keep moving around the map, and the format will stay the same: where the pot actually comes from, what makes it work, what makes it different from a Chinese hot pot, and how to cook it in a British kitchen without ordering anything you cannot find at home. If you cook this one, do the udon finish, and do not fill the pan. Those two things are the whole dish.