Hot pot & soups ── Nabe (hot pot)
Yosenabe
Yosenabe — a hot pot of assorted meat, seafood, and vegetables cooked together at the table
A pot of chicken, white fish, and shrimp alongside napa cabbage, scallions, mushrooms, and tofu, simmered together. It has no fixed form, and the ideal is not a hodgepodge but each ingredient cooked just right in a broth that stays clear.
- Soy-based & yosenabe
Lineage
What it's made of
Meat and seafood such as chicken thigh, white fish, and shrimp are combined with napa cabbage, long onion, shungiku, carrot, shiitake, enoki, tofu, and kudzu noodles. The savor of each ingredient layers over the dashi to build depth, and the sweetness of cabbage mixes with seafood stock so that the broth itself becomes something to savor.
How it's made
Dashi is heated and ingredients go in beginning with those that take longest to cook, never letting it boil hard. A strong boil lets the flavor drain out of the ingredients into the liquid, so the idea is to eat them just as they finish. A common ending is to simmer rice in the remaining broth and set it with beaten egg as zosui.
Why it took this shape
The name probably comes from gathering many ingredients to cook together. The agriculture ministry's explanation says that 'chanko' means the food sumo wrestlers eat, and that the same ingredients made by ordinary people are called yosenabe. It is not the pot of a particular place; it reads as a way of cooking around the table in winter that took root in homes across the country.
Before you go
- Foods to look for in winterA guide to foods often seen in Japan around winter — nabe hot pot, fugu, oysters, crab, year-end soba, and osechi — with rough pointers for finding them.
- At yakiniku, shabu-shabu, and hot potGrilling your own meat at yakiniku, swishing thin slices at shabu-shabu, and sharing from the pot — the customs behind each.
Dishes in the same style
- Chanko NabeChicken, napa cabbage, tofu, and more simmer together in broth — a hot pot born in sumo stables, said to date to the Meiji era, when four-legged meat like beef and pork was avoided since touching a hand to the ground echoed a loss in the ring. Former wrestlers still run chanko restaurants around Ryogoku, keeping their stable's flavor.
- Damako NabeFreshly cooked rice, lightly pounded with a pestle and rolled into balls called 'damako', simmers in hinai-jidori chicken broth with burdock and Japanese parsley — said to have taken shape once fish from Lake Hachirogata grew scarce and chicken took their place.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Related lineage
- Chanko NabeChicken, napa cabbage, tofu, and more simmer together in broth — a hot pot born in sumo stables, said to date to the Meiji era, when four-legged meat like beef and pork was avoided since touching a hand to the ground echoed a loss in the ring. Former wrestlers still run chanko restaurants around Ryogoku, keeping their stable's flavor.
- MizutakiBone-in chicken and vegetables simmer slowly into a milky broth, eaten with a citrus-soy dip — said to have taken shape in Hakata from a foreign chicken soup that first landed in Nagasaki, and now inseparable from the closing feast of the city's summer festival.