Chuxiong Whole Goat Hot Pot 楚雄全羊汤锅

Chuxiong Whole Goat Hot Pot (楚雄全羊汤锅) is a Yi pot of black goat in which the meat, skin, offal, trotters and blood all go into one pot. In Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture (楚雄彝族自治州) it is the signature dish of the Torch Festival (火把节) on the 24th day of the sixth lunar month. It is cooked in big iron pots at places such as Zixi Yi Village (紫溪彝村) in Chuxiong and Zhaojiadian (赵家店) in Dayao County (大姚县), and it has also become everyday restaurant food.

How it is made

Cooks start with a fat, free-ranging local black goat. After slaughter the hair is removed and the skin is scorched golden over a fire before washing, which Wenlv Toutiao says takes away the gamey smell and makes the skin soft. The Dayao County culture and tourism bureau adds that the head and feet are singed and the inner bones broken with a hammer. In the version Wenlv Toutiao describes, the meat and offal are cut small, marinated with spices, fried in rapeseed oil with a bag of black cardamom (草果) in a wood-fired pot for about an hour, then boiled in stock and simmered for two hours; the blood, cooked separately, goes in last. The Dayao account has the blood, offal and meat stewed together over low heat with only salt.

Flavour and texture

Long simmering gives a milky-white, strongly flavoured broth without a gamey smell, with meat that is tender but not falling apart. The appeal is the mix of textures from one animal: fragrant skin, fresh meat, crisp tripe, soft blood and chewy trotters.

How it is eaten

The meat is dipped in a Yi sauce of charred chilli: in Dayao the chillies are roasted in the embers of the stove and rubbed fine with local Sichuan pepper, garlic and fresh mint. The Yi dip Wenlv Toutiao describes mixes charred chilli powder, spring onion, coriander, garlic, ginger, bird's-eye chilli, ground Sichuan pepper, fermented bean curd and salt, loosened with a little hot broth. A more traditional bowl puts mint in the bottom, ladles in the meat and broth and tops it with charred chilli. Restaurants set out a dish of pickled radish and one of finely chopped chives, which are spooned into the soup, and pea shoots go into the pot once the meat is finished. Buckwheat flatbread (荞粑粑) and grilled goat skewers are common partners. For the 2023 Torch Festival the Dayao bureau invited visitors to a thousand-person goat-pot banquet at Zhaojiadian, and the food street of Yi Ancient Town (彝人古镇) in Chuxiong has many goat-pot restaurants.