Hotpot Ingredients You Can Buy in the UK (Beginner Guide)

One of the biggest barriers to making hotpot at home in the UK isn’t the cooking itself. It’s standing in a shop — or staring at a website — and thinking: “I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to buy.”

We’ve been there. The good news is: you don’t need anything exotic to get started. The better news is: once you know what matters, everything becomes much easier.

Start Simple (Seriously)

Hotpot can look complicated. Endless plates of ingredients, things you’ve never seen before, names you can’t pronounce — it’s easy to think you need all of it. You don’t. For your first few attempts, keep it simple and build from there.

The Core Categories

Instead of thinking in terms of specific dishes, it helps to break hotpot down into categories. You just need a mix from each.

Meat (Thinly Sliced Is Key)

This is usually the centrepiece. In the UK, your best options are:

• Beef (ribeye or similar, sliced thin)
• Lamb (shoulder or leg, again thinly sliced)

👉 Tip:
Asian supermarkets often sell pre-sliced meat specifically for hotpot — this makes life much easier, but it does cost more.

If you’re buying from a normal supermarket:

• Freeze the meat slightly
• Slice it as thin as you can (this is what we do nearly all the time, but we do use a slicer to help)

It doesn’t need to be perfect — just not chunky.

Vegetables (Underrated but Important)

Vegetables balance everything out. Easy UK options:

• Pak choi
• Spinach
• Mushrooms (shiitake if you can find them, but regular ones work fine)
• Lettuce (sounds odd, works brilliantly)

You don’t need anything fancy here.

Tofu & Bean Products

This is where things start to feel a bit more “authentic”. Look for:

• Firm tofu
• Fried tofu puffs

These absorb the broth really well and add variety to the meal. Both are typically harder to find in most UK supermarkets, a trip to the Asian store will pay-off even if this is the only item you buy from there. Tofu is very popular in asia, so you won’t need to look for a Chinese supermarket, any asian supermarket will work well, we have a lovely Vietnamese supermarket in our home town, perfect for little things like this.

Carbs (Don’t Skip These)

You will want something to bulk things out.

Good options:

• Noodles (egg or wheat)
• Rice noodles
• Rice cakes (if available)
• Potatos (do not knock it until you tried some thickly sliced potato cooked in a hotpot stock)

👉 This is usually the difference between “a nice meal” and “we are completely full”.

Don’t get hung up on special noodles as well, we often just use the noodles from a packet of instant noodles, the cheapest you can find in the supermarket, you won’t need the falvour sachets, just the dry noodles.

Seafood & Extras

Optional, but worth trying:

• Prawns or Shrinmp. To be honest, bigger is better, but the cheapest tiniest shrimp will work fine as well
• Fish balls
• Dumplings

These are very common in Asian supermarkets and easy to cook.

What About the Soup Base?

Technically not an “ingredient” in the same sense — but it’s the foundation of everything. If you get this wrong, nothing else quite works.

We’ll cover this properly in a separate guide, but for now:

👉 Buy a pre-made hotpot soup base

• Sichuan spicy base (if you like heat)
• Mild mushroom or tomato base (if you don’t)

Don’t try to build this from scratch yet.

Where to Buy in the UK

Best option:

• Local Asian supermarkets

This is where things start to make sense.

You’ll find:

• Pre-sliced meats
• Tofu varieties
• Fish balls
• Proper sauces

Second option:

• Larger Chinese / East Asian grocery stores

Often better stocked, sometimes slightly more expensive.

Third option:

• Amazon is brilliant for a lot of this stuff.

Last resort:

• Standard UK supermarkets

You can get basics, but you’ll struggle to find:

• Proper hotpot ingredients
• Authentic sauces
• Good variety

Common Mistakes (We Made These)

❌ Buying too much

You don’t need a full restaurant spread.

❌ Ignoring balance

Too much meat, not enough vegetables = heavy meal

❌ Picking random ingredients

If you don’t know what it is, maybe don’t buy 3 packs of it

❌ Overcomplicating it

Hotpot is simple at its core — keep it that way

A Simple Starter Setup

If you want the easiest possible starting point, try this:

• Beef
• Pak choi
• Mushrooms
• Tofu
• Noodles
• Pre-made soup base

That’s enough for a very good first hotpot.

Where This Leads

Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you’ll naturally start to:

• Try different ingredients
• Find better versions of things
• Build your own preferences

And that’s where it gets interesting.

From here, we’ll get into:

• The best soup bases you can buy in the UK
• Ingredients that are actually worth tracking down
• Equipment that makes the whole thing easier

Because once you’ve got the basics sorted, improving it is mostly about making better choices — not doing more work.