Self-heating hotpot

Have you heard of self-heating hotpot? I recently tried two kinds, making use of Shopee’s promotions (otherwise they are kind of expensive…). I bought two different brands, thinking that if the first one doesn’t taste good, it may be just because that brand/flavour doesn’t suit me.

One was spicy crayfish, while the other one was beef ham (not sure why they call it “ham”; it may be a bad translation)

I tried the crayfish one first.

Plenty of separate packets inside, including a pair of chopsticks!
The two packets on the bottom-right are both crayfish. The blue pack is the veggies/potatoes, while the other two packs are easily recognizable as the "noodles" and the chilli.

The boxes - we are to put the heating pack into the outer box, pour water (just room temperature water, not hot water) on it for it to start releasing heat.

Dumped everything into the inner pot. (except the chilli paste)

Added the chilli paste, but not all of it...I know it's gonna be spicy!

Then we add drinking water to the inner pot, and start heating!

Heating in progress. (15 minutes)

Done!

Then we stir and eat...

I actually felt that I did not put enough water on the heating pack. After the 15 minutes, I felt that the soup didn't seem hot enough, so I took out the inner pot, added more water to the outer pot, and let it continue heating for a while more... not sure whether it made any difference in the end.

When I took out the inner pot to add water to the heating pack, I placed it on a heat pad...and it was so hot it made my heat pad warp. :O

See that the part on the right became thicker?

So…how did it taste? Basically like mala soup… the crayfish were so tiny that it was pretty much impossible to get any meat after taking the shell off. So I was sucking the shells instead… 

I definitely didn’t expect such tiny crayfish…I thought they would give just one or two, but maybe two or three times this size? :P

Moving on to the beef hotpot...

This one has better illustrations, so I'm attaching the instructions.

Translated with Google Lens

Again, all the packets... And they have chopsticks too, really something we can have on the go, with just water. I won't say what each packet is...you can figure it out yourself with the next photo.

There's quite a decent amount of beef. Easily broken apart...which also means it's very tender, huh... :P
The dry noodles (same as the other hotpot) are at the bottom...I just realized that they are totally hidden by the other ingredients!
(I broke the sausage while trying to get it out of the packet. Oops...)

Again, adding the chilli but not all of it.

Heating it up!

This time, I put more water in the bottom compartment. The bubbling was really more intense...though I am not sure whether it's because of the water or because of the product brand. Here's a video:

And then it's done!

There was a little overflowing..

This one tasted a bit better...maybe because of the beef? But it was difficult trying to get all the tiny pieces of beef. The sausage was awful though, it was simply mushy (can't expect too much from this kind of sausage...) Overall the hotpot is not good enough for me to buy again. :P

While eating, I felt like the bowl was extremely shallow...and after pouring away the soup, I realized why:

The heat pack had expanded a lot!