Sitting around a table with a bunch of friends to eat from a piping hotpot is a blessing for many Chinese on a cold winter day. However, the delicious hotpot soups are worth a bit of worry and concern, because too many chemical additives are part of the recipe, the Yangtse Evening News reported on Dec 15,2010.

The spicy additives are seen in a dry-food store in Taiping South Road market，Nanjing, Jiangsu province Dec 14,2010. [Photo/Yangtse Evening News]

Hotpot additives such as toners, hotpot spices and pastils are found to be popular at several dry-food markets around Nanjing, the capital of East China's Jiangsu province.

"Many hotpot restaurants use it, and I can guarantee it's very tasty," one shop owner said.

"It's cheap to reduce the costs of modulating the basic charges; and it's effective or even better than using real seasoning," another shop owner added.

The red chili hotpot [Photo/Yangtse Evening News]

In one vegetable market near Taiping South Road, some stores even sell opium poppy as additives. One shop owner surnamed Huang said, "it is an unwritten material that almost every hotpot restaurants use."

"To make good taste of the basic charges, you need to mix the real seasonings with additives together," Huang added.

Huang Yan, vice-director of the Nanjing Hotpot Industry Commission, said it's been a norm in the industry, but no clear regulations have been issued to confine and restrict their use.

One official from Nanjing Administration of Quality Supervision said she was unsure whether all of those additives are safe, because there are hundreds of them and to test each item is unrealistic.