Today, Bon Appétit meets chefs Lucas Sin and Eric Sze just outside Taipei to taste some of Taiwan’s best clay-oven-roasted chicken. Using a time-honored vertical spit roasting technique and only a simple salt seasoning, these chickens are slowly cooked to achieve that perfect golden crisp. The result? Juicy, flavorful chicken with irresistibly crispy skin, served whole and ready to be devoured with your hands.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:01Ooh, woo!
00:03Jesus.
00:04It is 10 a.m.
00:05We're right outside Taipei in Yilan.
00:07We're at Fuge Shiaoji
00:08and we're about to check out
00:09some of the most traditional kiln roasted chicken in Taiwan.
00:12They're about to light the fire right now,
00:13so let's take a look.
00:16Welcome to the kitchen.
00:17First thing in the morning,
00:18what chef is going to do is fire these logs with gas
00:22until he gets a very nice consistent temperature.
00:25There's no flavor for the wood.
00:27It really just acts as a heating agent
00:28for the entire drum.
00:32They're using probably recycled wood,
00:34controls fire really well.
00:35So the chickens here,
00:36in Taiwan there's this thing called wentiji.
00:39Wentiji means it's slaughtered in the morning,
00:40delivered in the afternoon.
00:41So literally warm body chicken, right?
00:43Warm body chicken.
00:44So breed is called heiyuji, black feather chicken.
00:47It's a lot meatier, the skin is thinner.
00:49So let's go look at the salting process.
00:51His hands are soaking wet.
00:52He dabs his fingers into the bucket of salt
00:55and then he uses that sort of salt water mixture
00:58on his hands to rub it all over the chicken.
01:00This is cool actually.
01:00Yeah.
01:01It's a small amount of salt.
01:02Yeah.
01:03It's very minimal.
01:04These vertical skewers,
01:05this is what's really cool.
01:07Now the chicken is roasting straight up,
01:09kind of like a beer can chicken type of thing.
01:11Because of the way they're positioned,
01:12with the water pan in the bottom,
01:14seems gonna go inside of the cavity of the chicken,
01:17which means that it's gonna cook inside out.
01:19On the outside, it's gonna be continually dried,
01:21but the added moisture of the air
01:22is actually going to make that air hotter faster.
01:26That is kind of counterintuitive.
01:28People usually think if you add water to a roasting process,
01:32your skin won't be crispy.
01:33But the water in this case will actually accelerate the heat
01:36and it'll still give you crispy skin.
01:38It's a technique that a lot of fine dining fancy chefs have
01:41in their combi ovens,
01:42which is a combination of dry and wet heat.
01:45This is exactly not quite replicated,
01:47because it precedes that high-end technology.
01:50Each oven fits 16 chickens.
01:52Four total is 64 chickens.
01:54And chefs just told me that they have about 60 tables.
01:57So it's very serendipitous and very efficient.
01:59And on the weekends, they sell up to 400 chickens.
02:01That's five turns on all four ovens.
02:08So every about 20 minutes or so,
02:10they need to rotate it.
02:11If you look at the bottom of the pit,
02:13the water has basically all dissipated
02:15and now the drippings have begun to form.
02:17How long have you put this?
02:18How long have you put it in?
02:1940 minutes or 20 minutes?
02:21It's about 20 minutes.
02:23Okay, yeah, so the chicken's only been in here
02:25for 20 minutes.
02:26This is the first turn.
02:27So they need to do three turns in total.
02:29With a lot of these ancestral cooking techniques,
02:32the temperature regulation isn't
02:33with the thermometer and a dial.
02:36Heat comes in from the bottom here via the wood.
02:38He's controlling the burn rate by feeding more wood
02:41or letting it just turn into embers.
02:43And on the other end, the output of the heat
02:46is controlled with the lid over the top.
02:48He has a little wooden plank, a little wooden brick.
02:51He can control the amount of airflow.
02:52The more airflow, the hotter it gets.
02:54But also as he opens that lid,
02:55he's going to release the heat
02:57so that he can bring down the temperature.
02:58There are hot zones in the oven.
03:00And the hottest area in the oven
03:02is the one that's closer by the pipe,
03:04towards the end there of the oven.
03:06How do you control it?
03:08That one will be faster, right?
03:10That one will be faster.
03:12OK, OK.
03:12So the chickens closest to the pipe
03:15will finish faster than the rest of the batch.
03:17The thing is, like, every single time
03:19you go to kitchens where they're roasting whole animals,
03:21and it's that elemental,
03:22a lot of it just comes down to experience
03:24and the monitoring of the day-to-day.
03:25I'm sure that the temperature of the climate
03:28is going to affect how it cooks that day.
03:30I'm sure how often he feeds it,
03:32the quality of the wood, the wetness of the wood,
03:33all of those need to be adjusted on a day-to-day basis.
03:37These restaurants aren't really scalable.
03:38Yeah.
03:39Because it's so reliant on the chef's skill.
03:40And it has to be here.
03:42Exactly.
03:43Ooh.
03:44Woo!
03:45Wait, it's so hot!
03:47Way more smoke than I thought.
03:49Holy cow.
03:50Look at how even the skin is.
03:53There's nothing really burned at all.
03:55Chef was telling us earlier,
03:56the perfect chicken has the skin puffed up,
03:59which is to say that all of that water
04:02inside of that chicken becomes steam,
04:04pushes the skin outwards
04:06so that it's a thinner membrane that then crisps,
04:08and you know that you have chicken cooked properly.
04:10Yeah.
04:13Beautiful.
04:14Holy cow.
04:15Do you see that consistent golden brown?
04:17Do you see how thin that skin is?
04:19It's like paper.
04:20All that fat, all that chicken juice.
04:22This is our gravy later.
04:23Everything that we lost by cooking it,
04:26we have retained.
04:27It's about 11.
04:28The first customers are starting to come in,
04:30so the first kiln of chicken is done.
04:32It's going to rest in that barrel in the back.
04:34Some of it is going to the high-temperature oven
04:36to crisp,
04:37and the next batch of raw chicken
04:39goes straight back in to the first oven.
04:42Nuts.
04:43Jesus Christ.
04:44This skin is really, like,
04:45it really reminds you of Peking duck.
04:47This guy was slaughtered about 10 hours ago,
04:49quickly brined as well, like,
04:51rubbed with salt, basically,
04:52and then straight into the oven.
04:54Low-temperature, high-temperature, roasts,
04:56skin is crispy, already on the table.
04:59Just look at the glassiness of the skin, man.
05:01First...
05:01Oh, my goodness.
05:02First...
05:03Did you catch that?
05:04Oh, cow.
05:06It's like you can hear the skin just crackle.
05:10It's shatteringly crisp.
05:11Traditionally, when you see roast chicken
05:12in Chinese restaurants,
05:14they cut it with cleavers.
05:15But here, because it's so piping hot,
05:17if you cut it with cleavers,
05:18the flesh falls apart.
05:19So they use scissors to precisionally cut it.
05:22Or you can get gloves and just tear away.
05:26A carnal way of eating something
05:28this ancestral and this proper.
05:30First thing that comes off is the neck and the head,
05:32the feet, and then the wings,
05:34each of the legs, down by the joints,
05:38and the backs of the chicken are chopped into pieces.
05:42Chef is taking it apart and roughly assembling it again
05:44so that it resembles a little bit of a chicken.
05:46I'm amazed at how crispy this is.
05:49I'm amazed because there's nothing done to it, you know?
05:51It just proves good ingredients, good technique,
05:54every single time.
05:55Nothing whets your appetite,
05:57like that crispy skin, that juicy flesh.
05:59It seems like the perfect type of thing.
06:01Finally, our turn.
06:02But also, they are very, very famous for their bamboo,
06:05so they take all the drippings.
06:07Because it's a lot of drippings from one chicken, right?
06:10So the excess gets made into braised bamboo.
06:13So it's chicken fat bamboo.
06:15Yeah.
06:16Sorry, let's get some food.
06:17Okay.
06:17Now, Makan, we need two chicken.
06:19Yes.
06:20And then we need to cut one hand.
06:22And then we need to add the chicken.
06:25Okay.
06:26And then we need to add a hot water.
06:27Okay.
06:28That's right.
06:29That should be enough.
06:30Oh, uh...
06:34So the chicken itself roasted fresh out of the hot oven,
06:36a little bit of white pepper seasoning on the side.
06:39I'm assuming there's a bit of salt and sugar in there too.
06:40So there's probably white pepper, salt, sugar, MSG,
06:42and it's a proprietary blend, but you know, the core basics are the same.
06:46And then there's a little bit of the chicken jus on the side.
06:49So it's mostly fat.
06:50That's a yellow on the top and a little bit of liquid on the bottom.
06:53And gloves.
06:54Because we're going to take it apart ourselves, right?
06:55Yeah.
06:56Is this...
06:57This is very romantic.
06:59When my mom and my dad were dating,
07:02and they didn't have money to buy an extra pair of gloves,
07:05they would hang out in Canada and hold each other's hands.
07:09And then with the ungloved hand,
07:10then have it inside of their coat pocket to keep warm.
07:13And the other one, they would share one single pair of gloves.
07:15This reminds me of them.
07:16That sounds painful, not romantic.
07:18I don't know, man.
07:19Oh, shit, shit.
07:21Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
07:22I feel like they saved the best for us.
07:25The magic is when you turn it on its side,
07:28and you see there's no fat on it.
07:31Because all of that fat that was on that chicken
07:33had rendered out.
07:34And it's down here, right?
07:36You're heating fat so that it becomes liquid.
07:38It does two things.
07:39One is that it's basting the skin inside out.
07:41So it's basically frying in its own fat.
07:42And second, because this liquid is off the skin now,
07:45there's an...
07:46Everything left just becomes crispy.
07:49It's...
07:50You don't...
07:50You're never going to get this with a regular GMO conventional chicken.
07:54And it's way, way meatier.
07:55I can squeeze it, and it's not falling apart.
07:58This in the mouth is texture.
07:59It's all just texture.
08:00I'm just smelling a symphony of chicken.
08:02Dude, the minute you touch the chicken,
08:05and you just can smell it on your gloves...
08:07Look right here.
08:08It's rendering onto the gloves.
08:10All yellow fat.
08:13Are you kidding me?
08:16Look at that right here, that pocket of juice.
08:18Look at that inside.
08:19It's so juicy.
08:21I mean, they've really nailed the cook on here.
08:24All right, so first.
08:25Cheers.
08:25Cheers.
08:26Cheers.
08:28How香.
08:31Mmm.
08:34Good.
08:34Very good.
08:35Very good.
08:37It's actually salty enough, right?
08:40There's a good amount of salinity in this.
08:41And when you bite it with a little bit of that unrendered fat,
08:44it just completely fives.
08:50The s***.
08:52The skin is the best part.
08:54The skin truly is.
08:55The skin is so good.
08:56I expected no smokiness at all, but it is a little bit smoky.
08:59Just a tiny bit.
09:00It's got like a hint of smoke, like a touch of it.
09:02I think the smoke leeches in.
09:04Right.
09:04And also, at the end of the day, the chicken is still creating a lot of steam, right?
09:09And it's catching on whatever was left over from the last cook.
09:11Definitely.
09:12And that's the previous chicken batch is seasoning the current chicken batch.
09:15Right.
09:15The pepper there is not really ceremonial.
09:17It's about creating different flavor profiles.
09:19Because if you're just eating chicken after chicken after chicken bite.
09:22Mmm.
09:23So white pepper is the pepper fruit fermented, lacto-fermented,
09:27which means that it picks up some of this.
09:28Some people call it stinky, but it has that like fragrance.
09:31That really lends itself to the chicken, as well as a lot of Taiwanese cuisine.
09:35Yep, yep, yep.
09:36By the way, one of the best cuts of the chicken.
09:40If you're sharing a whole chicken with your friends or family,
09:43it's on that back on the spine near the butt.
09:45Right up here is the chicken oyster.
09:48I mean, it looks a little bit like an oyster, but it's a pocket next to the chicken thigh.
09:53If you watch our episode on goose, they refer to this part as the o lam,
09:57as the brisket of the goose.
10:01Probably the most tender piece on the entire chicken.
10:04That's the chef's snack.
10:05Yeah.
10:05Yeah.
10:07Perfect, yum.
10:09It's bouncy, yeah.
10:10The meat is bouncy.
10:11Yeah.
10:11It has a springiness to it.
10:12And it's self-contained.
10:13Yes.
10:14So on the theme of chicken, this sauce is this juice.
10:18So it's bamboo braised with scallions and the chicken fat.
10:21Chicken fat.
10:22You can see all the layers of the bamboo in the middle.
10:25You see that gloss.
10:26You can see the glaze of the chicken over the top.
10:28A little bit of that scallion.
10:31Papery thin.
10:34Yum.
10:35Oh my goodness.
10:36It's even more chickeny than the chicken.
10:39I think because they braised it for a long time.
10:41I love bamboo.
10:43I like the variety of bamboo.
10:44I love it in Taiwan.
10:46Holy cow.
10:48What if we made this whole episode about chicken
10:50and actually the bamboo is like kind of the best part.
10:52Oh, thank you.
10:54Water lily.
10:55Another vegetable that is pretty unique to Taiwan.
10:57I'm sure you can get it elsewhere, but it is everywhere in Taiwan.
11:01I mean, they look like scallions, but they're not scallions.
11:03They're not scallions.
11:04It's like vegetable and noodle form.
11:06Yeah.
11:07Every time they make a stir-fry, even these greens,
11:09they'll drizzle a little bit of chicken fat over the end.
11:11Just to give it that punch of chickenness.
11:13It ties the whole thing together.
11:17Mmm.
11:18Oh, it's young.
11:21Garlic chicken fat and vegetables.
11:23Are you kidding me?
11:24This really feels like the type of place that you can only have in Taiwan.
11:27Yeah.
11:28It's a heritage breed of chicken.
11:29It's the ancestral approach to the cooking.
11:31It's the purity of it all.
11:33And it's the experience of the chefs.
11:34Really, really incredible.
11:36Again, to reiterate, come here, get the whole chicken, get the bamboo.
11:42You're welcome.
11:43On to the next.
11:43Let's do it.
11:44Let's go.
11:44I got one more piece here.
11:46One more scoop.
11:47I'll take this out of the oil.
11:57The way some people will add a little bit of extra virgin olive oil just at the end
12:01for that aromatic punch, they add a little bit of that chicken fat too for their stir-fries.
12:05Just a little drizzle of schmaltz.
12:07Give it a little bit more lift.