Name: Taiwan's Best Roast Chicken is Cooked The Ancient Way | Street Eats | Bon Appétit
Uploaded: 2025-06-05T14:15:38.000Z
Duration: 12 min 12 s
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We're at Fuge Shiyaoji, and we're about to check out some of the most traditional kiln-roasted chicken in Taiwan.

They're about to light the fire right now, so let's take a look.

First thing in the morning, what chef is going to do is fire these logs with gas until he gets a very nice, consistent temperature.

It really just acts as a heating agent for the entire drum.

They're using probably recycled wood, controls fire really well.

So the chickens here, in Taiwan there's this thing called wen-ti-ji.

Wen-ti-ji means it's slaughtered in the morning, delivered in the afternoon.

So breed is called hei-yu-ji, black feather chicken.

He dabs his fingers into the bucket of salt, and then he uses that sort of salt-water mixture on his hands to rub it all over the chicken.

These vertical skewers, this is what's really cool.

You know, the chicken is roasting straight up, kind of like a beer can chicken type of thing.

Because of the way they're positioned, with the water pan in the bottom, it's even gonna go inside of the cavity of the chicken, which means that it's gonna cook inside out.

On the outside, it's gonna be continually dried, but the added moisture of the air is actually going to make that air hotter, faster.

People usually think if you add water to a roasting process, your skin won't be crispy.

But the water, in this case, will actually accelerate the heat, and it'll still give you crispy skin.

It's a technique that a lot of fine dining fancy chefs have in their combi ovens, which is a combination of dry and wet heat.

This is exactly, not quite replicated, because it precedes that high-end technology.

The chef just told me that they have about 60 tables, so it's very serendipitous and very efficient.

And on the weekends, they sell up to 400 chickens.

So, every about 20 minutes or so, they need to rotate it.

If you look at the bottom of the pit, the water has basically all dissipated, and now the drippings have begun to form.

So, the chicken's only been in here for 20 minutes.

So, they need to do three turns in total.

With a lot of these ancestral cooking techniques, the temperature regulation isn't with a thermometer and a dial.

Heat comes in from the bottom here via the wood.

He's controlling the burn rate by feeding more wood or letting it just turn into embers.

And on the other end, the output of the heat is controlled with the lid over the top.

He has a little wooden plank, a little wooden brick.

But also, as he opens that lid, he's gonna release the heat so that he can bring down the temperature.

There are hot zones in the oven, and the hottest area in the oven is the one that's closer by the pipe, towards the end there of the oven.

So, the chickens closest to the pipe will finish faster than the rest of the batch.

The thing is, like, every single time you go to kitchens where they're roasting whole animals and it's that elemental, a lot of it just comes down to experience and the monitoring of the day-to-day.

I'm sure that the temperature of the climate is going to affect how it cooks that day.

I'm sure how often he feeds it, the quality of the wood, the wetness of the wood, all of those need to be adjusted on a day-to-day basis.

These restaurants aren't really scalable.

Because it's so reliant on the chef's skill.

Chef was telling us earlier, the perfect chicken has the skin puffed up, which is to say that all of that water inside of that chicken becomes steam, pushes the skin outwards, so that it's a thinner membrane that then crisps, and you know that you have chicken cooked properly.

Everything that we lost by cooking it, we have retained.

It's about 11, the first customers are starting to come in, so the first kiln of chicken is done.

It's going to rest in that barrel in the back, some of it is going to the high temperature oven to crisp, and the next batch of raw chicken goes straight back in to the first oven.

This skin is really like, it really reminds you of Peking duck.

This guy was slaughtered about 10 hours ago, quickly brined, it was like rubbed with salt basically, and then straight into the oven, low temperature, high temperature, roasts, skin is crispy, already on the table.

Just look at the glassiness of the skin, man.

It's like you can hear the skin just crackle.

Traditionally, when you see roast chicken in Chinese restaurants, they cut it with cleavers.

But here, because it's so piping hot, if you cut it with cleavers, the flesh falls apart.

So they use scissors to precisionally cut it, or you can get gloves and just tear away.

The carnal way of eating something this ancestral and this proper.

First thing that comes off is the neck and the head, the feet, and then the wings, each of the legs, down by the joints, and the backs of the chicken are chopped into pieces.

Chef is taking it apart and roughly assembling it again so that it resembles a little bit of a chicken.

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Taiwan's Best Roast Chicken is Cooked The Ancient Way | Street Eats | Bon Appétit

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