Explosive Chicken Taiwanese Restaurant Introduction
This is a specialty shop in Huatan Township that was originally operated as an herbal shop. After the second generation took over, they creatively transformed the traditional clay oven used for roasting herbs into one for making clay oven chicken. Nearby the shop, there is a herb garden where many medicinal herbs are grown, which are used in the clay oven chicken, such as pearl grass, sour grass, and Ganoderma lucidum. The clay oven chicken from Wulong Herbal Shop is called "explosive chicken" because when it cooks in the oven, the heat causes the antibacterial paper wrapped around it to explode, hence the name. The explosive chicken uses specially selected black-boned native chickens filled with traditional Chinese medicinal ingredients and rice wine. It is wrapped in 11 layers of heat-resistant plastic bags, aluminum foil, newspaper, red clay, and iron mesh, and then placed in a cross-shaped clay oven, where it is slow-cooked with acacia wood and longan wood for 4 hours. Unlike regular clay oven chicken, the explosive chicken has less broth, but the meat is tender and flavorful, and the broth is a rich blend of various herbal essences, rice wine, and the natural broth from the black-boned chicken, creating a deep, aromatic flavor.
