Mud Roasted Chicken (Gà Nướng Bùn)

You would have no idea that there's a freaking chicken inside this big ball of mud. Today we are going on another fun food adventure continuing our saga in the Mekong Delta and look I've had fried chicken before and I'm over it. I've had chicken cooked in a clay pot. Oh look at that! Look at this! Okay calm down me from the past. I'm over that too because today we are cooking a chicken backcountry style and trust me you have never seen anything like this before. It is 7am and here we are at a market deep in the Mekong Delta in the city of Is this still Ben Tre? Yeah actually this is a district known as Vong Trong belonging to Ben Tre. Yeah good so that and that's where we are and look if we're gonna make chicken we need some chicken supplies. Namely we need a chicken but first we're just gonna take a look around the market and say hi to the friendly folks. Let's go! Did you grow up in the city or in the country? Actually I came from the countryside. Countryside? Yeah. Alright so do you feel kind of at home here? Yeah absolutely. These are your people. I feel that way too because I lived on a hobby farm for two years so that makes me country folk too kind of. You see this one? What is this? Tobacco. Look at this. This could be a gigantic cigarette. All you need to do is wrap it up in a newspaper and then instant lung cancer. I would love to try this nice lady's cigarettes but this isn't the best ever cigarette show. As all of you know it's the best ever food and sometimes drink and sometimes drinking show and once in a while cooking show. We must move on. So we've got meat. We've got pork. Oh and there's a bunch of stuff out here too. That's a good crab. Look at this crab. She's very proud of the crab. I would be too. That's a good crab. This is from the Mekong river? Yeah. From the Mekong delta somewhere? Very special fish on the Mekong and we actually graze and export a lot of catfish to different countries. These fish are very active. We have snakehead fish which we tried last week. These are a little bit bigger. Look at these guys. He jumped from that basket to another basket. It didn't save his life or anything. But that's still pretty good. Eel you see as well. There's eel here. Grass water eel. That river has everything in there. Everything. We found a snake last time. There's eel. There's all these gigantic fish. How are you? Good. We're getting to know the locals. And here this is Victoria's secret. She's got some ducks. They're gonna be cooked for lunch. No they're gonna have a good life. They're gonna have a good life. Bye. Do you have any idea where the chickens are? I noticed that the aisles are not clearly labeled. There's nothing that says chicken section. I tried looking for a map. I couldn't find one. How do you say where are the chickens in Vietnamese? Okay. I got it. Say it again. Like this. This way. Nailed it. Let's go. We've got the livestock section down here. This place has a lot of ducks. Look at all these ducks for example. All right we're gonna find a chicken. There's a chicken lady over here but don't worry we're not gonna show everything. Calm down Peter. How do you choose a chicken? You just want to pick one? I kind of trust you. Why don't you pick? I feel bad giving a death sentence to a chicken. Which one you like? Okay I'm not looking. That one. Right. All right. How do you get a chicken to stand on a scale? They're very self-conscious about their weight. How does she weigh it? Oh she just has a scale here. Yeah. She'll just throw the chicken in it. Okay. Okay. So she just throws the whole chicken on the scale. Okay. So 1.2 kilos. She's putting it in a plastic bag. What is she doing? Yeah. Make a hole for her to get oxygen to breathe. Oh my god. I've never seen anything like this. So probably we're gonna. I didn't think that they were gonna bag up a live chicken like groceries and then she's just poking the head through a hole so it can still breathe. We don't need to show this part. The chicken is alive and the next time you see it it's just gonna be like a grocery store chicken. Cut. Right now we are deep in the Mekong Delta in a small country home only accessible by motorbike and we are getting ready to put mud on a chicken. Let's go do that. My man. Are you ready to make a chicken? My guy over here. Guide for the day. Kind of someone local guide and we met these guys because they have their own YouTube. I'm gonna do that in voiceover. Let's just go. The crew cooking up today's uncanny mud chicken are all part of the food adventuring trio called Nguyen Minh Thai. Their Vietnamese YouTube channel features the best the Mekong Delta has to offer. When we showed up they were already busy cooking up a chicken in a clay pot filled with sand. These are my kind of dudes. All I know is that we've got our chicken and we're heading to the place with all the mud right? You first. Is this really necessary? Why is this place booby trapped? You only get chicken if you can go across. Okay. There you go nailed it. Right now with our shoes off we gotta be careful. I've got very delicate feet. Oh. This is why we gotta go barefoot. We're cooking the chicken in this? Why not? Right now we have our chicken here on the banana leaf. I've been told we have to select the right kind of mud. Essentially we want mud that's gonna cake the whole outside of the chicken that can be made into a ball and stay together. We don't want any kind of melty looking ball. We want a solid ball. The guts haven't been taken out. The stomach like none of that has been taken out and we're covering the whole thing in I've never seen anything like this. Uh yeah it's looking nice. You would have no idea that there's a freaking chicken inside this big ball of mud. Someone just gave us some eggs. What are these for? Okay he's gonna use this to make something nice for the whole stuff. She's gonna make a turtle shape. A turtle shape out of the chicken? What the heck? Is this like a decorative cake? If I am correct we are putting a chicken inside mud surrounding it with duck eggs. Right. So that it can look like a turtle. Right. Good good. Okay last egg right here. Throwing that in mud. It actually looks pretty cool. It looks a lot more turtley than I thought it would. See it's like a turtle. There's the head. Yeah. There's the legs. I didn't think this was gonna work. I thought it would just fall out but look at that. It's like a big dinosaur egg. Can I pick it up? Yep. All right we've got our chicken in the mud. Let's go grill it up. Put some eyeballs. Look at that. It looks just like a turtle. That's awesome. We're gonna start you on fire now. It has been about an hour. I can only hope that it's done properly. That it's not too dry and certainly not too raw. We didn't exactly put a thermometer through the mud into the chicken although that is not a bad idea. The way this way of cooking came about was out of necessity. People were in the fields. They had a little bit of clay. They had a little bit of a chicken. Right. So they said okay we got mud. We got chicken. I got a match. Let's all combine that and make some dinner. We're done cooking it. Let's bust it out. It's hot but it's not that hot and it's actually kind of turned hard. Freshly roasted duck egg. Something I've never seen before. We've got a mixture here. Probably salt, chili, some fresh herbs and sugar and lemon. Lemon leaf. Yeah. Lemon leaf. Oh dang that looks good. I feel great. That's delicious. You know what doesn't hurt? I'm legit starving right now. Since it's been cooked in the fire it's got some of that smoky char taste to it. It's almost like a smoked egg. The main event. This is what we're really here for. We are cutting open the mud and look if it worked like it should. It's supposed to be like a Biore pork perfect strip in that you peel away the mud and then that peels away the feathers. The mud on the outside is really hard but it's still nice and gooey on the inside. Oh good. The chicken has been kind of taken out of its clay casket and we're gonna pick it up and move it over to here. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I smell a lot of hot feathers right now there too though. So we don't have to take all the the feather out. So we finish one part and then we're gonna continue taking out the feather. We are just using our hands. Imagine we're in the field okay. We don't have utensils. We don't have special things like that. Smells tasty. It's juicy. Dip it into a little bit of the sauce and cheers. That's pretty good. You did it. That's amazing. Look I had some doubts okay. I didn't know the whole time if it would work or not. I couldn't imagine how you could cook a chicken in mud but we've done it. It's here. It's juicy. It's tasty and it's more than I expected. I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah. Wow. That okay. That is something right there. Look at that. Dip, dip, dip. One, two, three. Yo. Yeah. Especially with that sauce. Love it. It was more about the process than about the final product. Although the final product is very tasty. Thank you for all the hard work that went into this. It blew my mind. Can you tell my mind is blown? My mind blew. Back next week as we conclude our ultimate Mekong Delta tour traveling to southern Vietnam's magical floating market. Another beautiful breakfast boat has rolled up on us and this lady has everything. If you want to experience the magic of the Mekong Delta then hit up One Trip. They are putting on one day and two day tours to the Mekong Delta from Ho Chi Minh City. For more information on that check out the links below. I'll see you next week. Are you okay? I'm fine, fine, fine.