Xinying Clay-Oven Roast Chicken 新盈土窑烤鸡
Xinying Clay-Oven Roast Chicken is featured among the local specialties of Hainan.
Xinying Clay-Oven Roast Chicken (新盈土窑烤鸡) is chicken wrapped in foil and buried in the hot, broken earth of a small kiln built from clods of earth. It is one of the earth-kiln foods (土窑美食) of Xinying (新盈镇), an old fishing town in Lingao County (临高县), Hainan, where the same method is used for seafood and duck eggs.
How it is made
Clods of earth are stacked into small kilns and fired with charcoal until very hot. The kiln is then smashed, and the raw ingredients, already wrapped in foil, are buried in the broken, hot earth. At one Xinying farm restaurant that Hainan Daily visited in 2016, more than ten such kilns stood in a row, and the menu included ready-seasoned chicken alongside crab, whelks and enoki mushrooms; the cooks wrapped the food in foil with a little sauce, which the paper calls crucial to the flavour.
The earth matters too. The Xinying town government says the kilns are built from Lingao's selenium-rich soil, which gets hotter than other soils. The farm's owner told Hainan Daily that the kilns demand good soil: ordinary soil never gets hot enough, and food cooked in it comes out underdone and poor, while the ingredients and control of the heat matter even more.
Flavour and texture
Hainan Daily notes that roast chicken done in the kiln, like earth-kiln tofu, has a flavour of its own. Of the kiln-cooked seafood served alongside it, the paper says the even heat keeps the natural taste, and that the smell of earth mixes with the aroma when the foil is opened.
Where it comes from
Hainan Daily describes earth-kiln food as a childhood memory for many people born and raised in Hainan. A Xinying man told the paper how he and his friends piled clods from the fields into a small tower, heated it, covered fresh sweet potatoes with the red-hot earth and beat the clods flat, a 'sweet-potato stove' (番薯炉). The town government says Xinying's earth-kiln foods have made Hainan's food rankings in recent years, and its notice for the 2025 Dragon Boat Festival races recommended them to visitors.
Sources & reading
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-24. Recipes and servings vary between kitchens.