Texas Chicken's Real Salted Egg Fried Chicken Taste Test: Nice Or Not?

The American fast food chain has proudly unveiled its limited-edition “Real” Salted Egg Fried Chicken — meaning it’s coated with the stuff from fresh salted duck egg yolks instead of the powdered stuff (usually containing chicken yolks and other flavourings) that some snack companies are believed to use. It took Texas Chicken three years to perfect the recipe. We dig in and give you the low-down.

A meaty hunk of breast and thigh meat showered with amber salted egg crumbs greet us upon opening the box. However, though the Real Salted Egg Fried Chicken is supposed to be coated with salted egg sauce before being dusted with salted egg crumbs, we couldn’t spot much sauce on the two chicken pieces. While this means no soggy, limp skin — it's well fried and crackly — the flavour is rather mild. We suppose it’s ’cos the crumbs don’t cling as well to the chook as well as a sauce would. On the bright side, the chicken is tender and succulent and the egg itself tastes quite natural and somewhat reminiscent of a zi char stall’s salted egg dish, just not as rich and umami. Also, the chilli flakes mixed with the eggy crumbs induce a light peppery burn on the tongue (which is good if you’re into spice). This set includes a drink, mashed potato and a savoury-sweet honey butter biscuit.

This bite-sized popcorn chicken version is drenched in more salted egg yolk sauce than the two larger chicken pieces we had. Sadly, we found the sauce too sweet, and it overwhelmed the briny quality of the egg. This set also comes with six plain chicken tenders and eight nuggets.

Not bad. We appreciate the overall natural flavour of the fresh salted duck egg used in Texas Chicken’s fried chook. However, it’s like a far milder version of what you’d find in a Chinese restaurant or zi char joint’s punchy salted egg yolk coated dish.

The Real Salted Egg Fried Chicken is available at Texas Chicken outlets islandwide till Aug 21.