Kitchen Happenings: Showing Some Skin

What's interesting is that a lot of folks avoid eating the skin on meat (think salmon or chicken). Salmon skin is absolutely awesome, as is chicken skin, if you get it to crisp up properly. Sushi restaurants make salmon skin rolls, and if done well, they are coveted by folks in the know. When I get the chance, I do my salmon and chicken skins in a pan. You want to season the skin, and cook it in a non-stick pan over medium heat. Some weights over the skins will keep them from curling, and make sure that they cook up evenly. You get this great, crispy skin that's got a great meat flavor. But what I'm writing about is a little different. Today, we're talking pig.

So I was wandering around the grocery store the other day, and I took a peek into the part of the store that contained the smoked animal parts. There was the usual assortment of smoked turkey wings and necks, smoked hog jowls and ham hocks, and all the like. I came across something that I hadn't seen before: smoked bacon skins. Basically, bacon is the pork belly. Whatever fat and meat that they can trim off can get sold at a decent price. The skin? Not so much. But I took one look, and realized that I had just hit the jackpot.

When you roast a pig, one of the best things to do is to take off a little bit of that crispy skin (some folks call them cracklin's), add a little hot sauce, and crunch away. These are like pork rinds you get in the store, only they're awesome, and not Styrofoam. You get a great solid crunch, a meaty flavor, and something that a lot of folks don't ever get to experience.

Now, one of the hard parts is to get the skin crispy , when there's a layer of fat attached to it. The outside dries out and crisps up, but the inside is still being basted by the fat that's melting. So, the skin just burns, before it can crisp. Now, if you can strip off the skin, you can get it to crisp up pretty easily, either in a pan or in the oven. But this is hard to do and sort of messy.

But, if it's already cleaned off for you, you can make cracklin's very easily. And since the bacon skin is smoked, you get a little extra flavor in there. One thing to note is that the skins will curl up on you, resulting in uneven cooking. To quote Alton Brown, "that is NOT good eats." You can either weight down the skins, but I don't have the hardware for that. Instead, I took a number of metal skewers, and wove them through the skin so that the skins would stay flat, with about 1.5" intervals. I put the skins onto a metal cooling rack, over a baking pan. The fat melts onto the bottom of the pan (which you can collect for other purposes, if you like), and the skins just crisp up. If there's still some fat left on the skin, so ahead and score the fat (cross-hatching, lik you would a duck breast). This will let the fat melt out a little more easily.

All of this goes into the oven (250F), until you see the skin start to get golden-brown. I start with the fat-side down, so that the fat melts out. Then, I flip everything, and let it keep baking. I'm guessing that you can go a little higher than 250F, but you want to make sure that the cracklin's don't burn. As I removed the metal skewers, the cracklin's broke into nice-sized pieces. After the cracklin's are ready, you can add a little salt (and whatever other dry spices you like). Splash some hot sauce on the cracklin's and much away.

Be careful. These things are addicting. And I'm guessing that they're not particularly good for you. But boy, they're tasty.

-foodgeek