Making Bacon – Part 3 – Fried Pork Rinds

In case you missed the first two parts of my bacon-making series, here they are:

 Part One – Curing

Part Two – Smoking

So, now that the bacon’s made, what else is there to do?

Well, if you like fried pork rinds, they you can make those!

I’d never even had a pork rind before, but I figured, in the interest of not wasting anything, it was worth a shot.

And, like a sign from the culinary gods, I also stumbled upon this post by The Hungry Engineer.

It was fated.

So.  First thing I did was separate the skin from the smoked pork.  This was back in February of 2010 – the first time we attempted bacon, and didn’t entirely know what we were doing.

My method is kind of different from that of The Hungry Engineer in that we’d already smoked the skin, so it wasn’t raw and didn’t need to be boiled.

All I needed to do, after separation from the meat and fat, was to scrape off as much of the remaining fat stuck to the underside of the skin as I could.

Shall we?

Next step – to thoroughly dry out the skin.  I put it in the oven on a cooling rack set on top of a rimmed half sheet pan.  Then I put it in a very low oven – mine’s lowest temp is 170F – over night.

The next morning the skin was dried and brittle.

I broke it into lots of little pieces, around an inch or so square (or triangle).

And then I heated up some oil.  Probably to about 360 F or so.

And I started frying the rinds. 

First – for picture purposes – just one:

It was kind of cool to watch.

Then I cooked up a whole bunch of them and took pictures.

And that was fun, of course.

I also seasoned them, though I don’t remember what I used, but it was probably included chili powder.

Honestly?  I wasn’t enamored of them.  They were crispy and crunchy and I think I made them right – I just didn’t like them. 

But that’s just me.

You might like them just fine. 

I am, however, really glad I made them – because – yay, I made fried pork rinds!  One more thing to check off on a great, long list of culinary adventures, right?

Right!

Comments

[na]

I had a dream about you and the smoked mozzarella.....I can't seem to get the smoked mozzarella out of my mind :-)