Healthy Recipe For Pork Rinds
Here’s my special recipe for the best, easy, healthy pork rinds you can make at home without a deep fat fryer. You can enjoy these moreish, healthy pork rinds plain with only salt, or you can add herbs and spices for a bit of pizazz. Plain, they’re a delicious carnivore treat you’ll want to munch on all the time. Try not to end up with an addiction. Are pork rinds keto? Absolutely. So get stuck into this recipe for pork rinds if you're paleo, AIP, keto, carnivore, WAPF, or just love to cook.
Equipment
- roasting tin
- Rolling Pin
- cooling rack
- oven-proof dish or cast iron pan/skillet
Ingredients
- 500 g pigskin
- salt to taste
Instructions
- Inspect the pigskins for long hairs. If you find any, burn them off over a naked flame. I have a gas hob, but you might need to use a blow torch or BBQ. If you have wild boar skins, reconcile yourself with the fact you’ll be pulling boar bristles from between your teeth for the next week. Those things ain’t coming off.500 g pigskin
- Get a couple of roasting tins and on each roasting tin, place a cooling rack. Arrange your pigskins, skin side down, on top of the racks. They can touch but not overlap. In the oven, they’ll shrink as they lose water and fat. Don’t let them poke over the edge of the roasting tins unless you want to spend your evening cleaning lard off the bottom of your oven. Only got one roasting tin and no cooling racks? No problem. You’ll only be able to do one lot at a time. Lay the skins on the roasting tin skin side down.
- Place the pigskins on the racks on the roasting tins in the oven and turn to 100 ºC (212 ºF). Leave until the skins are completely dried out, hard and brittle (check them after 2 and ½ hours. They may need 3 hours). They need to be absolutely dry without a hint of bendiness, so like crackling, not like old leather. Quite a lot of lard will have rendered out of the skins and collected in the bottom of the roasting tins. Celebrate and collect it. Pour your warm, liquid lard into a clean, dry jar to save it for when you want to cook your healthy pork rinds later.
- Once the pigskins are dried out, you can store them in a sealed box for a week or 2 at room temperature until you’re ready to finish preparing them. Or you can cook them immediately. Dealer’s choice
- When you’re ready to cook your crispy, healthy pork rinds, preheat your oven as hot as it will go. The top marking on mine is 220 ºC (428ºF), but I can turn the dial slightly higher. I estimate mine can reach 230 ºC (446 ºF). I have a fan oven.
- Meanwhile, start setting some of the pork rinds on to a clean hard surface. A chopping board is ideal. Using a wooden rolling pin or a clean meat mallet, bash them into small pieces. This should be easy to do if they’re completely dried out. If they bend instead of shattering, they’re not dry enough yet and you need to put them back in the oven at a low setting.
- Now you’ll need a good oven-proof dish. I actually use my cast iron frying pan (skillet for Americans) which has a cast iron handle and no wood or plastic anywhere. But if you don’t have one of these, you need a dish which will happily tolerate very high temperatures, like a casserole dish. Put at least ½ cup of the reserved lard that you rendered from the pastured pigskin in the dish and pop into the hot oven for about a minute until the lard is liquid again. Don’t leave it in there too long or it’ll start smoking. Then take your pan or dish back out of the oven.
- Throw about 1-2 cups of small crackling (dried pigskin) shards into the dish and toss them in the runny lard using kitchen tongs or a tablespoon until they are well coated all over. In the oven, the chicharrones will increase a lot in size as they puff up, so you want to make sure there’s plenty of space in your dish or pan to allow for this without half of your healthy pork rinds falling on to the oven floor.
- Once the oven is really, really hot, pop the pigskins on the top shelf and set a timer for 9 minutes precisely. Be very exact. Don’t guess. As soon as the 9 minutes are up, remove the puffed up crispy, healthy pork rinds. They should be light golden in colour. They shouldn’t be burnt. None of them should have any hard bits that haven’t yet puffed up. If they’re dark brown, take 1 minute off the time for your next batch. If any of them are under-cooked, add 1 minute and fill your dish with fewer pieces the next time.
- You can transfer them onto some paper-towel-lined plates to drain. To be honest, I use my kitchen tongs and dump them straight into a bunch of Kilner jars.
- Make your next batch the same way if you have any left over.
- Add salt to taste. No, you need more than that. They take a lot more salt than you think. Be very generous. Close the jar and give it a good shake to distribute the salt well. Now taste one. You need to add a bit more salt, don’t you? The saltiness is one of the reasons I love them. One of the reasons pork scratchings are healthy is that they can be a great source of salt which, as I’ve already discussed, has been vilified so much that many people’s intake is insufficient. Real food keto, low carb, paleo and AIP diets are naturally usually pretty low in salt and when people transition on to them they often experience fatigue, headaches, dizziness and other symptoms from insufficient salt intake. Did you know that the top source of salt in the average American’s diet is bread and rolls? Blaming the salt for what the refined wheat did. Shame on you, dietary guidelines.salt
Notes
You might be able to get some smoked pigskins from your butcher if they make bacon. Ask them about this.
If you can’t have pork, why not try beef skin instead? You can do something similar with tendon, but you’ll have to figure out the specifics yourself as I’ve not tried this yet. I tend to throw tendon in with my trotters to make the best bone broth ever!
How to spice things up
Here are some ideas about how you could spice up this pork scratchings recipe. The first suggestions are compatible with the autoimmune protocol (AIP), paleo, Whole 30, primal, low carb, keto, zero carb, Weston A Price Foundation, GAPS, SCD and any real food diet that isn’t vegetarian or vegan.
- Medicinal mushrooms seasoning (the medicinal mushrooms also have health benefits and this tastes awesome!)
- Garlic powder.
- Onion granules.
- Add both garlic powder and onion granules together.
- Try some black pepper.
- How about a generous dash of smoked paprika? (makes the pork rinds taste like smokey bacon crisps — crisps are what we call potato chips in the UK. In the UK, chips are French Fries)
- Some finely grated hard cheese like pecorino romano or parmesan. But beware: these pork rinds should be eaten immediately. You shouldn’t leave these cheeses at room temperature for more than 2 hours. They’re much safer in your belly!
- Or you could add onion granules plus grated cheese.