Apparently, the gourmands have discovered pork rinds. Yes, the deep-fried, not at all good for you, salt-laden, very high fat, treat found rarely if ever outside the US South or (as chicharones) where there is a sizeable Mexican consumer pool. Northerners don’t generally care for pork rinds, or pickled trotters. This may be changing.
However… The link in the caption takes you to the manufacturer or retailer. The link in the image goes to the source.
If it’s not made of meat, how is it a pork rind?!?
If vegetarian’s not enough, there are also vegan options. Think about that for a moment…
Fried pork skins that have not a trace of animal product anywhere in or around them. Oh, there’s also a version that is non GMO and is gluten-free.
I’m almost tempted to chalk this up as one of the signs of the pending End Times and Second Coming of Jesus. Almost.
Vegan pork rinds. I… just…
Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
At first I only saw “Salt & Vinegar” and wondered if the flavoring was that much of a fuss, but then a scroll down and… sheesh.
If I could see the back of the bag, there might even be Kosher approval marks. Oy. The Sepoy Mutiny started over something far less … unnatural … than this. It’s more like.a Butlerian Jihad level of abomination.
I love pork rinds. My introduction to this treat came as a kid when we would help Granddaddy slaughter hogs. The skin was debrided and cut up in small squares and the dropped into a kettle full of rendering hog fat. Granny and my aunts would be tending that while the rest of us were cleaning up the mess.
fun times!
Wait until you see the vegan piggy bank. When you put your money in it, you lose interest.
😉
Wow. And people say my puns are bad…
So you’re here all week, try the soy veal?
thought that was already happening – it’s called less than 1% interest on bank accounts
THIS!
An English voice here asking what the hell is a pork rind (one made of real pork of course not the travesty you are talking about)? Does it have any connection with what I ate in my youth, before any ideas of healthy eating were heard, and when one stretched out the ration food by eating pretty much everything. Pork was roasted with the skin left on and the result was delicious crisp crackling on the outside, but it was always eaten hot with the rest of the meat and never turned up cold in plastic packets (though come to think of it I doubt that plastic packets existed in those days). On a good day it might be followed up by a suet pudding just to ensure there was a nice lot of healthy fat in the diet, though as the potatoes were roasted in the pork fat they also helped with this..
Your recollection is close, but these were scraps of the thinnest bits of the hide and occasionally (varies with region) the skins of internal organs that were deep fried and salted, then served as treats. the hide was too thin to use for leather, and edible, but not as small as cracklins’ (which floated up while rendering the lard and were used to flavor cornbread and other things.)
And now I’m hungry. 🙂
Vimes’ fourth food group: Crunchy bits.
Inspired me to make a sweet chili pork dragon noodles for dinner. ^.^
But did you use Real Dragon? And has anyone seen Drak lately? 😉
You called? [Very Big Dragon Grin]
It’s a PORK dragon, rather than pork and dragon.
😉
Mike I remember crackling being sold in plastic packets in pubs in my youth as an alternative snack to salted nuts or crisps to go with your pint. Don’t know whether they are still because I dont frequent pubs these days. Mind you might have been a regional thing- Im talking about pubs up north.
I suspect that your youth took place rather later than mine. And as a southerner married to someone from “up north” I’ve always realised that it’s a different country up their (especially if you venture past the Humber).
I did that just the other day. I was cooking some pork and red cabbage, and had to cut a hunk of fat off the pork before I sliced it into chops. It ended up with a bit of meat on the underside, so I heated the skillet and threw it in there. Parts got all crispy while the pork cooked right up. I ate it while I sliced up the rest of the pork and browned it. YUM!
AKA pork scratchings
Scratchlings – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/food-and-drink/features/best-pork-scratchings-tried-tested/
Pork rinds are HORRIBLE and addictive as can be– wouldn’t the crunchy bits of fries at the bottom of the container basically be that? Soaked in oil, no animal content….?
Elf grabbed a bag of “dill pork rinds” because the store only had one normal bag left and sharing one bag among seven bigs is not going to work. They were…not entirely bad?
Kosher bacon salt.
As Miss Em knows, I’ve been buying that for years from a company called J&B. It’s considered kosher except for Passover, vegetarian, and also low-sodium……
J&B’s owners would probably fit right into this bunch; they’ve marketed such things as a casket painted to look like bacon with bacon-scented interior, his and hers bacon scented and flavored underwear, and “Bacon lube —- perfect for porking”.
I’m just amused, constantly amused, by the people who piously intone that people should not eat animals, that meat and animal products are terribly bad for us, and that natural is the only way to live, then brag about making meat-flavored and textured products. 🙂
Bacon flavored foods, turkey ham and bacon? Bring ’em on! Just don’t pretend that you are eating them in order to save the world, or I will roll my eyes, giggle, and make under-the-breath comments about arsenic and “death’s head” amanita mushrooms also being all natural.
One death’s head is enough to feed you for the rest of your life.
Also natural……
c4c
In Mordor, there is felt a rumbling from Mt. Doom, not even Sauron can abide the unnaturalness of that.
You just can’t? Me, neither!
The popularity of pork rinds is partially the fault of the paleo / keto / AIP / gluten-free dieters. Because smashed-up pork rinds attached with an egg wash give much the same crispy breading texture when baked or fried as deep-friend flour breading… and once the northerners discovered they could still get “breaded” things without the flour, the non-regional consumption went way up.
And then people tried eating them, and discovered they can be mighty tasty. What the people above were thinking, though, I have no clue. I mean, seriously, was a vegan being taunted by friends enjoying cracklings or pork rinds in front of him, and decided there had to be a way? How did this pass market testing to get to market at all? This is… this is as silly and unnatural as vegetarian burgers and vegan bacon!
Dorothy, most vegans don’t produce good bacon. Jerk, maybe; even better, no need to dry and season first, many come pre-jerked.
I figure they’re proof that you *are* what you eat. And they likely have way too many flakes, fruits, and nuts in their diet.
Yes, many vegans are jerk{ed}.
I remember pork rinds getting popular, back when jerky got popular and expensive.
But we always had a lot of pork rinds in the north, and the bags did disappear from the grocery. It was just not something that people ate in public, per se.
Sick, sick, sick… Will the heresy never end? Fried pork rinds were a ‘treat’ when we butchered hogs on the farm. And now my mouth is watering… sigh
This is on the same lines as “almond milk”, imo. It should be considered fraud to even put the word “chicharon” on the bag – at least without putting in large letters after it “(but containing no chicarones whatsoever)”.
Almond milk, by that name, has been an important European ingredient since fairly early medieval times or even before. It has always been important in Spanish cuisine, and in any country with big almond groves. But you used to have to smash and grind the nuts into flour by hand, and draw off the milk and oil by hand. Nowadays, folks can just go to the store.
If you do not believe me, look up medieval Lent recipes and use “almond milk” as a search term.
“Almond cheese” still has to be made by hand, though. A great base for sweets and goodies.
Just ’cause it’s an old fraud doesn’t make it any less a fraud. 😉
Anything plant-based that was juicy or sappy or nectarish, in Middle English, was called milk. Also a lot of sauces. Also the eggs of fish or frogs (milt).
The dairy industry is fighting the English language.
The Dairy Council is following the same path as TadPubs– screaming at their customers for not WANTING what is being offered.
My mom thinks they’re right– we had quite a discussion about it, and I identified another reason milk sales are down, we have a lot larger population of folks who can’t drink milk as adults, if they ever stopped.
Mark Kurlansky ends his book about milk with the observation that that’s shifting a little. As more adults have the funds to buy fresh milk, more of their kids are growing up with the ability to keep drinking relatively large amounts of fresh milk. However, he’s looking at global trends, not US specific.
IIRC, they figured out that you CAN keep the ability to drink fresh milk as long as you don’t stop because of all the little Asian kids in America `who never stopped eating ice cream and drinking milk.
My recipe for vegetarian chili begins as follows:
“ In a large cast-iron skillet, brown 2 pounds of ground turkey. . .”
Just get the natural turkey and you should have 2 lbs of vegetarians in each batch.
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