Of course the best pork rind is home cooked straight off a fatty roast pork. I do at least one of these a week for my family, and I pig out (pun intended) on the crackling/pork rind all by myself as dessert. Yum! I’ll take a pic from tonight’s roast and post it.
Do calories matter?
Robert_Johnson
(Consensus is Politics)
#42
My favorite ones, arent brand dependent. Its the ones that have a lot of fat on one side, and crispy skin on the othet. The texture ofbthe fat side is almost creamy. Its hard to describe. But I love it. My grandpa called them cracklins. Not exactly the same as porkrinds where I grew up.
gingersmommy
(Marianne)
#45
Is the whole thing the pork rind? Where is it on the pig? Does it start out a big piece of fat on the roast?
HelenM
#46
The pork rind, or crackling, is the skin of the pig that has been left on the joint, along with all the fat underneath it.
My Grandma used to make super crackling but I’m less than successful 
and don’t get it really crispy. Soggy crackling is the pits!
I’ve just cooked a gammon joint for tomorrow and Monday (maybe even Tuesday, if it lasts that long) but realised I made a mistake - i bought a pre wrapped one, and they’d removed all the fat 
must remember to get from the butcher from now on. I did it for simplicity, I do 90% of my shopping online because supermarkets are one of my big anxiety triggers, but gonna have to stop doing that. Luckily the shop up the road has an in house butcher so I’ll have to cultivate them, and try to learn how to crackle that rind!
HelenM
#47
I remember Grandma sciring the skin then rubbing it with oil and salt and as the joint roasted the skin turned to crackling. Love the stuff when it’s like that.
Alecmcq
(Alec)
#48
That’s exactly how to do it. But these days, the meat companies usually score the skin for you. So my method is:
- Buy roast pork joint with the skin on (most important). I like to buy the one with the thickest fat layer!
- Unwrap roast joint from the plastic wrapper, and dry the skin with a paper towel
- Cover the skin with salt. Some people rub it in, and also use oil, but I don’t. I have found just sprinkling salt on the skin is good enough (I like simple!)
- I like my pork slow cooked, so I put the joint in a low heat (150C) oven for 5-6 hrs, with lots of water in the pan to avoid it drying out. Some folks might think that’s all too hard, but all it means is I turn the oven on around 12 noon, prep the joint per the above (30 seconds of work), slap it in the oven and forget it. The gorgeous smell of roast pork reminds me I have a meal in the oven come early evening!
- Here comes the only tricky bit… about 30 minutes before I want to serve up, I take the meat out of the oven, and put the heat up to 240C. The skin is usually now a bit crispy, but often not really crispy as good crackling should be. So, I remove the skin/crackling from the joint (pics above, crackling separated from the joint), and then put just the skin back in the pan (without any remaining water), and then put back into the 240C oven for 20-30 mins.
- I let the joint sit for 30 minutes, and after 20-30 mins take the now crispy crackling out of the oven to serve with the pork.
Voila, foolproof crackling, best pork rinds/crackling you ever ate. Crispy, salty, fatty (often dripping with pork fat), ooooh I can taste it now…much MUCH better than shop bought pork rinds.
Travel tip: if there is one keto food I love taking on the road it’s home made crackling. Make per the above, let it cool, put it in small zip bags and sling in your travel bag. Your own home made snacks. Luscious keto fare.
Cheers
Alec
Alecmcq
(Alec)
#50
I think anything with the skin on will work. I am no expert at naming the joints of meat, I just buy whatever is in the grocery store, as long as the skin is on.
Charles
#52
This worked for me. The theory is toxins are stored in the fat cells so if you have a lot of weight to lose like I did, it’s one long detox to the body while shedding all the weight. You can easily supplement electrolyte loss. Once the weight comes down, the daily intake can return to the rule of thumb of consume half your body weight in ounces daily as long as you don’t consume a lot of caffeine which dehydrates. I have been keto one year this month and lost 80 pounds.
Maisri
#53
Okay, fessing up my abnormal (apparently) guilty secret.
I hate pork rinds. No matter how fresh they are, they smell like rancid fat to me and taste about the same. Bacon please.
Alecmcq
(Alec)
#54
This is impossible. You need to resign from keto forthwith. 
Have you ever had proper home made pork rinds? Completely different to the puffed up shop bought crap.
Maisri
#55
That I have not, and might very well like those. Store bought though…bleah. Dead animal. I mean, yeah, it’s all dead animal, but pork rinds taste like the not good version of that.
gingersmommy
(Marianne)
#56
Now I must try them!
Made corned beef last night in a “hurry” (two hours). Didn’t come out very well - tough, nasty fat/mouth feel. I was only able to eat a little bit of it. Most of it I wound up spitting out and that is pretty extreme for me. Normally I love it.
Mcostas
(Marga Costas)
#58
Tldr: calories count and we have an unhealthy relationship with food.
A keto diet isn’t an all you can eat diet. I grew up before the food pyrimid and the “all you can eat as long as it isn’t fat smartwell cookie era”.
There were 4 or 5 main food groups. Eggs and milk were still considered nutritious. Basically for most meals you had a meat, some kind of starch, one serving. So you could have potatoes or rice or bread, but not all 3. And one or two vegetables.
People got really hungry before they ate. Mainly this was because meals were prepared from scratch and families sat together and ate.
When I was young the last thing I wanted to do was sit and eat, I wanted to go outside and play! Food wasn’t recreation like now, there were no fast food places within 100’s of miles.
I’ve been following a ketogenic diet for about a year and a half. It is more or less how we ate growing up, minus the bread and other high carb empty calorie foods. I lost weight slowly and now the losses are measured in ounces a month instead of pounds. I’m at the upper level of my ideal weight though.
But I notice that I need to be mindful of the calories I consume, there was a couple months were I was stuck at a plateau even though I was strict. I cut back on some of the added fats that were simply not necessary and the scale is moving again.
I mention the part about how people used to eat vs how people do now because ketogenic diets are viewed as something new and radical when in fact until recently people went in an out of ketosis, as they should, routinely.
Also, we have an unhealthy relationship with food. Our goal seems to be to eat as much as you want. Eating is recreation. It’s better than living in times of famine but it’s lead to our current food obsessed state of mind. The mere suggestion that a person cut back on eating is met with wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Another phenomenon I’ve noticed is how bread has been elevated to something it’s not. It’s not “good”. It’s bread. Again, in days gone by it was cheap filler because real food was in scarce supply. Remember the myth of prisoners getting nothing but bread and water? Funny story to tell misbehaving children but it also revealed how people saw bread, as a bland food that was punishment.
I have to hand it to the power of advertising, now people can’t imagine themselves doing without bread and grain. I hear it all the time when people critique my meals. “Oh I could never live without bread and pasta”.
My in-laws are so obese they can barely walk to the mailbox to get the mail. They are a “few points away from being diabetic”, they tell me, yet they cannot eat real food. Everything they put in their mouth is processed, sweet, or a combination of both. They eat until they are bloated, then they eat some more.
Just watching others not eat crappy food sends them into a freazy. It’s heartbreaking because I don’t think they will ever change and their health is suffering at an increased rate.
CarlKeller
(Carl Keller)
#59
Welcome Marga.
Yes they do… but we shouldn’t count them if we understand hunger and respond appropriately to it. The number of calories is self-regulating if you have a healthy understanding of satiety and know how to reach it.
Agreed. Again it’s all about making the appropriate response to hunger.
Nobody can argue what works for you. I have a similar experience with reducing the amount of fat I ate, but I never counted the calories. I simply stopped making fat a part of my every bite of food and found that it didn’t affect my hunger at all. The scale started moving along nicely.
Amen. It’s very easy to overlook this or accept it as a normal when you are in the middle of it… but once on the outside, looking in, it’s insane what the current culture sees as normal. It’s like when someone loses 50 pounds and everyone wants to know what’s wrong with them? Are they sick? But if you gain 50 pounds, nobody bats an eyelash. The world is comfortable in its gluttony.