Pork Rinds in France

(Ronald Weaver) #1

I always had difficulty sourcing pork scratchings, or pork rind for our American readers, here in France.
They just don’t do them !
Sure, other things like deep fried pork intestines…actually pretty tasty…but not traditional pork scratchings. The Spanish, Germans and Danish do and probably some other Europeans. But France ?
Non !
It wasn’t so bad before Brexit, but now not only am I forbidden from getting them delivered I can’t even bring them over myself unless I want to become a smuggler.
Good news is that they are available from Amazon.de at a cost of around €15.00 a kilo which is much better that other sources looking for over €50.00 a kilo. Go for the Delvita brand,they’re ideal for all those delicious crusty breading substitutes.

#2

I only saw pork rinds in Hungary lately, never before (but I wasn’t looking and this is in a small village shop so it probably was available in bigger ones before. or at least in speciality shops, they have everything). I can’t bring myself to try it though as it’s very expensive and can’t be good, not fatty enough :smiley:

We have cracklings, they are good, popular, super fatty and not cheap but okay. I don’t buy those either (only like the ones with enough meat anyway and it’s rare), I make my own cracklings sometimes :slight_smile:

Wow :smiley: Doesn’t sound so good alone, we fill it with sausage first… But of course I would be willing to try it if I could.

#3

I just had a problem with a brand I bought here in America last week, “Mac’s.” I first ate pork rinds/skins 25 years ago on an Atkins diet, and I enjoyed them with dips. So when I saw a recipe last week using them in a breading I thought, sure! The Mac’s brand looks fresh and well made. Good coloring, nice and light. But when I opened the container it was worse than the smell of a corpse. Crushing them into crumbs made the smell even worse than that. I immediately sealed up both the container and the bag with crumbs and they are just sitting there. I don’t know what to do with them. :joy: I quickly made my own homemade bread crumbs in the oven using a low carb bread so that I could finish making my dish.

I called the company and asked if this was normal, or if I had to air them out first or something. They took the message and said someone would be in touch with me, but they never called me back. I’ve read if they go bad they have a rancid smell, but this smell was beyond that. I don’t remember it being this bad years ago. Just a mild porky smell that I ignored and it didn’t interfere with taste, but this? This is something entirely worse. Our sense of smell is tightly woven with our taste, and I just don’t feel like biting into a crusty corpse.

I wonder if over 25 years my body changed and I pick up smells more strongly? Idk. But I have to try a different brand to find out if it’s all pork rinds or just this brand.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #4

Definitely a bad batch. I’d chuck 'em in the trash. Quality-control seems to be part of the supply-chain problems we’ve been having recently.

When I roast a pork picnic (shoulder joint), I love to nosh on the cap of fat that it comes with. If you roast the joint fat side up, not only does the melting fat baste the meat, but the skin also gets really crisp and tasty. I eat it with a bit of salt. Yum!

#5

Have you tried intl’ Supermarkets? Specifically in a Spanish / Latin section?

As the Pork Rind connoisseur I used to be, FWIW What you guys (UK at least, not sure about all of Europe) call scractchings, in the states would be called Cracklings, Pork Rinds are the skin only. We have both. Some brands of Cracklins also say Scrachings on them. But we import everything from everywhere.

(Stickin' with mammoth) #6

Pork Rinds in France sounds like an independent film about two star-crossed lovers from Waco, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama who bond in Provence at an underground culinary school.

(Ronald Weaver) #7

Closely related to Andouillettes…again a bit of an acquired taste. But well worth acquiring !

(Ronald Weaver) #8

Yes, I know what you mean. The pork rinds I’ve just got are just skin and fine for making breading etc. The pork scratchings I used to get in the Black Country in England were of a different calibre altogether.
If you bought them from the corner butcher’s shop in a plain paper bag these had so much fat on them they could do for a meal.
Two packets of them on a Friday night with twelve pints of Banks’s beer and a fight and you were on top of the world !..so I’m told…

#9

Yes, ours are fat oozing things too. These are just gotten out of the fat they made but I wanted them shiny and visibly fatty :smiley:
image

But the end result is something like this:

image
image.jpg800×450 137 KB

I still prefer meaty ones though maybe the previous one is that too, hard to tell with all the reddish brown colors, it’s different irl… But this must contain meat :smiley:

husos

Cracklings are in some traditional recipes and very popular so it’s very available here. Too fatty, usually not meaty (yes, that’s the problem. I LOVE fat but I require meat with it) and expensive for me (for that non-meaty stuff, nope, I make my own if I want, super easy and way better).

(David Cooke) #10

My Yorkshire dad used to love crackling, which was any fatty bit fried crispy. Ears, feet, tail… I went off the idea of eating this kind of stuff when I was 12. Artisanal butchers probably still exist in France despite all the efforts of the EU to regulate everything. Stay away from the supermarkets!

#11

Lmao thanks for the best laugh with my morning tea ever. :joy:

(Stickin' with mammoth) #12

Just make sure they send my royalties to the right address.

(Stickin' with mammoth) #13

Oh, man, those look waaaay better than the stuff we can get here.

#14

Do tell me where as I’m not that far (other side of Brum) and everything in the shops seems to have dextrose/flour in :roll_eyes:

(Ronald Weaver) #15

You can get a kilo bag from Black Country Snacks on Ebay for £10.99. I’ve not been able to get them because of Brexit and I live in France. I doubt whether they will be 100% keto ( what is ?) but they reminded me of the ones I used to get in Wolverhampton sixty years ago. They’re not suitable for cooking with but they taste good and they didn’t spike my blood sugar levels. The ones I get from Amazon.de are made by Delvita and are ok for cooking purposes. If I want real pork scratchings now, I buy a piece of skin from the butchers and make my own.