My wife is pregnant and has been craving homemade chicken salad. So I promised that I would endeavor to make some today. Not only that, but I'd make the good kind where you poach the chicken on the bone in stock with onions, celery, and carrots (as opposed to diced boneless, skinless chicken breast). But what to do with the chicken skin? Fry it, of course.

I've never fried up chicken skin, so I went looking online for some tips on how to do it. Oddly enough, most searches for "fried chicken skin" or "crispy chicken skin" ended up turning up recipes for fried chicken or people talking about chicken skin, but no recipes for just chicken skin.

This did not daunt me. I'm a pro at searching the web. I made my name in the '90s by using online resources to hunt down kooky facts about wayward celebrities of yesteryear. So I did what you do when you're not getting the search results you want from Google; rephrase and refine. Rephrasing is just using different words or a different word order to try to find different ways people might have used to say the same thing. Refining uses Google's boolean search and phrase matching functions to help ensure that your results are more focused.

In doing this, I ran across a mention of "griveness," a classic dish among the Ashkenazi (basically, Jews of Northern Europe who spoke Yiddish) made of fried chicken skins and onions. As I went down the "griveness" rabitt hole, I found that they're more commonly called "gribenes" (grih-bih-niss) and they're actually a byproduct of making schmalz (rendered chicken fat). Basically, you put pieces of chicken skin in a pan and cook them over low heat to melt out all the fat, then you raise the temperature, toss in an onion and fry the skin and onion in the rendered chicken fat. Remove the chicken skins and the onion from the fat and you have schmalz, which is used in a number of classic Ashkenazi recipes.

Now, being an Ashkenazic Jew, I wondered how I missed out on this classic dish, but realized that by the time I was old enough to appreciate gribenes in the early 1970s, two factors were working against me.

• Few people made their own shmalz anymore.
• If your doctor found out you were eating chicken skin fried in chicken fat, he'd show up at your door with a baseball bat.

But I promised my wife fried chicken skin, so I decided to try my hand at it. I used this gribenes recipe, though after this first attempt, I believe it tells you to put the onions in too early. Most other recipes tell you to put them in after you've rendered the shmalz, and I think that would have helped me get my gribenes crispier. They were still tasty. I used a little chopped garlic in the pan and then sprinkled with a touch of garlic salt instead of kosher salt. My wife and son gobbled them down. He may only be 3 and 1/2, but he knows what's good.

So, if you're ever doing a chicken application that requires you to buy chicken on the bone and want to make some delicious crispy fried chicken skin, look up a gribenes recipe and work that on the side. It's fatty, oily, and many people would be horrified that you're eating it, but it tastes goooood. Life's too short to waste perfectly good chicken skin.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Cooking & Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.