We have a Jasmin and a @Jasmine (apparently a few others as well!). Just so they get their @ of course.
And yeah, @kferr explained it well. I believe that low carbing has brought fried pork skins / chicharrones into near mainstream status though, as it’s often featured as a “breading” substitute. It worked… okay, the few times I did it, but the levels of sodium involved is terrifying with most commercial products.
And second aside, yeah @Beckdawrek is totally right about how in every bag or so, there’s the one tooth breaker, so that was another reason (plus the fat, plus the salt, plus the sheer calories) that I couldn’t make more use of them when weight loss and better health was the goal.
I grew up eating chicarrones and I LURRRRVE them. That was one of the things I made with my nipple-y belly. I love them poofy and I love them crunchy and and I love them extra hard, I love them like you get them at the cuchifritos place with surprise pieces of meat in them.
They sure are. I had them in a French restaurant in Jakarta once and have never forgotten how incredibly tasty they were.
ETA: and to answer the OP, the only other slightly “out there” pig part I have knowingly consumed is chitlins. Years ago an African-American friend took me to a famous soul food restaurant to introduce me to the cuisine and ordered for me. At the time I did not know what chitlins were, and she wouldn’t tell me.
Right, but I’m talking about grinding the hams and all. Ground pig. I buy ground cow and it is much better (though pricey) than regular ground beef because the steaks and all are ground.
A local independent butcher shop sometimes offers “Pork Belly With Titties.” Yes, that’s what they put on the label! There are people who request it with the skin, which does include the nipple line, especially in a sow.
Cracklings are also a by-product of lard manufacture. To me, they taste like crumbled bacon.
ISTR that one of the early “Survivor” episodes, or some similar program, required the contestants to eat that, RAW. One wonders if the pig had to give birth before slaughter for it to qualify, if you will.
On a related note, one of my local libraries is offering free summer enrichment programs for children and teenagers, and fetal pig dissection is one program on the calendar. (Parents must accompany children 12 and under, because kids that age are not allowed, per the program, to handle scalpels.) Naturally, some people are freaking out about this. I dissected several of these in Biology 101.
I’ve seen chicken oviducts for sale in Asian restaurants too. They have the egglets attached, usually future yolks the size of BBs.
I buy a 5 pound bag of ground cow. I’ve sent the farmer/butcher a bunch of business, so he is giving me his “friends and family” discount. Still more expensive than ground beef, but just a bit and worth it. I make 1/2 pound sou vide rare burgers that are heavenly.
Some years back, I was moderating a focus group on breakfast foods, in suburban Philadelphia. Two of the participants were heavier-set guys, and when I asked each of them about their favorite breakfast foods, one of them mentioned “scrapple” – a fried mush, made using pork offal (head, heart, liver, etc.), which is popular in that region. The other big guy nodded in agreement. “Yeah, definitely scrapple!”
Being a Midwestern boy, I’d not ever heard of scrapple, and I asked them, “Umm, what’s ‘scrapple?’” One of them replied, “Everything from the pig but the oink!”
Has Lil’wreskker seen pork skin in jars? Sometimes they sell them in big jars in the same stores you’ll find pickled pigs feet. Oh, my God. The first time I saw a big jar of pickled pig skin I was horrified. But you can find them in some Arkansas markets.
All around Mexican markets and just general supermarkets here in Chicago as “cueritos.”
I’ve pretty much had it all, from pork blood sausages (yum) to brain (not as much a fan) to chitterlings (ok) to jowl (delicious!) etc. I’ve never had the uteri, though. One of the meat packers I go to has a big bucket full of them, but I’ve never been brave enough to buy and try to cook one.
I lived in China or greater China (HK, Taiwan) for 20 years. I’m sure I’ve knowingly or unknowingly had it all.
Sliced pig ears in red hot chili sauce is pretty big every where. Crunchy.
Pork blood is typically not wasted. Looks kinda like liver when cooked. Often found in hot n sour soup.
Will never forget the first time I heard a distinctive sound in a small town (population maybe 10,000) in China in 1985. Yep, a pig being slaughtered. Never heard that before, but looked at my buddy and said “sounds like a dying pig.” Yep, had it’s throat cut and took quite a while (don’t remember exactly but a lot longer than minutes) to shuffle off this mortal coil. The butcher was capturing the blood for later usage. Took place on a sidewalk. There were virtually no vehicles back then on the streets.
Worked with a fellow from Louisiana who brought in a gallon jar of pickled pig lips. With hot peppers in the pickle. They were great. We ate that whole jar in 2 weeks.
Back when we had a Schnuck’s, a Midwestern grocery store chain, their deli carried scrapple. Granted, it was factory made, and it also tasted MUCH better than it looked.
On another related note, when I was in college, I dated a man who had once patronized a truly genuine Chinese restaurant, and on the menu was fish lips. Not fish scales, not fish gills, but fish LIPS. For 99 cents, why not? So, he and his dining companions ordered this, and they brought out a platter of some things that looked, smelled, and tasted like gelatinous rubber bands. Oh, well, it was worth 99 cents, in 1980s money, to say he’d tried fish lips.
As for pig ears, a few years before that, my mother would take my grandmother grocery shopping at a store that abutted the inner city, and they would see black people buying pig ears, stacked up in their carts. At the time, I worked with a black woman who got to talking about some of the ethnic foods her relatives prepared, and she told me that they boil pig ears for several hours until they were soft enough to slice, and put mustard on them. She didn’t like them.
Recently, I saw a YouTube video where the pig ears were indeed boiled for a very long time, put in a loaf pan, and the broth poured around it and the whole mess was refrigerated overnight, then turned out like an aspic and sliced - and served with mustard.
