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CRISPY FISH SKIN CHICHARRONS

By Hank Shaw 17 Comments

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Photo by Holly A. Heyser
If you’ve ever heard of pork rinds, known in Mexican cuisine as chicharrons, you know. I mean,
really. Crispy, light as air, dusted with salt and whatever other flavors you have in mind. Vaguely
porky and oddly ungreasy. Properly made, they are so addictive they really ought to be illegal.

You can do the same thing with fish skin, people. And it is every bit as good. Same as pork
chicharrons, but with an oh-so-slight briney thing going on. You know it’s fish, but it is in no
way fishy in a bad way.

I’d vaguely heard of fish chicharrons before, but never really quite knew how to make them. The
I cooked in a big Sacramento food festival called “Have an Offal Day” — yes, we all cooked
nasty bits — and at this event Sacramento’s greatest sushi chef, Billy Ngo of Kru, made
sturgeon skin chicharrons; there are a lot of sturgeon farms around our area, so we use sturgeon a
lot here.

Billy told me how to make the chicharrones, and I was immediately obsessed. I made them for a
fundraising dinner for the California Food Literacy Center and they were a hit. But then it
occurred to me: Sturgeon has a thick, largely scaleless skin, and besides, not many people have
access to it.

So I began working on other fish skins to see if it would work.

It does. Oh yes, folks. It does.

I am happy to report that I’ve now made chicharrons from the skins of sturgeon, leopard sharks,
walleyes, Pacific rockfish, white bass, and salmon. Having done this, I am pretty sure you can
make chicharrons from any skin you can slice off a fillet, meaning that ultra-thin skin like that on
a mackerel might not work.

Let me walk you through the process.

Start by scaling your fish if they have scales; sturgeon, eels and sharks don’t, so you are good to
go there. Scale when the fish is whole, by the way. It’s a pain in the ass to scale fish once you’ve
filleted them.

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Photo by Hank Shaw
Slice the skin from the meat off the fillet. You will notice that you still have some meat and fat
attached to the skin. That needs to go. You also need to tenderize the skins of thick-skinned fish,
 like sturgeon, sharks and fish like salmon and triggerfish. You do this by boiling in salty water;
the salt helps season the skins.

Here’s what I’ve found with certain skins:

 Sturgeon and leopard shark: Boil for about 5 minutes.

 Salmon I’d boil for 1 or 2 minutes, but you can scrape the skin even without cooking.
 Most basslike fish, i.e., walleyes, rockfish, bass and perch you will only need to boil for a minute
or two. They are tender already. (Here is a recipe with walleye skin chicharrons.)
Now you need to carefully remove all the meat and fat from the skins. Gently lift the skins out of
the boiling water and lay them meat side up on a cutting board. Now, using a butter knife,
carefully lift and remove all the meat and fat. This is fairly tricky, and if you have oven-mitt
hands you will tear the skin. Take your time until you get the hang of it.

Once you have all the meat removed, you need to dry the skins. I do this in a dehydrator at 120°F
until the skin dries, which isn’t too long — about 2 to 4 hours depending on the species of fish.
I’ve also greased a baking sheet and laid the skins down (meat side up) and dried them in an
oven set to 170°F. You will need to flip the skins at least once if you do this option.

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Photo by Hank Shaw
When the skins are dried you can save them in the freezer indefinitely.
Frying is easy. Heat about 1 inch of high smoke-point oil — I prefer rice bran or grapeseed oil,
but canola or other vegetable oil works, too — to between 350°F and 360°F. Get your seasonings
nearby, as you will have only seconds to season before the skins’ surface dries. Salt is a must,
but I’ve used herbes de Provence, smoked paprika and even lemon pepper.

Drop a couple skins into the hot oil and watch the magic: They will puff up immediately in an
amazingly miraculous way. They will be ready in less than a minute. Watch for the sizzling to
die down dramatically. Move them to paper towels with a slotted spoon and season
immediately. Once fried, they will stay crispy for a few hours, depending on the humidity.

All I can say if you are on the fence about fish skin chicharrons is try them. You will never look
at the skin on fish in the same way again. Trust me.

Save
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
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Filed Under: Appetizers and Snacks, Culinary Experiments, Featured, Fish, How-To (DIY
stuff), RecipeTagged With: cooking tips, fish recipes, wild food

READER INTERACTIONS

COMMENTS

1. Sarah says
May 9, 2015 at 6:14 am

Oops!ase these in two toaster last night, turned the heat off, and then forgot to move them to the
fridge. Perfectly crispy but they were left out for about 12 hours. Safe to eat or need to chuck?

2. Hank Shaw says

May 9, 2015 at 9:28 am

Sarah: Not sure, actually. If they were perfectly dry and crispy, I bet they’d be OK. But it’s just a
guess.

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