Last weekend, I made a pork goulash the results were too disappointing to blog ,recipes suggested cooking til the the pork til it was falling apart but the texture just seemed to stringy with no real bite, the flavour was good so something I will work on.
However the recipe did have one positive result,it required me to remove the skin and fat from a large shoulder of pork, this meant I could indulge in a little extra porky goodness and make some pork scratchings. A pub classic , my dad would make this from thick bacon rind using the microwave ( 20 minutes on a medium setting makes a passable impression of pork scratchings)
But these were the real thing , a little reading including St John – Nose to Tail suggested a long salting of the skin, which I did for more than a week , covering the skin in sea salt in the fridge, this draws out water from the skin.
After that I cooked the scratchings in the oven at 180degC for 1.5 hours draining the fat regularly. I was thinking of making fat balls for the hungry birds mixed with bird seed , but as BT has pointed out below this may not be a good idea and can cause kidney damage to birds.
I think I should have sliced the pork skin more thinly , at half an inch wide , the scratching resemble thick chips, the scratchings are quite bulky rather than the twirly crispy things, the taste however is spot on crunchy & salty.
Girl Interrupted Eating 
Ooh, I’ve had these on my “to cook” list for ages but never get round to making them. They look great, hard not to eat the whole lot I imagine!
Not exactly health food, is it? But probably all the better for it.
I’ve never made pork scratchings just for the sake of it. Scratchings, crackling and the like have always been a happy by-product of some major pork roasting exercise. Often, though, the rind is the best bit of the meal, and the crackling is the part that disappears first. Every time.
Looks good love to try it
Becky, I’m not sure if balls prepared of drained fat make a proper meal for birds.
Here in Poland (yes, another bloody Polack) we are taught that if something just lay next to salt it should never ever be served to birds. And I’m exaggerating only a bit – the impact of salt on birds’ kidneys is disastrous.
While pork fat alone is a winter blessing for many species, it turns into poison if you get it from salted pork.
Thanks for the comment BT , I had not thought of that as an issue so I have amended the comment . We often put out bacon rind for bird so had assumed it was safe . Always glad to learn something new from the East.