The `cracker's cracker' is nation's newest diet craze

If pork-rind makers were assembling a consumer dream team, Sandy Clark would be the last one drafted. Clark is female, white-collar, health-conscious and Jewish - lousy demographics for peddling deep-fried pigskin.

But that was before the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet craze. Clark, a West Hollywood computer programmer, now munches the zero-carbohydrate skins instead of potato chips. She tosses them in salads for a croutonlike crunch and pulverizes them as a coating for fried chicken. Tale of the tape: Clark has lost 17 pounds in a little more than two months while consuming two bags of pork rinds a week with her co-dieting husband.

Call it the pigskin paradox. Weight watchers have helped catapult pork rinds, that Southern-fried scourge of the food pyramid, into an unlikely diet aid and one of America's fastest-growing snacks.

Boosted by weight-loss gurus such as Dr. Robert Atkins, whose regimen includes fried pigskin dipped in sour cream, pork-rind sales grew a sizzling 18 percent last year. That's triple the growth rate of the snack industry as a whole.

Long a fixture at truck stops and liquor stores, pork rinds are turning up in high-end grocery chains, executive lunch boxes and Internet chat rooms. Epicurean dieters are elevating the blue-collar snack into full-fledged cuisine, tossing it into recipes from French toast to meatballs.

Hungry dieters are ecstatic. Nutritionists are horrified. And jubilant manufacturers are as puffed up as their product. Weary of insults heaped on a Southern specialty known to some as the "cracker's cracker," some purveyors are tickled that salted, deep-fried hog skin is catching on with the dieting in-crowd.

"I'm not sure you could call this health food," said a grinning Rudolph Gaytan, inspecting mounds of sizzling skins tumbling fresh from the fryer at his Industry, Calif.-based Gaytan Foods. "But we're thrilled that more people are trying the product."

Fastest-growing snack food

And how. Pork-rind sales grew faster than any other salty snack-food category except for jerky last year, topping $420 million, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Snack Food Association.

For a product that barely registered on the snack-food radar a few years back, pork rinds now are outselling such niche players as sunflower seeds and are gaining fast on such popular categories as ready-to-eat popcorn.

Industry watchers credit America's surging ethnic populations for some of that growth. A favorite with Midwesterners and Southerners, fried pork skins are known as "chicharrones" to Mexican Americans and Filipinos, who often top them with fiery salsa or spicy vinegar sauce. Inventive cooks also use "chicharrones" as an inexpensive meat substitute in main dishes, or sprinkle the ground product over entrees for flavoring.

"It's the Filipino Parmesan," said Barry Levin, president of Industry-based Snak King, whose pork-rind sales in the Western United States have been expanding by 30 percent a year. ". . . (Ethnic consumers) are a great market for us because they already know the product."

Eating fat-laden, high-calorie foods such as pork rinds as part of a weight-loss plan is the antithesis of traditional dieting. But that was before rebels such as Atkins began shaking things up with the notion that fat and calories alone are not the culprits.

His plan and similar regimens such as the Zone diet contend that the energy catalyst insulin is the key to weight control. By restricting carbohydrates, and thus the blood sugar that triggers insulin production, so the theory goes, dieters can force their bodies to burn fat for fuel instead.

So it's out with carbohydrate-rich pasta, bread and sweets and in with steak, eggs, butter, bacon and other foods rich in protein and fat. Nutritionists warn that the diet, if taken to extremes, could be a recipe for heart disease and kidney damage. But dieters' biggest concern appears to be monotony, which is where pork rinds come in.

Puffy, gnarled, a few shades lighter than cardboard, pork rinds look and taste vaguely like a cross between packing peanuts and crisped bacon. Their real appeal, aficionados say, is the texture. With crunchy treats such as potato chips, crackers and popcorn forbidden on a low-carb regimen, fried pork skin is one of the few remaining refuges for dieters seeking a crispy fix.

"It has filled a big hole in my diet," said James Akin, a crunch-craving weight watcher who works for a Catholic organization in San Diego. His favorite memory of a recent business trip to the Deep South: Pork rinds were available in almost every vending machine. "Now that was heaven," he said.

Ohio-based Rudolph Foods, the nation's largest producer of pork rinds, just elevated low-carb dieters to its list of prime targets.

"About 80 percent of the e-mail we're getting right now is from women," Rudolph spokeswoman Dori Coldwell said. "And I'd say most of them are on that diet."

Even so, pork-rind purveyors have yet to openly court weight watchers - or change their labeling to highlight the product's high-protein, low-carbohydrate content - for fear of turning off core consumers.

"We make authentic Mexican-style chicharrones," pork-rind maker Gaytan declared. "When customers buy our product, they want to know they're getting the real thing . . . not some diet food."

Only well-trimmed back skin

Gaytan's process begins with fresh pork skin, about 125,000 pounds a week or so. Gaytan is fussy. He buys only well-trimmed back skin, sliced into 8-by-36-inch rectangles carved from the flesh on either side of the hog's backbone. He says shoulder skin smells funny. Belly skin is too dicey - customers would flip if an errant nipple ever made it into the final product.

The fresh skins are sliced and then rendered, or slow-cooked, for up to three hours on low heat in giant stainless steel tanks bubbling with 800 gallons of melted lard. Just as bacon shrinks in the frying pan, the rubbery pork skins are reduced to hard, amber-colored "pellets" about one-quarter of their original size. These are drained, then transferred to another cavernous fryer to be "popped."

An automated bagging machine packages much of the product. But Gaytan's specialty "gourmet" pork rinds - giant, golden-brown beauties - still are hand-packed by nimble workers clad in smocks and hairnets who seal each bag with an old-fashioned twist-tie.

"Don't ask me why," Gaytan said. "My customers just like it that way."