I've been eating low-carb, so when I was cart-plowing through Costco today the chicharrones tasting table caught my attention. Almost no carbs and crunchy with some tang, what's not to like? So a couple of bags came home with me:
I was already planning to cook chicken wings for dinner, so I put some of the chicharrones in the new Vitamix for its maiden run and ended up with this:
I had a dozen mostly-thawed wings to cook. I patted them dry, then split them up. I sprayed half of them with avocado oil, then tossed them in Harry Soo's All-Purpose Rub with MSG. For the other half, I beat an egg with some of the rub, then breaded each wing using the egg first and then the "pork panko" (i.e., ground-up chicharrones). Then they all went into the Cosori Dual Blaze air fryer:
And after 20 minutes at 360 degrees (with no flipping or tossing!), I had this:
This was a quick-and-dirty cook with minimal effort, but both kinds of wings were pretty darned good. I thought the pork worked quite well as breading, I consider that a success. Ultimately I think I like the unbreaded wings as much (or almost as much?) as the breaded wings, so I don't know that it's worth the effort for me personally, but it was good to see that the technique works anyhow.