Chicharon substitutes

This is chicharon, sold under an English name. Any bag labelled pork rinds, cracklings, chicharrones or scratchings is fried pork skin with salt, which is what chicharon is. It crunches the same, it crushes the same, and it dissolves into a sauce the same way.

Best for

snacking, crushed over sisig or dinuguan, topping crispy pata, thickening kare-kare, any recipe calling for chicharon

Prep

Buy unflavoured. If they have gone soft in the bag, spread them on a tray and give them 5 minutes in a 350F oven to crisp back up.

Two real differences. American pork rinds tend to be lighter, airier and more heavily seasoned than Filipino chicharon, so taste one and hold back the recipe's salt. British pork scratchings are the opposite: harder, fattier and closer to chicharon bulaklak, the ruffled fatty cut. Measure by weight, because a cup of airy rinds might be a third the weight of a cup of dense chicharon.

The best answer when you want pork, salt, fat and crunch all at once from an ordinary supermarket. Chopped over sisig or a bowl of bulalo it reads as a savoury pork topping in the same way chicharon does.

Best for

topping sisig, garnishing soups and stews, sprinkling over rice or vegetables, breakfast plates

Prep

Fry until genuinely brittle, drain on paper, then chop small. Save the fat for frying garlic.

Two things change. It is smoked, and that smoke is loud next to chicharon's clean fried-pork flavour. And it is meat rather than skin, so it stays chewy at the edges instead of shattering, and it will never dissolve into a sauce. Use unsmoked streaky bacon or salt pork if you can find it and the gap narrows a lot.

The best purely-crunch substitute, and the one to use when the chicharon is a garnish rather than an ingredient. Fried alliums bring the same brittle shatter and the same savoury, fatty, salty hit that makes a topping worth having.

Best for

topping sisig, pancit or lugaw, garnishing soups, sprinkling on rice, vegetarian versions of Filipino dishes

Prep

Slice thin, fry in a shallow layer of oil over medium heat until pale gold, then drain; they darken after they leave the pan.

It tastes sweet-savoury and oniony rather than of pork, and it goes soft in liquid within a minute or two, so add it at the table rather than in the kitchen. It contributes nothing to the body of a sauce. Store-bought crispy fried shallots from an Asian market work well and save you the frying.

Purely a texture stand-in, and a decent one for a dry garnish. Toasted panko is light, brittle and salty, and scattered over a sizzling plate it does the same job of interrupting soft food with something crisp.

Best for

garnishing sisig, topping baked dishes, coating fried food, pork-free versions

Prep

Toast panko dry in a pan with a spoon of oil and a pinch of salt until deep golden, about 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

No pork, no fat, no savoury depth, and it goes soggy faster than anything else here, within about thirty seconds on something wet. Frying the panko in a spoonful of bacon fat or lard rather than oil recovers a surprising amount of the missing richness.

Sold in the same aisle as pork rinds and confusingly under a similar name, these are puffed fried wheat snacks. They have almost the same brittle-then-melting texture as chicharon, which makes them a genuinely good textural match for a pork-free version.

Best for

vegetarian toppings, snacking, garnishing dishes where the crunch matters most

Prep

Crush lightly in the bag with your hand; they shatter easily.

The texture is close, the flavour is not there at all: they taste of fried wheat and whatever seasoning is dusted on them. They also go stale-soft quickly once the bag is open. Not gluten-free, and not a swap for anyone who needed pork rinds for a low-carb reason.

The honest option when crushed chicharon was being used for body rather than crunch, as in kare-kare or some dinuguan. There is no substitute that both shatters and melts into collagen, so split the job: thicken the sauce properly and add crunch separately, or accept a thinner sauce.

Best for

kare-kare, dinuguan, any braise where chicharon was crushed in to thicken

Prep

For toasted rice powder, toast raw rice in a dry pan until deep brown, then grind to a fine powder and stir into the hot sauce.

Toasted rice powder is the traditional kare-kare thickener and adds a nutty roast flavour; peanut butter thickens and enriches but pushes the dish sweeter and nuttier. Neither gives you the faint gelatinous richness that dissolved pork skin does. If body is what you are missing, a piece of pork skin or a ham hock simmered in the pot for an hour is closer than any powder.