There's nothing quite like a salty snack with a pint at the pub, but have you ever stopped to wonder how pork scratchings are made?

They've been around for decades, and they're so salty that they'll probably make you reach for another bev when you're with pals, but it turns out that you haven't been munching on little nuggets of meat over the years because pork scratchings are actually another part of the pig altogether. People have been left gobsmacked to learn that the savoury snack is actually pieces of pig skin.

So how is the snack made? The bites of pork are made from salted and deep-fried pork skin. They're created by deep-frying pork skin from a pig's shank, the top portion of a pig's hind leg.

If you're still curious about the process, the skin is cleaned, and then boiled until it becomes soft. They are then required to cool before the fat is removed, reports the Daily Star.

Then, the skin gets chopped up into pieces, and they're cooked in the oven until they turn crispy and golden brown. Salt is then added to make them extra tasty. According to history books, pork scratchings have been a British staple since the early 1800s. This is because families with pigs will have wanted to ensure that not a single part of the animal was wasted.

After realising what pork scratchings were, people took to X, formerly Twitter, to express their shock. One wrote: "Wait so pork scratchings are made from pig skin? I thought it was deep-fried fat and somehow this news is worse." Another was responding to someone complaining about people eating chicken skin, joking: "Wait til he hears about what the pork scratchings are made from."

According to Chuckling Cheese: "Sometimes the terms pork scratching, pork crackling, and pork rinds, can confuse many people. They might look the same but it's how they are made that determines the name."

So, pork crackling is a "lighter meat snack made by taking the pig skin from either the shoulder or the shank, and fried twice". When they're fried for a second time, it "causes the skin to inflate, adding air, making the crackling lighter and crunchier than ordinary pork scratchings."

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