Making Vegetable "Cracklins"

[Scott Heimendinger]

I want to make pumpkin cracklins with the same texture of pork cracklins, or at least the texture of the tapioca puffs from the book. I sliced pumpkin flesh thin and dehydrated it. My guess is that I need to vacuum-impregnate the dehydrated pumpkin with a starch slurry. Should I use Tapioca? Cornstarch?

Or, following this method, will I end up with a pumpkin chip instead of a pumpkin cracklin?

[Anonymous Modernist 210]

Are you looking for a crackling or pork rind texture? The tapioca puffs are more like a pork rind.

The gelatinzed starch needs to act as the structure if you want the puffing action in the tapioca starch cracker on 6-343, so I don't think using impregnated pieces of dehydrated pumpkin will work well puffing up.

If you want pumpkin flavor with the tapioca puff, you could either powder the dehydrate pumpkin and incorporate that with the starch and use pumpkin puree as the liquid, or just use a pumpkin puree/juice. The latter will probably result in a less intensely flavored product.

I prefer tapioca starch because it is more neutral and puffs better than cornstarch in my experience.

[Anonymous Modernist 10]

I can think of three different ways of trying this. One is the way you suggested. You will want to use tapioca starch because the cell structure is different than cornstarch. Or, you could dehydrate the pumpkin down to a powder and then rehydrate it with water and tapioca. Third, you could puree the pumpkin and use that plus pumpkin juice instead of meat and water and follow the prawn cracker recipe in MC.

[Scott Heimendinger]

Thanks, Max, I'll give it a shot!