Schmaltz!

While prepping chicken thighs for the grill (they're in the fridge, bathing in Chiavetta's) I decided to make them skinless and trim them of as much fat as possible. That's healthy, right?

At first, I was disgusted at the amount of fat and skin I'd trimmed off (see 1st picture). But then I was inspired: schmaltz!

Schmaltz is rendered chicken fat. It's a main ingredient in chopped liver and is a good general cooking fat if you keep kosher -- you can't use lard because it's pork, and can't use butter because it's dairy. Apparently it's also tasty spread on dark rye with a little salt.

	After aggressively trimming four large chicken thighs, I was left with a pile of skin and fat. Since I started with 1.3 lbs of chicken, I estimate there's maybe 0.3 lbs of fat and skin here. This looks disgusting.
	Into a pot it goes, along with 1/4 cup of water, some onion powder, and some wing tips I'd been saving for stock but would repurpose here for its fat and skin content. The water will all boil off by the time it's done, but early on it helps distribute the heat while the fat melts. Ideally, you'd use real onion, but I didn't have any on hand (the one half onion in the fridge had gotten dried out).
	Once the wing tips gave off everything they could, they went into the trash. Now what's left is just the melted fat and the skin bits.
	Any water, as well as any moisture in the skin and fat, has boiled off, and the gribenes (more on this later) are getting nice and brown. All done. It took nearly an hour to get to this point, which is longer than I expected.
	On the right is the cup of schmaltz, having passed through a coarse-ish strainer. If I had cheesecloth, I'd have used it, but I think it turned out okay anyway. And on the left is the gribenes, the fried bits of chicken skin.

For my first try, this couldn't have gone any better. Once the gribenes cooled a few minutes, I ate them with just a little salt. Not something I'd snack on every day, but amazingly good. And, surprisingly, not that greasy. All the fat attached to the skin had melted off, and so I suppose not that much remained.

The schmaltz is cooling. After that, it'll go into the freezer. It's pure fat, so it should keep a long time, at least until I can figure out what I want to do with it.