Clarksdale, Miss. -- What in the name of all that's greasy and Southern does a man from China know about making cracklings and pork rinds?
Anyone who has to ask hasn't tasted Kim's Fried Pork Rinds and Kim's Seasoned Pork Cracklings. Cooked in the heart of the Mississippi Delta by Chinese-born Kim Wong and his son, John, these pork snacks sell so well that the pair barely keep up with the demand.
The locals love them. People from around the country order them. When inspectors from the Department of Agriculture visit from Washington, they always take time to sit down with a mess of freshly fried skins and a bottle of hot sauce after they finish their inspection.
And former President George Bush, who received a box of Kim's products from a Mississippi senator while in the White House, pronounced them "delicious" in a letter to Wong. He ought to know -- his was, after all, the "pork rind presidency."
The Wongs say the secret is in the pots -- or rather, the woks.
Kim, who said he simply "didn't know any better" when he started his business in 1985, cooks the pigskins in 18 iron woks lined up neatly in his plant in downtown Clarksdale.
"Usually they're fried in big cookers with 100 or 200 gallons of oil," John said. "But they don't cook evenly that way."
The plant manager, Nathaniel Davis, agreed.
"These are crispier than the ones I used to make in a large vat," he said as he readied a batch of skins for the wok.
Kim, who grew up in a small village in China, followed his father to Mississippi in 1949. His father had opened a grocery in the Delta in the 1930s, choosing the rural South over the immigration hot spots -- New York and San Francisco -- to avoid competition.
Over the years, Kim ran several successful businesses in Clarksdale, a small Delta town about 65 miles south of Memphis. They were all called Kim's and included a grocery, a karate school and a Chinese restaurant. The pork rind business was "completely accidental." For years, his wife, Jean, whom he met in Hong Kong and brought to Mississippi in 1961, rendered lard from pork to make biscuits. She'd throw out the crunchy chunks of meat and fat that remained -- the crackling -- unless Kim was there to snack on it. (Jean, by the way, learned to cook Southern biscuits and other local delicacies from the woman they hired to serve down-home breakfasts at the Chinese restaurant.)
He didn't know anyone else who liked those crunchy, bacony bits until he saw two kids fighting over the last bag of pork rinds -- made by frying larger pieces of skin in oil until they puff into a crisp -- at a grocery.
"I had no idea people ate what my wife had been throwing out," he said. "And crackling tastes even better than the rinds those kids were fighting for."
Kim at first gave away his wife's crackling in plastic baggies at the restaurant, as a sort of taste test. It was so popular he packaged it and began selling it. Soon, he was out of the restaurant business and into the fried-skin business.
Today, Kim's plant fries about 55,000 pounds of pork skin a month to make nine products. They sell for 25 cents to $2 each.
Like his pork rinds, Kim, 60, is equal parts Chinese and Southern. He loves his home in Clarksdale and says he'll never leave, but his office is filled with things from his first home, including Kung Fu action figures and traditional Chinese weapons. He speaks perfect English but with a thick Cantonese accent.
His 30-year-old son, on the other hand, is almost all Southern -- he speaks with a thick Mississippi accent, wears ball caps and listens to the blues.
"He's a hillbilly," jokes Kim.
Look for Kim's products on shelves in Mississippi. Or you can order them, but only in fairly large quantities. A cautionary note: They can be addictive.
This article first appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution
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