There are white-meat people and there are dark-meat people; there are those who swear by the drumstick, thigh or breast.

And then there are skin people. They are the ones who cannot help themselves around roast or fried chicken, ripping off the crispiest bits of skin before the bird makes it to the table.

Nate Gutierrez, the chef and owner of Nate's Taco Truck and Nate's Taco Truck Stop in Richmond, Virginia, could not stop snacking on the skin left over from his roast chickens. So about six months ago, he decided to make the skin crisp and offer it in a taco. The chicken-skin tacos sell out whenever they are on the menu.

By using chicken skin for its texture and powerful flavor in all sorts of dishes, chefs are legitimizing what used to be a guilty pleasure, whether they call it gribenes, yakitori kawa or cracklings.

There's nothing new about eating chicken skin. Just about any region that customarily eats chicken has a way to use up the skin.

In Japan, and in Japanese restaurants like Yakitori Totto and Yakitori Tori Shin in New York, one of the most popular kinds of yakitori is grilled chicken skin, often grilled on a skewer until crisp-edged.

Deep-fried chicken skin is a favorite snack in certain parts of the Philippines, where it's called chicharon manok.

In European Jewish cooking, chopped liver is often served with gribenes; at Sammy's Roumanian in New York, the classic chopped liver and gribenes has been on the menu since the restaurant opened in 1975.

But chefs like Ilan Hall, who were exposed to traditional preparations as children, spin the ingredient in directions that their grandparents wouldn't have imagined.

One of Mr. Hall's signature dishes at the Gorbals, his restaurant in Los Angeles, is a take on a B.L.T., or bacon, lettuce and tomato, sandwich: a gribenes, lettuce and tomato sandwich, served on rye with horseradish mayo. "Fallen Jews love the G.L.T.," he said. "Because it's funny. Familiar, but taken out of its element."

No one is more committed to skin than Sean Brock, executive chef of Husk and McCrady's in Charleston, South Carolina. If it can be done in the kitchen, Mr. Brock has done it to chicken skin: He marinates it in buttermilk, then smokes and deep fries for a crunchy appetizer served with hot sauce and honey. He layers it with rabbit in a terrine. His twist on Southern chicken and dumplings includes a block of braised shredded chicken thighs sandwiched between rendered sheets of the stuff.

"Everyone knows deep down that they are closet chicken-skin lovers," he said. "They just need some help."

The appetite for chicken skin is a logical outgrowth of fried chicken mania and the fashion for over-the-top foods. Last year, a rumor that the KFC fried chicken chain was testing a "skinwich" flew around the Internet. The rumor was met with disgust and excitement before it was proved to be false.

But the skinwich seems restrained next to an invention by Jesse Schenker, the chef and owner of Recette in Manhattan: deep-fried, chicken-skin-wrapped gravy, a crunchy parcel with a molten interior. The dish, served with roast foie gras and a black pepper biscuit, is one of the richest in New York and is the only item on Recette's menu that routinely elicits loud, happy cursing.

"If it weren't so time-consuming, I'd offer it as the ultimate bar snack, 10 to an order," he said.

One frustration inherent in cooking with chicken skin is shrinkage. When the fat is rendered from a piece of skin, it shrivels to about half its size, so you need a lot of it. Most chefs buy it in bulk from distributors when possible. It can be tricky to find a steady supply because the skins left over from chicken processing, like that from the boneless, skinless breasts that dominate the market, usually go into products like chicken sausages and nuggets, or are rendered for animal feed.

Steve Gold, vice president for sales and marketing at Murray's Chicken, said bulk orders for skins from chefs have increased to two or three a week from near zero a year ago. (Among those chefs is Mr. Schenker of Recette.)

"A year ago it wasn't even on our map," Mr. Gold said. "We would have thought a chef was crazy."

Most home cooks will find it easiest to buy skin-on chicken and reserve the meat for another use.

Even with the advantage of buying in bulk, Hugue Dufour, who was the chef and an owner of M. Wells in New York, said it was a hard ingredient to manage. "It was difficult to get enough skins to keep up," he said, speaking of dishes like chicken-fried chicken skins and a chicken soup in which slippery skins substituted for noodles.

Mitch Prensky, a chef in Philadelphia, also grew up eating gribenes and likes to try unusual uses at his restaurant, Supper. He puts chicken skin in his spaghetti carbonara, cures and smokes it like pastrami and crisps it into tuile-like garnishes for summer salads. "It's the Jewish bacon," Mr. Prensky said.

But chefs like Marc Forgione, who uses chicken skin as a delicate wrapper for monkfish at the restaurant in downtown Manhattan that bears his name, resist the inevitable comparison.

"If I could marry bacon, I would," he said.

The New York Times

(China Daily 11/13/2011 page10)