Touchet's Bar in Vermilion Parish is place for cracklin cook-off on Saturday

Cooking cracklins is not just about throwing raw pigskin into hot grease and watching it fry. There is an art to it that most people do not know unless they have mastered it.
Clarence “T-Boy” Desormeaux has the frying cracklin technique figured out.
On Saturday at Touchet’s Bar on La. 167, north of Abbeville, Desormeaux and his team will be battling 13 other teams cooking cracklins in the 12-th annual Cracklin Cook-off.
Cooking will start around 8 a.m., and the public can begin eating free cracklins at around 12:30 p.m.
Derek Touchet, the owner of Touchet’s Bar, and his father, Calvin, (former owner) will provide each team with 40 pounds of raw pig skin when they arrive.
Desormeaux likes to cook the skin under the belly of the pig. Skin on top of the pig’s back makes for tougher cracklins.
“You get good quality fat,” said Desormeaux about using skin under the belly. “You want the belly because it is tender.”
Once you decide what part of the pig you want, you have to decide how you want your raw pigskins cut.
You can get it with a lot of meat on it; with not a little meat on it or with no meat on it.
Desormeaux said he likes it with a little meat on it. The more meat, the harder it is to fry because the meat may fry too much, he added.
After the meat is ordered, the cook has to decide what type of grease to use. Over the years, Desormeaux enjoys cooking with hog lard.
Over the last 50 years, Desormeaux has tried different ways to fry his cracklins. He once fried them until they were almost ready, took them all out and then put them back into the hot grease and continued cooking.
Now, he just fries the cracklins until they are cooked and floating in the grease.
“Not everyone can cook cracklins,” said Desormeaux, who helped his family cook them when he was 10. His job was to provide wood for the fire as a kid. “Cooking is a process. I have tasted a lot of cracklins that were not cooked well.”
On Saturday, he is going to try something new. When some of his cracklins are cooked, he will take them out and put bar-be-cue sauce on them to give them a different taste.
Other teams will first fry alligator or fish in the grease to create a unique flavor for the grease before frying cracklins. Desormeaux does not do any of that.
Derek Touchet, Calvin’s son, said there are no judges who decide the winner or loser. People walk around and taste all of the cracklins for free and then they decide who has the best tasting cracklins.
Derek said the cook-off grown the last eight years.
“It started small, and now it has taken off,” he said. “It gets bigger each year.”