Eating Keto and missing crunchy croutons on your salad? Or are you Keto Carnivore and looking for a delicious crispy snack?? Either way, you’re going to love my Zero Carb Keto Croutons!

As I get older, I realize just how very much I am just like my Grandma Elsie.

When I was a kid, I spent nearly every weekend with her and Grandpa Stush. Their house was truly my favorite place.

The funny thing is that now (at nearly 41 year old) the things that I inherited from them aren’t the things that I’ve suspended in my fondest memories.

I remember going shopping with Gram (and getting spoiled), the smell of cabbage cooking and Grandpap watching wrestling.. I remember getting squirted with dish detergent and sliding on a garbage bag DIY slip and slide.. I remember eating vegetables straight from the garden and drinking from the garden hose. They had home milk delivery from the farm clear into the 80’s in glass jugs and they didn’t live on a farm but maintained the most amazing garden in the city lot every year.

While those are great memories and I truly cherish them, each day that goes by I find that I am becoming more like the woman my grandmother was.

Gram embraced organ meats, all the odd cuts and was a butter-loving-foodie when everyone else was eating low fat.

So, today when I’m sharing with you my favorite salad-condiment; Zero Carb Keto Croutons, I know Gram Elsie is smiling down on me.

Are you ready to learn the my secret ingredient??

I know you might be a little shocked, but I need you to trust me….

CHICKEN SKIN

Yep. That’s right. My Zero Carb Keto Croutons are little nuggets of fried, crispy chicken skin.

I mean let’s be honest, if you don’t love crispy chicken skin then we probably wouldn’t be BFFs in real life… there really isn’t much better eating than chicken skin!

Ok, before you panic and your fat-phobia rears it’s evil head, here at Health Starts in the Kitchen we don’t shy away from healthy animal fats. Never have. Never will. Even when I’m not strictly keto, a large portion of my diet is always composed of protective saturated fats.

I do want to remind you the importance of always choosing the Highest Quality Animal Fats & Proteins, in this case choosing organic pasture raised chicken.

There’s 2 ways you can obtain chicken skin, the first is obvious just pull it off of a whole chicken or chicken parts and the second is to buy it!

I’ve always known that you can purchase chicken skins, because even until her advanced age, I would seek out packs of chicken skins at local grocery stores for Gram.

Like Grandma, Like Granddaughter.

If you don’t see Chicken Skins on your farmer’s food list, ASK THEM! I’ve been helping to encourage my other farmer/butcher friendsto offer it for sale as well.. or at least gift them to me!

Most often chicken skins are thrown away, when parting out chickens and low-fat boneless skinless chicken breasts, seen as an unsalable part of the bird.

For the past 2-3 years I’ve been buying packs of pasture raised chicken skin from The Family Cow, 10 at a time… They even joke that they don’t need to look at the customer name, they know it’s me just from the order…..

Then a couple weeks ago, we stopped at our friend’s butcher shop; Working H Meats and Market, and they were just finishing processing their pasture raised chickens… I helped to encourage them to offer their chicken skins as well and I’m excited to share with all my local friends that both Working H Meats and Market and The Family Cow offers packs of chicken skins!

Making your own Zero Carb Keto Croutons is so easy, too!

Simply cut up chicken skin into roughly 1 inch squares and fry them over medium heat until lightly browned and crispy.

Scoop them out of the the skillet and drain on a paper towel lined plate. Season with sea salt.

The hardest part is not eating the whole lot of them right away, they are addictively delicious on their own but even better on a salad.

But Wait! One more thing…..

Don’t toss out that leftover fat in the skillet, that beautiful liquid gold is SCHMALTZ! Save it for later and use it anywhere you’d use a cooking fat or drizzle it on steamed veggies as a dairy free substitute for butter.