Gribenes facts for kids
Chicken gribenes
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| Alternative names | Grieven |
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| Created by | Ashkenazi Jews |
| Main ingredients | Chicken skin, onions |
In Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, gribenes or grieven (Yiddish: גריבענעס, [ˈɡrɪbənəs], "scraps"; Hebrew: גלדי שומן) are crisp chicken or goose skin cracklings with fried onions. As with other cracklings, gribenes are a byproduct of rendering animal fat to produce cooking fat, in this case kosher schmaltz.
A favored food in the past among Ashkenazi Jews, gribenes is frequently mentioned in Jewish stories and parables.
Gribenes can be used as an ingredient in other dishes like kasha varnishkes, fleishig kugel and gehakte leber.
Holiday food
This dish is often associated with the Jewish holidays Hanukkah and Rosh Hashanah. Traditionally, gribenes were served with potato kugel or latkes during Hanukkah.
Gribenes are also associated with Passover, as large amounts of schmaltz, with its resulting gribenes, were traditionally used in Passover recipes.
Servings
Gribenes can be eaten as a snack, typically on rye or pumpernickel bread with salt, or used in recipes such as chopped liver, or all of the above. It is often served as a side dish with pastrami on rye or hot dogs.
This dish has also been eaten as a midnight snack, or as an appetizer. Some Jews in Louisiana add gribenes to Jambalaya in place of (treyf) shrimp. It was served to children on challah bread as a treat. It is also sometimes served in a GLT, a modified version of a BLT sandwich that replaces bacon with gribenes.
Etymology
The word gribenes is related to German Griebe (plural Grieben) meaning 'piece of fat, crackling' (from Old High German griobo via Middle High German griebe), where Griebenschmalz is lard from which the cracklings have not been removed.
