Skinned: A Trio of Skins, A Triplet of Techniques

by Nicholas Rummell

Matthias Merges and Antoinette Bruno

August 2012

Recipe

Skin Tasting: Pig, Salmon, and Chicken

Interview

Interview with Chef Matthias Merges of Yusho — Chicago, IL

Photos

Chef Matthias Merges of Yusho - Chicago, IL

We've all eaten our share of skin, be it Thanksgiving's roast turkey, pork cracklings and chicharrónes, or even crispy skin-on salmon. But if skin is your fatty, guilty pleasure, yakitori cuisine is a mainstay.

In yakitori—the centuries-old Japanese tradition of grilling nearly every single piece of the chicken—chicken skin, or kawa, is pretty standard, with several strips of epidermis folded onto a skewer and grilled until caramelized. But other types of skin were a rarity at yakitori dens until recently.

The rich history behind humble yakitori was a huge inspiration for Chef Matthias Merges's Yusho, with a particular focus on chicken skin. "We went back to skin being used as a component rather than a focused preparation," Merges says. "Lots of chefs use skin in deconstructed ways. They take a monkfish [for example] and use the skin, use the bones as part of one preparation. The thought behind [our dish] is that these skins are so delicious and unique on their own. The next logical step was to make a preparation of just the skin."

In strictest yakitori terms, Merges' Skin Tasting takes some liberties. He pairs the traditional chicken skin (trimmed and baked very non-traditionally, leaving it looking like lacquered oak instead of rumpled and skewered), with pig and salmon.

Merges has taken the skin tasting further, having experimented with other skins (monkfish, fluke, duck, and goose) when they are available. Goose skin, for example, is particularly tough compared to chicken skin, and needs to be broken down a bit more before baking. Monkfish is thin and needs a gentler approach; Merges poaches it in dashi until soft and then stretches the skin and dehydrates it before frying.

All of his skins have been popular, Merges says, but it's the pork skin that's invariably the star of the show, providing an airy porcine punch in the mouth without the typical teeth-sticking gumminess associated with most pork skin preparations. "The pork was the hardest to get right. A lot of pork skin is crackling, but can be tough and hard," Merges says. It can also be labor intensive, requiring a day's worth of sous vide cooking, meticulous effort to scrape away as much of the fat as possible, and another day or more to dehydrate. "It took a while to figure how far to take it," Merges says. "But it's definitely popular."

The focus on what is essentially street food—no matter how gussied up—was seemingly a strange turn for Merges, who was one of the most high-profile alums to leave Charlie Trotter's after it closed earlier this year. Merges originally wanted to open an American restaurant (something he still hopes to do), but after settling on a location in the hip Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, he decided instead on yakitori. "Street food is the great equalizer—no glamour required," Yusho's website states.

Merges is an also aficionado of Japanese cuisine and culture, as well as an adherent of sorts to the warrior code of bushido, admiring the focus and discipline it imparts as much as he does the simple purity of Japanese cuisine. "I wanted to keep [our menu] clean and focused," he says, pointing out that in Japan, you might have a restaurant devoted simply to one type of yakitori. "I wanted to make sure the food spoke for itself, where it was recognizable and delicious."