How To Make Your Chicken Fried Steak Keto-Friendly

While steak is a reliably keto-friendly food if you broil, grill, or pan-fry it, once you get into the realm of chicken-fried steak, things get a little trickier. The breading that makes this steak "chicken fried," after all, is the kind of thing you can't eat on a keto diet. If you opt to make your steak country-fried instead of chicken-fried, you might be able to get away with a simple ingredient swap. Since the former preparation involves merely dipping the steak in flour rather than breading it, all you need to do is replace the all-purpose flour with a keto-friendly option such as almond or coconut flour. If you want your steak chicken-fried and keto, though, we have a solution that will let you lower the carbs: pork rinds.

In our chicken-fried steak recipe from developer Keith Kamikawa, the steaks are "breaded" in cornmeal, thus giving them a cornbread-like crust. Very tasty, but it's not very keto-friendly as cornmeal is too high-carb to make the list of keto-approved foods. If you swap this ingredient out for a breading made from crumbled pork rinds, however, you should be good to go since the keto diet gives these a green light.

Pork rinds are actually better for you than you might think. While not exactly a superfood, they are low in carbs and high in protein, thus making them a pretty keto-friendly snack all on their own. Plain pork rinds can be a bit boring, but these days they come in a plethora of flavors ranging from pickle to pineapple to pizza. In addition to eating them straight out of the bag, though, they can be also used in place of various carb-heavy cooking ingredients. Not only can they be substituted for breadcrumbs, but if crushed into dust they can also make for a keto-friendly flour replacement. This means that they can be used to thicken the gravy for your chicken-fried steak, thus making that dish keto-friendly, as well.

Besides chicken-fried steak, you could use pork rind crumbs to "bread" chicken-fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, or schnitzel, or give your keto-friendly casserole a crunchy crust. You can also use pork rind flour to make the crust for a keto pizza or whole rinds to replace tortilla chips in keto nachos. Pork rinds can take the place of chips as a dipper for salsa or guacamole, too, or be broken into chunks to serve as carb-free croutons or crostini.