When my wife first moved in she made me watch all of Little House on the Prairie. Ever since then popcorn has become a regular thing here. It’s a perfect low calorie snack.
My standard is peanut oil and popcorn and a little bit of koshi salt on top once it’s done. I just use a standard pot for making mine because I’m not about to deal with a popcorn maker.
Sometimes we’ll shave some red dark pepper chocolate just sprinkle on top. Sometimes my wife wants Raisinets in hers.
Rarely I’ll use Bacon fat instead of peanut oil. On extra rare occasion I might use duck fat.
We never put butter on it because we don’t tend to stock salted butter, although that is changing now that I’m making more sourdough. So maybe I will add some water to it in the near future.
What are you doing with your popcorn?
Cost per person: 38¢
I’ve experimented a good bit with popcorn, starting with the stir/shake-pot method, graduating to an cheap air-popper, and finally discovering that one can pop it between two baking sheets in the oven(!) The advantage with the latter two is that you can more exactly control the oil content. Oh, also-- an air-fryer is super-useful for crisping up stale popcorn and many other snacks. (seriously, it’s a miracle worker)
I’ve also tried all kinds of different spritzes and coatings, experimenting with curry powder, nutritional yeast, chili powder, grated parm, garlic powder, black pepper, red pepper, chipotle powder, pseudo-butter powder, and then stuff like the Kernal Season’s store-bought stuff.
(their sour cream & onion powder is da bomb, altho sadly my local store doesn’t stock it no more)
There’s also an industry standard item which I haven’t tried yet, but intend to. It’s called “Flavacol,” and is apparently theatres’ ‘secret sauce’ to making their popcorn so yummy and buttery, even though it’s just a powder. By reputation, if you’re planning on trying powder flavorings, that one seems far and away the one to get, if you can.
Flavacol is just an artificial butter flavor with salt made into really fine particles. But you are correct, any time you’ve been to any business or place that had a popcorn machine you can pretty well guarantee they are using it.
I used to make the popcorn at Target and it’s what we used.
Oh it’s also cheap as shit and the carton will last you forever so just pick some up if you are curious.
Yup!
But I’ll say this-- there are many, many butter-flavorings out there for popcorn, and yet “Flavacol” is the one repeatedly, commonly used in the popcorn sales industry at large.
Personally, I would guess that tells a certain tale, amigo.