Hot Popcorn: The First Popcorn Was Made by Accident. Now There Are Better Ways (2024)

IFALTERED WHEN striding briskly through the aisles of a gigantic food show in Chicago last year. I was determined to avoid taking any more of the hundreds of samples offered by members of the Food Marketing Institute, but I had caught a whiff of caramel corn being made in an old-fashioned Cracker Jack cart. In a trance I lined up for my own box. It was of course better than the Cracker Jack I remembered from circuses long ago—not only crunchy, salty, and sweet but warm and fresh, too. I wondered as I scratched at the bottom of the box (there was no surprise) what had become of my seemingly innate aversion to even relatively innocuous forms of junk food, and knew that it was time to surrender to the lures of popcorn.

I was by no means alone. Popcorn stores had already replaced chocolatechip-cookie stores as trendy low-cost food franchises, offering popcorn in such misguided flavors as root beer, strawberry, piha colada, and watermelon. Sticky artificial flavorings did little to encourage popcorn devotees, and the cute shops are already being replaced by cute muffin and cinnamon-bun shops. Sales of popcorn, however, both popped and unpopped, have climbed steadily in the past five years—by 12 percent in 1987, according to Snack Food magazine—and show no signs of decreasing.

The rise can be attributed largely to microwave popcorn, sales of which increased by 41 percent in 1987 and by 74 percent the year before. All over the country vending-machine centers and offices with microwave ovens smell like movie theaters—that is, like salt, oil, and popcorn, which is what most microwave-popcorn packages contain. So do snack-food packages of popped corn, which are also selling well. Smartfood, for example, a popcorn coated with oil and powdered white cheddar cheese (no fluorescent-orange stains), has in three years become ubiquitous in delicatessens and on office desks in New England, where it has claimed more than 50 percent of popped-popcorn sales. Smartfood is sold as far south as Virginia and as far west as Michigan, but faces a tough fight: already nearly every producer of snack-food popcorn has come out with a white cheddar version.

Popcorn doesn’t have to be junk food, of course. It has commendable amounts of fiber and is low in calories if unencumbered by oil, butter, caramel, or white-cheese powder. There are about 110 calories in an ounce (two tablespoons or so) of unpopped corn, which makes about four cups of popped corn. Weight-loss groups include fat-free popcorn on their diets; the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Dental Association advocate it for snacks. Popcorn can even make a fine breakfast, with milk and sugar, or dinner, with, say, olive oil and grated Parmesan cheese, to which you can add garlic, herbs, and spices. A surprising number of cooks I know do, in fact, eat popcorn for dinner, whether or not they’re on a diet. It’s hard to find someone who doesn’t love popcorn, secretly or openly.

IT’S ALSO HARD to find a popcorn to love. Taste is usually the last thing growers and manufacturers look for in a hvbrid of popcorn, which is a different kind of corn from sweet corn and corn used for animal feed. Growers want a popcorn hybrid that is untemperamental and gives high yields. Manufacturers want high expansion—literally, the most bang for the buck—and low numbers of unpopped kernels. (In talking to many researchers and manufacturers I hoped to assemble a lexicon of colorful synonyms for unpopped kernels but found disappointingly few. The standard terms are old maids and widows, and the tersest term I heard was duds; the best is Betty Crocker’s—-flopcorn.) The greatest expansion is in “butterfly,” or “snowflake,” popcorn, which explodes in all directions. Most unpopped popcorn sold to consumers today is butterfly. “Mushroom” popcorn usually explodes in one direction, forming a spheroid head, and is used for commercial popcorn that is coated; it is tougher than butterfly and doesn’t taste as good, but it doesn’t break into crumbs at the bottom of the bag when shipped. Growers and manufacturers also value “hull-less" popcorn, which isn’t really hull-less: the hull shatters when it pops, making the popped “flakes” more tender. White popcorn usually has a lighter hull than yellow and is sometimes called premium, even though it rarely tastes better than yellow.

The moisture level in all popcorn must be brought down from a natural level of about 16 percent to between 13.5 and 14 percent, or the popcorn won’t pop. Drying can be done in the field or with heat. The corn is either allowed to dry on the ear and then shelled or shelled by the combine that picks the ears and then dried. Ear-picking is more expensive but damages kernel hulls much less than field-shelling, and results in a higher percentage of popped kernels.

Orville Redenbacher, a real person— an agri-businessman from Indiana— starred the vogue for “gourmet" popcorn in the late 1970s, when he marketed a hybrid with a big kernel that offered high expansion and few unpopped kernels. He avoided flopcorn by ear-picking the corn and packaging the kernels in a jar, which keeps the moisture content stable. (The best way to store any popcorn is in a jar with a tight seal, kept at room temperature. The freezer, which is often recommended, is in the long run dehydrating and can impart off-flavors; the refrigerator dehydrates popcorn even faster.) Redenbacher’s company is now owned by Beatrice/Hunt-Wesson, and smaller companies have copied his ideas about ear-picking and packaging. They have also paid more attention to flavor. The best-tasting of the large-kernel corns that I have found arc Chateauneuf Du Pop, cleverly packaged in wine bottles by Damon-Worth, an Ohio firm, and sold in gourmet shops across the country, and Old Capital, an Indiana brand that will soon be marketed nationally and will appear in video stores paired with Mars candy. Big popcorn doesn’t necessarily mean good popcorn, as Redenbacher proved. White Cat Corn, sold at high prices in canning jars with old-fashioned hand-drawn labels, expands to bigger flakes than any other I tried, and has the texture of Styrofoam.

My favorite popcorns are in fact the smaller varieties, which big manufacturers want nothing to do with, since they offer such low expansion. E. P. Andrews, an Iowa firm, sells Ladyfinger corn, with very small white or vellow kernels. There’s blue popcorn, from Blue Heaven, the people in New Mexico who brought you blue tortilla chips and blue cornmeal-muffin mix, and Cornfetti, parti-colored popcorn also packaged in wine bottles by DamonWorth. There is also black popcorn, which is grown in Illinois and is available through both Damon-Worth and Williams-Sonoma. Colored corns pop into white flakes; blue and black become luminous. I found that all of the small varieties have a more interesting texture than the big ones—they’re more crunchy, because of the higher proportion of hull—and the blue and black have enough corn flavor to be served unsalted and unbuttered, and without apologies.

No hybrid developer in the world can explain just why corn pops. Everyone agrees that the heated moisture in a kernel partly gelatinizes the starch grains and that the ensuing steam bursts through the hull, and the starchy endosperm flies out and solidifies. But whv is anybody’s guess. The riddle of popcorn, probably the world’s first cultivated corn, awaits a modern Curie.

HOW YOU POP corn matters more to how it tastes than the kind you buy. I’ll go in order of appearance in history, omitting campfires and hearths (to which you can apply stovetop rules). Hot-oil popping produces the greatest volume if done properly, but it’s awfully hard to get the hang of doing it on the stove, and I’ll admit that the essential finesse eludes me. The rules, however, are clear. Use a heavy pan and coat the bottom with a film of vegetable or olive oil. Butter will burn at the temperatures required to pop corn, which start at 350 degrees. The ideal popping temperature is from 400 to 460 degrees. The standard proportions are three parts popcorn to one part oil, although you don’t need that much oil. You can use different kinds of oil. For example, Dan Holmes, the chef of the Downtown Cafe, in Boston, pops corn in half olive oil and half bacon fat—rendered fats can withstand high temperatures—for himself after his patrons have gone home. Don’t add salt, which will toughen the corn, or herbs or other seasonings, which will scorch. Heat the oil until two or three kernels pop and then add the rest of the popcorn. It ought to cover the bottom in one layer; too little will encourage the oil to become overheated, and the kernels will scorch and pop into pitiable, stunted flakes. Use a ventilated frying-pan lid, so that steam can escape. lest the Hakes reabsorb it and become tough and soggy. If you don’t have a ventilated cover, be sure to empty the popcorn into a bowl as soon as it’s done.

The more agitation during popping the better, since the heat will be distributed evenly and the unpopped kernels will fall onto the hot surface. This is why a popper with a stirring mechanism pops corn the fastest and with the best volume. Felknor Marketing, of Loudon, Tennessee, makes the Theater Popper, a thin tin bucket with a vented cover and a paddle at the bottom that you crank during popping. Once the oil is hot, the corn pops extremely fast—it billows suddenly and threatens to overflow, like soapsuds in a Doris Day comedy. Felknor claims that its popper can be used without oil, but each time I tried that, even though I had seasoned the popper first, the bottom turned black and so did the kernels. The home popper that popcorn manufacturers use to test their products is the Stir Crazy, by West Bend, a large and uncomely machine with its own heating element, which is said to rival concession-stand poppers. It continuously sweeps the kernels over a Teflon surface. In both these poppers ir is relatively easy to cover popcorn with caramel or other coatings.

Hot-air popping is the brest way to make popcorn without fat. The poppers have a rotating hot metal cup with a fan that blows the kernels in hot air until they pop. Air is less efficient than oil at transferring heat, and there is often flopcorn at the bottom of the cup. The most frequent criticism of air poppers is that they make dry popcorn. Certainly the hot air is dcssicating, but hot-air poppers eject flakes almost as soon as they are popped, and I think that what most people are missing is the fat they associate with popcorn. Another cause for complaint is that the force of exploding kernels can cause unpopped kernels to be ejected with popped ones. The Popcorn Institute, a trade association of popcorn processors, recommends the hot-air poppers made by Presto, Wear-Ever, and Sears; a processor who did not wish to be named claimed that the Presto ejects more unpopped kernels than the WearEver. Consumer Reports will be issuing its own evaluation of poppers and popcorn brands next year.

MICROWAVE POPPING has revivified the popcorn industry. The great majority of owners of microwave ovens have made popcorn in them, which as it happens delights neither manufacturers of microwave ovens nor packagers of popcorn. Oven manufacturers dislike popping because it’s such an inefficient use of microwaves. Moisture in food attracts microwaves; the small amount of moisture in popcorn means that only about a third of the microwaves emitted find anything to absorb them. (Oil is best avoided, because it could melt any plastic container with which it came in contact.) Popped corn is easily turned to carbon in a microwave oven. Popped flakes are an excellent insulator, and by the time microwaves heat most of the kernels enough to pop them, the flakes can have burned. Many people pop corn in paper bags, which can catch fire when people keep turning on the oven for thirty more seconds, hoping to pop all the corn; recycled paper often contains metal shards, which can cause abnormal heating patterns.

Packagers have had a difficult time of it too, though they can hardly mind the business that microwave popcorn has brought in. Bags for ready-to-cook popcorn have been a great problem, with big companies searching for solutions that will work in the many kinds of ovens people own, and copying one another. Growers have had to find hybrids that work well in the ovens, which so far seem to be those whose moisture can be easily regulated. Nearly all high-quality brands are carefully calibrated and will pop in a microwave oven—you don’t need to buy “microwave” popcorn.

I, too, thought for a while that microwave popping was a lot of trouble. I succeeded in melting the bottom of a plastic bowl and nearly cracked open a flawed ceramic bowl in my experiments. Because the kernels must be concentrated in as little space as possible to best attract heat, I tried putting them in plastic cups, which melted completely, and in small glass jars, which became extremely hot. The lesson that I resisted learning is to use heatproof glass and plastic containers designed for use in microwave ovens. After rigging up various systems I gave in and bought plastic microwave popping dishes, and must reluctantly recommend them because they work so well, although they are ugly and take up shelf space. Most have a cone-shaped receptacle for kernels, to concentrate them in one place; some force the kernels into a ring, which seems to work better in ovens without turntables. Watch the popcorn carefully—the kernels pop much faster than in a bowl or a bag. Fifteen seconds too much can dry out and toughen the corn, and thirty seconds too much can burn it. Reconcile yourself to flopcorn, which is preferable to tough popcorn. Don’t try to re-pop duds, either—once they have been heated, it’s too late. Remember that popcorn is cheap.

The technology of packaged microwave popcorn has evolved greatly since Pillsbury introduced a frozen version, in 1982. Consumers frequently burned popcorn in their irrationally thrifty desire to pop every kernel or their assumption that the paper bag (made of a heatresistant but unfortunately not reusable paper) had to be full, whereas it was purposely extra large to accommodate steam. Today most manufacturers use “susceptor pads"—paper-thin metallic squares at the bottom of the bags—to better distribute energy. Frequent use of these bags can damage plastic oven floors, so put them on a heatproof dish or surface.

The way manufacturers make sure that the kernels are concentrated in a small space is to embed them in a brick of fat, which begins to explain why I disapprove of packaged microwave popcorn. Almost all of it has unacceptable levels of fat and salt—even the “natural” flavors (the best-tasting “natural” massproduced microwave popcorn I tried was Pop-Secret, by Betty Crocker; Old Capital, Jolly Time, and Act II also produce very good ones). And if the brick is frozen, the fat will likely be coconut oil, the most highly saturated of all fats. Nearly all commercial popcorn is popped in coconut oil, which gives it a rich “mouthfeel.” Movie theaters mix the oil with salt and coloring, and snackfood manufacturers mix it with all kinds of flavors. It is possible, however, to make your own junk food, even without coconut oil. One of Redenbacher’s popcorns now comes with packets of powdered sour cream and onion, which you are directed to toss with the flakes. This is primitive technology, according to R. F. Schiffmann, a consultant on newproduct development with his own firm in New York City. He dismisses separate flavor packets as “a trivial answer to a complex question” and is working on putting everything in the same bag as the kernels.

I like popcorn as natural as it comes, and think that any seasoning should be from your own spice cabinet and refrigerator. Once you arrive at just the right herb blend, coating the popcorn with it is simple if you use butter or oil but a problem if you prefer fat-free popcorn. Most seasoning falls to the bottom. One solution is to use something in a fine powder, like paprika. Another is to mix the seasonings with tomato juice or buttermilk, toss the popcorn quickly with just enough liquid to coat it lightly, spread it one layer thick on a baking sheet, and dry it for a few minutes in a preheated 300-degree oven. Soon you will devise ways to substitute popcorn for nearly every course of a meal. Just remember not to serve them all at once. □