After you bought your home popcorn popping machine, you may have wondered what all the fuss was about. Sure, you have to admit that it looks great sitting in the corner of your home theater room in the basement and it does add to the theater experience by filling the room with that wonderful fresh popcorn aroma. Your friends always go out of their way to comment on how much fun it is to scoop some fresh popped corn from the bin into a red and white striped bag before the show.
But, when it’s all said and done, you wonder if the popcorn it produces really tastes that much better than what you were making before in your old cast iron kettle. Luckily, with a few basic techniques and a little professional theater knowledge, you can transform home popcorn machines from a decorative party novelty into machines that produces genuinely great flavored corn.
The first trick is to pour some popcorn salt into the cooker before you start popping and you will end up with perfectly seasoned corn. When it comes to popping oil, corn oil works best, but canola oil is perfectly acceptable as well. As for the corn itself, plain old yellow corn will produce the largest, most satisfying kernels. White corn will pop with fewer hulls, but the small kernels it produces doesn’t really live up to the big screen. If you have an aversion to hulls, try the gourmet black popcorn that’s now on the market; It produces large kernels with very few hulls.
If you like rich, buttery popcorn but hate getting grease all over your clothes, try substituting half of the popping oil for butter. The milk fats in the butter will burn slightly as it pops, but the discoloration will be barely noticeable and you will have wonderful buttered popcorn with no mess.
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