Popcorn became indelibly associated with cinema-going during the Great Depression (it was cheap and hugely profitable), but it also has an established reputation as a superfood – recently given a boost by longevity expert Dan Buettner, who described popcorn as the best snack to eat if you want to live to 100. “It’s very high in fibre, it’s very high in complex carbohydrates, and it even has more polyphenols than a lot of vegetables,” he said.
Popping corn has been consumed by humans for at least 4,000 years, but its widespread popularity as a snack probably dates to a single event: the Columbian Exposition of 1893, also known as the World’s Fair, held in Chicago.
It was there that inventor Charles Cretors introduced the first mobile, steam-powered popcorn machine, which enabled street vendors to travel to fairgrounds, baseball games and political rallies. At this same exposition, two brothers started selling their own proprietary mix of sweet molasses-coated popcorn and peanuts. Later packaged and sold under the name Cracker Jack, it is often considered to be America’s first junk food.
So popcorn can be good for you or bad for you, depending on how much salt, sugar and fat you add to it. Here are 17 recipes running the entire spectrum, from healthy to indulgent to potentially life-threatening – offered without prejudice.
First up, a spiced popcorn brought to you by the British Heart Foundation. It requires nothing more than a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika and a quarter-teaspoon of ground cumin per 50g of popcorn kernels (this doesn’t seem like enough to me; I’ve never used a quarter-teaspoon of anything). Put everything into a pan with a tight-fitting lid, along with a couple of teaspoons of sunflower oil, and pop.
For a slightly more complex – and saltier – variation, Guardian reader Rachel Kelly offers popcorn with a spiced salt that includes chilli and lime as well as paprika and cumin. Nigel Slater suggests fennel seed and pancetta popcorn in which the corn is popped in a mixture of butter and bacon fat.
The choice between salted and sweetened popcorn divides opinion, although I generally reserve my ire for people who mix the two. It requires no small leap of faith, then, for me to recommend Yotam Ottolenghi’s spicy popcorn, which features a caramel made from butter, sugar, salt, chilli and dried shrimp. The coated popcorn is baked for an hour until it loses its stickiness, then mixed in a two-to-one ratio with plain popcorn.
For a more straightforward toffee popcorn, you can’t go far wrong with a recipe containing only butter and muscovado sugar. Susanna Booth, meanwhile, has a dairy-free toffee popcorn that can be adapted to produce two flavours: margarita (lime and salt) and coffee.
Liam Charles’s honey-caramel popcorn is closer to the traditional American Cracker Jack, although he claims it’s the result of a serendipitous cinema collision between toffee popcorn and honey-roasted nuts. If you’re after a more dedicated recreation of the original, this homemade cracker jack from Brown Eyed Baker is a decent approximation, and even a possible improvement.
Popcorn granola snack bars come with the imprimatur of the Popcorn Board, an awareness-raising nonprofit funded by US popcorn processors, which collectively might be referred to as Big Popcorn. They would like you to eat way more popcorn, and their snack bars are an amalgam of popcorn, peanuts, granola, honey and peanut butter. For a slightly less-stuck-together version of the same idea, try Bombay popcorn mix: peanuts, popcorn, sultanas and crispy chickpeas. For an even more stuck-together version, Tom Kerridge’s popcorn bars are fused with chocolate and marshmallows.
Salted caramel and popcorn crumble choux buns, which include three kinds of sugar and a filling of toffee popcorn cream, bring us quite a long way from superfood territory. If this isn’t the Snack Least Likely to Help You Live to 100, it must surely be on the shortlist.
Popcorn’s status as a whole grain sometimes allows it to make an appearance in bread recipes. In this popcorn bread recipe from Australian Better Homes and Gardens, the popcorn is first reduced to a powder in a blender before being combined with less unusual bread ingredients, such as flour and yeast. Likewise popcorn can be deployed as part of a coating prior to frying fish, as with popcorn and mushroom-crusted tilapia (another idea from Big Popcorn).
From the wilder shores of popcorn-based culinary innovation come not one but two recipes for popcorn salad. The first is a strange but apparently quite traditional picnic dish familiar to residents of the American heartland. This popcorn salad recipe from The Kitchn combines freshly popped popcorn, grated carrots, celery, spring onions, tinned water chestnuts, grated cheddar, bacon, mayonnaise and ranch dressing. Suffice to say it’s not just the popcorn that makes it weird.
The other one – from Three Many Cooks – is a simple rocket and onion salad with a classic vinaigrette dressing, and popcorn. The idea is easier to get your head round if you think of the popcorn as a crouton alternative. Pretend you’re out of croutons.
Finally, popcorn soup. Almost all the recipes I found tell you to whiz and sieve the soup before serving – often several times – so the popcorn element is not textural, except for the few pieces sprinkled on top as a garnish. This popcorn soup recipe from A Food Lover’s Kitchen, modelled on a dish from a Seattle restaurant, also uses fresh corn on the cob. The kernels are first stripped off, and the denuded cobs used to make corn stock. Otherwise it’s popcorn, celery, carrot, onion and cream, resulting in a smooth chowder with a delicious buttery corn taste. Just don’t try to take it to the cinema with you.
