A Little Corny

Lately I've been trying to avoid cooking with certain oils (mainly vegetable oil and Canola oil) because I've heard disturbing things about them that I'd rather not go into right now. Most of the time you can just use butter instead. Unfortunately, my attempt at making popcorn with butter instead of oil didn't go very well. I couldn't get the butter hot enough without going past the dreaded "burn point" so, by the time the popcorn popped, it was pretty much not fit to eat. Here's what it looked like. Yuck!


Since that didn't work, I decided to move on to another method I had read about on the internet. I dumped 1/4c of popcorn into a brown paper bag. Since it was going to go in the microwave, I came up with this method of sealing the bag (I'll admit, I was a little surprised at my clever resourcefulness).


I have a pretty lame microwave (it can't even pop actual microwave popcorn) so I wasn't quite sure how long to zap the kernels or whether this would work at all. I decided five minutes would be plenty of time. It wasn't until about two and a half minutes that I started hearing popping. How exciting! I felt like Dr. Frankenstein- I may have even raised my hands above my head, fingers curled, laughing maniacally and yelled, "It's alive!" Okay, it wasn't that exciting- after all, you get popcorn hot, it's gonna pop. Duh. The pops slowed down and it started to smell a little like overdone popcorn around four and a half minutes so I stopped the microwave and opened the door. Here's what I found...


A puffy bag! Just like the pre-packeaged microwave popcorn you buy in the store. I was pretty amused by this, especially when I opened the bag and dumped out some very happy looking popcorn (much better than the burnt buttery mess from the first attempt).


There were a few burnt pieces that I had to weed out and, after I had devoured the "fruits" of my labor, there were a few more unpopped kernels than I would like to see...


Overall, pretty satisfactory results though. I do plan on doing this again (at least until I can get my hands on an air popper- I feel like the microwave is just a lesser of cooking evils). Also, I think I could train myself to eat the popped popcorn plain but it is quite bland. As is true with most things, butter would make it better.