Kettle Corn

I've always wondered about the Popcorn Man stall at the Jan Power Markets. They're a very distinctive red and yellow booth with bags and bags of fresh kettle, caramel and butter salted popcorn made in huge metal vats with rice bran oil and stirred with a long stick. This is their website.

I've always wondered what kettle corn tastes like since its touted as having a lightly glazed salty and sweet flavour. One day, when my Boyfriend and I were planning what to pick for a picnic at the Botanic Gardens, I decided to get some as a snack while we were shopping.

Our first kettle corn

Admittedly, our first taste of the stuff wasn't the best. Alternatively super sweet, and buttery salty, it was like someone had mixed a batch of movie popcorn and caramel corn together and not quite amalgamated the pair. We ate the entire cup but we weren't sure if we liked or disliked it, because we would get a good taste of one flavour, to have the next kernel of corn spoiled by the other flavour and so on. The popcorn itself was fantastic, crunchy, light, fluffy with a predominately lovely mushroom pieces and not many of the butterfly around.

Mushroom vs butterfly

Read up the Wiki article on it for a more in-depth understanding of the difference. It basically boils down to, mushroom are less fragile, are small/compact, tend to weight the same, have more hull pieces and are better for lots of stirring like with caramel/kettle corn. While butterfly are more tender, melt in the mouth texture, they take up a lot of space and have way less hull. Hull being that shiny brown stuff that sticks in your teeth or braces!

So I was really surprised to find myself craving it again the week. That time it was perfect! A wonderful crunchy mixture of salty/sweet caramel like salted caramel! It was amazing. Then I realised, four dollars for a cup of popcorn was ridiculous.

So then I had a brain wave. I knew that one of my friends, NZ-A, knows how to make popcorn the ol' fashioned way, with a hot oiled pan, some popcorn and a deep saucepan. If she could make it, and she said her kids loved making it, then I would do fine as a relatively solid cook. I vaguely remember seeing a packet of popcorn kernels sell quite cheaply at around $1-2 per bag. I googled quite a few recipes as well as the history of kettle corn, good work North American Dutch settlers.

The first batch I made was at my Boyfriend's house. It was terrible, I used a tiny saucepan and a quarter of the popcorn burnt with nowhere to expand into. There was a terrible charred caramel base at the bottom and despite all this, we ate it all.

That saucepan eventually came clean

Not bad looking. Noticeably smoky notes

The second batch I made, scorched the bottom of my saucepan and my mum declared it ruined. She then ate all my popcorn and said it was pretty good, she didn't like the hard kernels leftover but she still ate them. My aunt said the same thing, about how lots of fibre isn't good for her, she has diverticulitis, but she still sat there eating it whilst complaining.

Second batch. Notice the more caramel notes. More shaking required

The third batch was for night shift. This was by far, the most perfect batch I've made to date. Evenly coated, golden brown popcorn pieces with a good combination between salty and sweet. On coming home from work, my mum shoved her fist into the box and ran off to her room with about a third of the box in her hand. When I was shouting at her that it was for work and that she couldn't have any, she was yelling back at me, "JUST GIVE ME A LITTLE. ITS SO GOOD."

Dat popcorn.

Anyway, this is the slightly tweaked recipe I stole from this random blog I found.

Kettle Corn

Uses: pre picnic snacks, night shift snacks, feeling fancy with popcorn

Ingredients:

1-2 tbsp of oil, high smoke point oil is preferable
1/3 cup popping corn kernels
1/4-1/3 cup of sugar*
3/4-1tsp of salt

Ingredients.

*Brown gives a better colour, but clumps, which is hard to separate over burning hot oil. White is easy to distribute. Raw sugar is halfway between both.

Random stuff:
The biggest goddamn saucepan with a lid you have. Preferably cast iron, or something with a heavy heat retaining base. Something that doesn't burn easily.
A hot stove, like induction or gas burner. 
No loose handles.
Oven mitts or a tea towel, so you can hold down the lid without burning.

Instructions:
1. Fill up your saucepan with oil and half the salt. Heat over medium to high heat
2. Once the oil is just starting to smoke, throw in three kernels of popcorn. Put on the lid.
3. Once popped, throw in all your corn.
4. Then throw all your sugar/sugar on top, as evenly as possible
5. Put your lid back on, hold on tight and start shaking your pan. After 2-5 seconds of shaking, put back on heat for another few seconds until it starts popping.
6. Expect nothing to happen for the first 10-30 seconds? Once the kernels start popping, start shaking more vigorously, in a fancy arse tossing salad type motion. Try to do it away from you, so if the lid comes off, you don't get a face full of burning caramel.
7. Once the kernels stop popping every 1-2 seconds, take off heat and keep shaking until the popping slows down. Pop it back on the heat for another few seconds if the popping stops and once the popping restarts, keep shaking.
8. Dump in a large bowl immediately, do not keep it in the pot or it will continue to burn. Eat ASAP or it will go soggy, still delicious but not as delicious as it could be.

There are no pictures of the process because of how fast it cooks. Also my Boyfriend didn't think to help me with making this.

Also! In other news, I've risen to the top 50 of Urbanspoon's Brisbane blogs yay!

Random stats for my blog show that my first post, "Becoming a Cat Lady", is the most popular post. The next most popular food related post is my Cirque review.

The most commonly used search words to get to my blog are, "Crazy cat lady." With 56 hits.