It’s so unusual, exciting and adaptable. You can make it yourself, buy it in a thousand difference flavours or just get it plain and make your own taste concoctions.
Never mind sitting eating it in the cinema: popcorn is the new potato, there’s just so much you can do with it.
Forget bread and try salt and pepper popcorn with tomato soup. It’s fantastic, I know because I’ve tried it!
You can add it to the top of an apple crumble and it goes great with cheese on toast. Just toast the bread, put salted popcorn and mayo on top of it, add some cheese and put it under the grill. It will freak you out.
It also works really well on a pizza: take lots of tomatoes, cheese, sweetcorn and salted popcorn and enjoy.
You can sprinkle some curry powder and Cajun pepper on it and add it to the top of a curry for a bit of extra spice or buy plain popcorn and mix it with mint sauce. What you get is weird but fantastic: it’s like eating a mint factory.
It works really well in macaroni cheese: chuck a lot of sweetcorn, tonnes of cheese, onions, tomatoes and popcorn in and give it a go. The popcorn doesn’t dissolve, it just stays puffy. It’s fantastic.
It’s also great with mashed potatoes: add a handful of cheese and popcorn, some corned beef and gravy and there’s your meal.
You can add it to porridge with honey, dip it in hummus or one of my favourite things to do is to add it to custard and watch it float to the top. It’s magic and kids will love it.
Alternatively, add salted popcorn to a pan with melted chocolate and crushed almonds and make crispy cakes or get some wholemeal bread, lots of peanut butter, sweet popcorn and maple syrup and make a peanut butter and popcorn sandwich. It’s so good Elvis will come back to life!
Popcorn is just so exciting and whatever you put on it is what it tastes of.
It’s an American idea that we have embraced. It loves cheese, sweet and sour flavours and it works well with anything savoury. It’s almost like grown up nachos and it’s good for you because it’s full of protein and carbohydrates.
It’s something we’ve been using in the restaurant for years and I think we should celebrate it massively.
So forget your crisps and raise a glass to popcorn: one of the most adaptable ingredients around.
Popcorn is a great source of protein and carbohydrates but did you know that it also contains more iron than eggs, peanuts, spinach or roast beef?
Here are 10 more fascinating facts that you might not know about popcorn.
1 Compared to most snack foods, popcorn is low in calories. Air-popped popcorn has only 31 calories per cup, while oil-popped has 55 calories.
2 There are two different types of popcorn: snowflake and mushroom. Snowflake is used in cinemas because it looks and pops bigger and mushroom is used in sweets because it doesn’t crumble.
3 Popcorn kernels can pop up to three feet in the air.
4 The world’s largest popcorn ball was created by volunteers in Sac City, Iowa in February, 2009. It weighed 5,000 pounds, had a 28.8 foot circumference and was over eight feet tall.
5 If you made a trail of popcorn from New York to Los Angeles, you would need more than 352,028,160 popped kernels.
6 Americans consume 17 billion packets of popcorn every year. That’s enough to fill the Empire State Building 18 times.
7 Christopher Columbus allegedly introduced popcorn to Europe in the late 15th century
8 Unpopped kernels are called old maids or spinsters
9 The first commercial popcorn machine was invented by Charles Cretors in Chicago in 1885
10 Popcorn has more protein than any other cereal grain
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