Popcorn, butter, Parmigiano, curry

I wasn't even sure this corn would work anymore but in the end there were only a few old maids.

How rude. 

Ever since I read in Harold McGee's book, the cooks bible actually, that popcorn is best heated slowly not quickly as I had been doing and with an open lid not a closed lid as I had been doing, and incorporated those two changes my popcorn has improved immeasurably. It's crunchy now. I'll be giving away that 80's hair-dryer popcorn maker. 

This popcorn is heavy with oil and butter, the seeds cooked coated in oil with a little extra slopping around, oil that can take the eventual high heat. I used olive oil, not the best kind of oil for this but I like it and it works. The seeds stirred around as a machine would while they are heating. A screen is placed over the pot when they start popping. Then, it's on. The pot shaken for the seeds to make their way down and have contact with the pot. Listening for the sound of seeds shaking. The pot turned out as the last pops space too far apart to go any longer without burning. 

Popcorn dumped.

Butter goes into the hot pot and melts and bubbles, lots and lots of glorious butter, this whole effort is all carrier for wonderful butter. 

And other things. 

Whatever you like. The butter will help  it stick. 

When the popcorn is gone and all that remains are the kernels and the unstuck dregs. Lots and lots of glorious dregs. This whole effort is to get at those wonderful rich fatty spiced up intense cheesy butter-soaked dregs.

Not just regular butter, butter from cows. Not just regular cows. Cows that eat grass. Not just regular grass, super green lush happy densely full of chlorophyll grass. Grass in France! Or maybe England or somewhere. I don't know. It's the only butter they had.

What is curry? It is a billion possible combinations of untold number of spices. Every household in India has their own rather complex favorite mixtures. What is in this little bag? Curry.

Cooks use the elements that go into their mixture, not buy the whole mixture pre-mixed like this. That cedes control. The cook will have all the elements already. They bring out their little masala daba, their spice tin, and get to mixing. This sack labeled curry is yellow with turmeric and that would be one spice in the masala daba added to cooking at the end. Not dumped in all at once. And not on popcorn like this. But hey, what the heck. The spices have five seconds to bloom in the hot bubbling butter. 

Popcorn

Popped in a pot on medium heat covered with a screen, not with a heavy lid so the steam escapes without moistening the popped kernels. 

Hot evacuated pot used to melt generous butter, chipotle powder and salt, then drizzled over popped corn while tossing.

Grated Parmigiano sprinkled over top without tossing, its weight carries it down to the end.

Popcorn, best in the galaxy

The seeds are brought up to temperature slowly and evenly in oil and butter, just enough to coat the seeds. 

The pot is not covered tightly, moisture must escape to allow the popcorn to become crunchy so a screen top is used instead of the pots own heavy lid.

Additional butter is melted in the hot emptied pot after the popped corn is dumped into a bowl. The seasonings have just that long, only a few seconds to heat in the hot oil before drizzled over the cooked popcorn. Sprinkled with grated hard cheese while the popped kernels are still hot. 

Salt smashed to powder, Madras curry, cayenne, garlic, butter, Parmigiano Reggiano ready to go after the kernels are fully popped. The cheese is reserved for the moment.

Grated hard cheese sprinkled over the bowl of popcorn after the seasoned butter is drizzled providing small oil patches for the grated cheese to stick.

Popcorn

Those bags of microwave popcorn that are available all over the place sure are convenient, but one time I opened a bag to see what was inside and smelled the contents. The oil smelled rancid and decidedly non-buttery and awful with chemicals. Put me off microwave popcorn permanently and I don't care how great it smells when it's cooked. It must be some kind of dark chemistry magic. 

This corn comes from the bulk bins at whole foods and kept in a jar in the pantry. I can mill the popcorn to powder and make homemade polenta. I can use the milled corn for addition to bread, cornbread, biscuits, to mix with steamed rice, as a corn-flavored thickener, to supplement masa for tortillas, coat fried chicken and fish along with wheat flour, crackers, all kinds of odd and adventurous things. Try doing any of that with microwave popcorn -- truly a one trick pony

Kosher salt or sea salt is crushed to fine powder. It can also be processed in a coffee mill. The idea is to have the smallest possible crystals.  

Parmigiano Reggiano, undisputed king of all cheeses, celery salt on impulse, garlic powder, a very fine powder also from the bulk bins at Whole Foods and unlike the granular form available in tiny jars in the grocery store spice section. Some kind of curry probably Masala, it seems to have a good deal of turmeric in it, cayenne sold in tins. 

Ordinarily I would treat the spices and the cheese separately. Unsalted butter melted in the same pot that popped the corn off the heat but while it is still hot. This way the seasoning can cook briefly in the hot melted butter before being drizzled over the popcorn without melting the cheese. But this time I mixed it all together and sprinkled it over the finished popcorn that was drizzled with butter. The wet butter gives the finely grated cheese and the powdered spices a way to stick to the popcorn. The cohesion can be assisted with a few seconds in the microwave which will then melt the cheese to the surface of the popcorn so it doesn't all end up at the bottom of the bowl, although that can be sort of fun too. 

Exactly 1/2 cup popcorn seeds works perfectly with this 3-quart pot. I think it's 3-quart, I didn't check. 

The butter is cut and ready to go, like the grated cheese and the salt and other spices, mise en place, if you like. The popcorn cooks very quickly and there will be no time to root around for various additions. 

Vegetable oil, one tablespoon approximately, just enough to coat the kernels, So two types of fat; vegetable for higher cooking heat, butter to finish, to flavor the corn, and to provide a damp surface for grated cheese, salt, and spices to adhere.

This pot has a lid but it fits too tightly. The lid must vent steam or else the popcorn will not be crunchy. Therefore, this splatter guard screen is substituted for the lid. 

The popcorn is dumped into a waiting bowl as soon as it rises to the top of the pot. The heat is cut off. Butter (and usually spices) are added to the hot pot. The spices cook and the butter is drizzled over the popcorn. Cheese is drizzled over the top of the popcorn while gently tossing. 

Cheese and spices. Salt and pepper. Vegetable oil to cook and butter to flavor. This popcorn is unlike anything you've ever tried. It is available nowhere but your own kitchen. Because the spices and their amounts are all impulse, it is never precisely the same any two times, so the variations are infinite. 

Shrimp and scallop polenta

protein and sauce	popcorn polenta
Thai curry, chipotle, garlic, mustard ↑
pineapple and mango ↑

Oh, my God, I almost forgot to put in a tomato.

The pineapple and mango up there was frozen from fresh, and it sure comes in handy.

Butter and chicken broth is in both columns. I also added a little bit of wine and a tiny bit of sugar but I didn't show that. Also salt and pepper.

If I had coconut milk, then I'd have used that. 

Popcorn polentahas become one of my favoritest things in the whole world. Grits. With chicken this time. I do not know why. The chicken breast, pardon me, 'chest,' was thawed and must be used and because I wanted this to have a little bit more substance on account of I've been feeling very thin lately. Now that I have some discernible body fat, I want to keep it.

Red Thai curried popcorn

*Three quart Magnalite pot

* splash screen

* one half cup popcorn kernels

* one tablespoon vegetable oil

* two tablespoons unsalted butter

* small pile grated Parmigiano Reggiano or some other hard cheese

* teaspoon red Thai curry

* 1/2 teaspoon coriander

* 1/4 teaspoon sea salt.

McGee page 480. As the temperature inside the corn kernel reaches and passes the boiling point, the protein matrix and starch granules soften, and moisture in the granules turns into steam. The steam softens the starch even more, and the many thousands of little steam pockets exert a growing pressure against the hull. The softening of starch and protein continues until the internal pressure approaches seven times the external pressure of the atmosphere, at which point the hull breaks open. The sudden pressure drop inside the kernal causes the pockets of steam to expand, and with them expands the soft protein-starch mixture, which puffs up and then stiffens as it cools off, becoming light and crisp. (If the popping is done in a tightly covered pan that offers no escape for the water vapor, the endosperm will retain it and be tough and chewy; the pan lid should be left slightly ajar.)

Coffee grinder grits, two eggs, spinach and cheese, orange

The green and beige stuff on the left is the chicken and mushroom and zucchini and broccoli filling used for arancini down there ↓.

See, the 'popcorn milled in the coffee grinder' experiment had to wait for the arrival of the new coffee grinder. This is what is left of the old coffee grinder.

Poor thing. Autopsy went badly. This old work-horse was originally purchased to grind coffee but then performed double duty grinding spices. Then eventually became devoted exclusively to spices, mostly seeds sometimes breadcrumbs and such. After decades of use, hang on, *counts* yup, decades, I finally accidentally left it too close to a burner and melted the bottom. I thought I could fix it. Hey, I'm a guy, we think we can fix anything. Things were going along rather well until a tiny screw fell off the screwdriver. I imagined it was stuck to a magnet on the motor. I tried to get it. Wouldn't come out. Dug deeper. Tore it apart, and let me tell you, it was a bastard taking apart too. Toughest little machine I ever tore apart. It absolutely would. not. come. apart. I pounded it with a hammer and it wouldn't even crack. The blade wouldn't pop off nor unscrew. The shaft was fixed solidly through the body and would not be removed. I used a dozen tools. Brought out the heavy guns, finally I had to hack-saw the casing in five different places just to get this motor out. The body was in tiny plastic bits, and there was a huge pile of plastic dust by the time I was done. The blades bent upwards, and the tin cup destroyed. But I got the motor. Yay! Anyway, if the new one is built half as good as the old one I'll be quite satisfied. Incidentally, I think I paid $40.00 for the first one, and less than $20.00 for the replacement -- a bargain at twice the cost.

Then I found the tiny screw on the sofa cushion.

So there was that. Here's this.

Conclusion: A coffee grinder can be used to mill popcorn for grits and the result will be a great improvement over pre-milled corn because the oil within the kernels is fresh and every element of the original kernels are in tact with no loss to processing, marketing, or transportation.

The result is uneven granules unless you continued to grind the grain to dust which is not what you want with grits. Stopping soon enough to preserve granules large enough to be considered grits results in a few overly large granules that must be removed and either discarded or re-milled. A sifter with sufficiently large holes would be helpful that would allow the right size granules to pass while holding back larger granules for further processing. I don't have one of those, but I intend to keep an eye out for one.

I do believe this concludes my messing around with popcorn for awhile.

Milled popcorn

OK Fine, so I'm obsessed. The purpose of this experiment is to see if the mill would work for popcorn and to see if popcorn could be used for polenta.

Conclusion: It does, and it can. In fact, it's qualitatively better than the unidentified milled corn whatever it is, either flint or dent. Popcorn is a hybrid, either one can be used for popcorn, I expect this is hybrid flint because there isn't a noticeable dent in the kernels. It grinds faster and more easily than wheat, which is surprising, although on coarse setting, the mill grinds more finely than commercial meal, and way too finely for grits. On fine this mill produces corn flour, which I suppose would make a very smooth cornbread or coating for fried foods, although less interesting texture. The ancients would have given their right arm for a mill like this. Or somebody's arm.

I suppose I should have made the polenta with water then tested for corn taste only. Oh well. I can still tell the fat in the corn is clear and clean, and there is no lingering sense of processing whatsoever.

This polenta was cooked in chicken broth and flavored with cayenne, arbol, and chipotle chiles with Parmisiano Reggiano, so the corn flavor was heavily masked. Even so, the corn flavor comes through nicely and more strongly than pre-milled corn.

Next experiment: Coffee grinder.