Arts: You?re Doing It Wrong: Popcorn

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Brow Beat You're Doing It Wrong: Popcorn By Gilad Edelman Posted Thursday, Aug 02, 2012, at 01:00 PM ET When I was a kid, there were two kinds of popcorn, as far as I knew: movie theater and microwave. (The only exception was the output from my grandma's electric air-popper, which saved me the trouble of finding out what packing peanuts tasted like.) Most of my grown-up friends still seem to hold this benighted worldview. In fact, serving popcorn made on the stove, rather than in the microwave, is the most reliable way I've found to impress guests without doing anything actually impressive. Look, I get why people eat microwave popcorn. It's good in the same way Doritos are good: Doused in artificial flavoring, it's addictive and crazy salty, and it leaves your hands covered in weird powdery stuff. As with most commercial snack foods, its flavor seems designed to be both intense and fleeting, so that you can't stop yourself from reaching for the next handful, even though the payoff diminishes with each bite. Stovetop popcorn, on the other hand, tastes good in the way that real food tastes good. The key is the oil, which lends a satisfying savoriness that actually gets better with each mouthful, making the last few bites feel pretty decadent. (Have you ever wondered why movie popcorn is even more orgiastically addictive than the microwave kind? It's popped in amounts of oil that would make Mike Bloomberg weep.) Any oil should work, but extra virgin olive oil will yield by far the most delicious results. And stovetop ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Paint it Black! And Red! And Put a Flag on It! An Ode to the Olympic Fencing Mask. Is Air Conditioning Bad for You? How Not To Defend Voter ID	Advertisement
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