The McNamara Cooking Dialogue

It really does. Alton Brown covered making popcorn without a special popcorn maker  or a microwave on Good Eats using this recipe. Inspired, I bought some white and yellow popcorn from the bulk food aisle at Whole Foods and tried this over the weekend. "Real" popcorn truly is better than microwave popcorn. Even without a topping, the popcorn I made came out at least as good as the best movie theatre popcorn I've had. Adding just a touch of real melted butter really completed the "dish."

This was really easy and took no more than five minutes. I was surprised, because it normally seems harder to make the TV recipes in real life. In this case, it seemed easier than it had looked on TV. Next time I'll have to try some sort of topping.

Popcorn keeps. This was just as good the next day.

Use medium heat -- the first time I tried this I used high heat and the popcorn looked fine but didn't taste as good as it did made over medium heat.

The different popcorns really do taste different. I liked the yellow quite a bit more than the white, even though the yellow was slightly less expensive. I'm going to try ordering some of the more interesting varieties from Wisconsin Gold. They have red, blue, and various heirloom popcorns for sale. A sampler pack (a half pound of each type) from them seems like it should be fun to try. Searching the web for folks selling heirloom or specialty popcorn returned only references to Wisconsin Gold -- if someone knows of another source, please let me know.

Note: This was also posted to my blog. If my brothers don't start posting here soon I'm going to start only putting these entries up there.