Make Popcorn With Too Much Oil
Aside from watching Bake Off on a weekly basis, I don’t spend my free time browsing food and generally avoid any celebrity cooking videos. Having a lot of money is the best way, so – unless they’re a Barefoot Countess or some other rich culinary character – they rarely have a reason to come up with cheaper, quicker, or easier ways to cook and eat. That being said, Cameron Diaz is good at making popcorn, which I would never have known if Lifehacker’s video producer, Joel Kahn, hadn’t sent me this adorable little clip.
Diaz’s sweatshirt prepared me for the worst, but my fears were quickly dispelled when I saw her add a damn ton of butter to her popcorn pot, which is exactly what I do. If you have never grown corn in what society considers “too much oil,” I suggest you try it with the next batch. I usually use Jessica Coslow’s ratio of 1/2 cup oil to 1/3 cup unopened kernels , but Cameron ‘s eye-to-eye approach works just as well. She pours the butter into the pan until it rises “up the curve of the pan” (which looks like a cup), then adds enough popcorn until the butter covers the kernels. She covers the pan with a lid, turns on the fire (I recommend medium heat) and lets it burst without shaking .
Then things get a little addictive: the popcorn bursts so well and so hard that it pushes the lid away from the pot, but Cameron holds it back with brute force. Can she just use a bigger pot? Yes, but it wouldn’t look so cool.
Cameron then finishes her popcorn with chopped Maldon salt (a) and nutritional yeast (good) before transferring it to a bowl that’s been lovingly drenched in hot sauce (great).
In general, her method is quite reliable. I especially love how she doesn’t measure, shake the pan, and add the sauce to the bowl before adding the popcorn, which ensures everyone, not just the top grains. I, of course, could find a reason for controversy. Maldon, for example, is terrible popcorn salt. To properly stick to the popcorn, the salt needs to be ground into a powder, and Maldon is all about crunchy pyramidal crystals. Also, a large pot would have eliminated the need to hold the popcorn in place with the pot lid as it rises out of the pot, but I put some in a pot of the same size and nothing tragic happened. It was very easy to prevent the popcorn from spilling out, and it made me pay attention to the popcorn so it wouldn’t burn.
Now about all this oil. Cameron claims that this gives popcorn a “buttery” quality, but that’s simply not true. The oil makes the popcorn taste buttery rather than olive. In fact, I have found that Cameron’s measurement system produces very few oily residues and virtually no clumping (at the bottom of the pan). You may be worried about the smoke temperature of the olive oil, but don’t worry – as long as you keep the temperature around medium, there is no danger of burning the oil. The main contributor to this amount of butter is texture: the popcorn I made using the Cameron Method came out very crispy and fluffy (because it is mostly fried in oil), which was able to maintain its texture even when doused with hot sauce. I also didn’t have to shake the pan (because the kernels were dipped in oil) or measure the damn thing that I love. Giving up measuring is one of my favorite things to do, and I’m glad I will never measure popcorn again.