Warning: Experienced and careful adult cooks only please! This involves working with hot oil.
I don't like fake butter and I've read the same as all of you about the dangers of the ingredients that go into the yellow goop that bagged microwaveable popcorn contains. So here is how I make my popcorn.
I use a large frying pan with a transparent lid top. I use Emeril cookware and love it. Use popcorn that you buy in a jar or a sack that is not packaged for microwave, such as what I am using, "Orville Redenbacher's Original" that comes in a 30 oz plastic jar.
Pour olive oil into the cold frying pan to a depth that is more than coating the bottom. A good gauge is to put one kernel of popcorn in the center of the pan, the oil should come up about half way up the kernel in depth. Leaving the one kernel in the pan, cover and bring it to high heat (on my range I heat to 7 out of 10). Stand by and wait for the test kernel to pop. When it does, pour the remaining popcorn in quickly, which you have pre-measured (I find about 7-8 spoonfuls work in the large pan). Immediately cover. You don't have to shake the pan continually, but I tend to tip it from side to side so the oil moves a bit until the corn all starts to pop. It will pop quickly, and when the sound of popping stops take it off the heat right away. With a transparent lid you can also see how the popping is going, and that's always fun. Kids can peak but shoo them away before you remove the lid, for reasons I explain below. Also be sure the lid fits well and that you did not use too much popcorn. If the lid is not the right size for the pan it is very dangerous because hot oil will spatter through the crack. Likewise if you use too much popcorn it will force the lid upward as it expands, pushing it out of position and also creating a hot oil spatter hazard. Experiment with small amounts of popcorn first to see what amount fits your pan's capacity.
The pan will be enormously hot so be careful. When you remove the lid, tilt it slightly holding it over the popcorn still in the pan. Some hot oil will have collected on the lid and what you want is to tilt it so it runs back onto the popcorn. It will hiss and be very hot so be careful. When you've done that dump the popcorn from the pan into your serving bowl, and a glass one works great. Season the popcorn with salt (I like using coarse sea salt from a grinder). Serve.
See, you are not using butter or margarine (or fake goop) at all for the flavoring; it all comes from the olive oil, which is 100 percent healthy and safe. It's more subtle than butter but it is delicious. I'm eating some now in fact as I type this. If you just use olive oil instead of butter even half the times you have popcorn, it's a great improvement, since olive oil is one of those heart and other bodily organ healthy "miracle foods."
I re-emphasize only adult cooks experienced with cooking in grease or oil should do this. Remember that the pan will be very hot when you are done and will make a steam explosion if you put it into any water, so let it cool off first on one of the back burners of your stove. When you do start to cool it with water, use professional cook safety instructions which is to start with just a few drops of water to trigger the steam, very very VERY gradually dripping a few drops of water over the surface. One of the basics you learn in cooking is that a pan that has been heated with grease or oil becomes very hot and the remaining oil can create explosive and damaging steam if doused with water before it has completely cooled.
Enjoy! And please do this safely!!!
Showing posts with label olive oil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label olive oil. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
Food talk
I've been buying ingredients to bake bread. I'm going to make what is called a sweet bread or a nut bread, which is a bread that is not made with yeast and does not rise. So while at Winn-Dixie earlier today to buy fresh organic eggs what do they announce? That a new batch of hot French and Italian loaves of bread have just come out of the oven. Mmmm. So I bought the eggs but I also bought a loaf of Italian. I ate a huge piece of it while it was hot as soon as I got the groceries into the car!
And my dinner tonight is four slices of the bread, two with butter, and two with olive oil, and a sliced tomato in olive oil, with pepper and salt. Bread is called the staff of life for a reason. It is about the healthiest day to day thing that you can eat. People were healthier and had less diabetes and so forth when they had home made full grain bread (though Wonder bread remains a favorite of mine) and most importantly, they had it in sandwiches, or like me, Italian style, drizzled with olive oil (another wonder food of health) and with glasses of milk. Men drank milk back in the World War II generation and rarely soft drinks. Coffee or tea helped with waking up. But men and women often ordered a glass of milk with their lunch or dinner. Have you ever wondered why dieters are so against bread? Modern dieters are against bread because they recognize that it has a lot of nutrition. Dieting has become so insanely unbalanced. Rather than having healthy moderation in all the way past generations lived, now there are phoney food wars with people looking for magic weight loss remedies and as a result turn away from the healthiest and most stable of foods, like bread. If you truly have Celiac or some other syndrome that is one thing, But if you are not allergic or sensitive to wheat you ought to eat good healthy bread at least once a day and twice is even better. I don't get fancy like having dinner rolls (especially just cooking for myself) but often I have a slice of toast as a "side dish" for my main meal!
Bread also stabilizes the digestive system. So many people with heartburn and bathroom issues don't realize that bread helps to stabilize all of those problems. (Again this applies to the vast majority of people who are not allergic). It takes an effort to reintroduce what used to be the staple of our food now that pressures of fast food and health nut faddish style of eating take people away from classic bread and toast. Grabbing a muffin instead of toast could result in your consuming an extra, yes, not a typo, 500 calories! A slice of bread is about 100 calories before adding butter, peanut butter, or jam. A muffin ranges from 400-700 calories and has unhealthy oils and other additives. When I commuted if I had to "grab a muffin on the way to work" I would always go for a corn muffin, figuring it was tasty but also still marginally healthier. But when I have time I always make toast. So try to get in the habit of having more toast of a good healthy bread and less of pre processed buns, muffin and so forth that are packed with calories and often chemicals and are less nutritious. Also on light nights when you want a simple dinner, you can't do better than what I just did, such as having fresh baked Italian bread with olive oil and a fresh vegetable like a tomato on the side.
I just remembered something about how we ate in the 1950's that will help with this understanding. We never bought hamburger or hot dog buns, we always used slices of bread! So when we made hamburgers at home they were served on toast, and when we made hot dogs we wrapped a slice of bread around it as the "bun." First of all it was expensive and wasteful to buy buns so being poor we'd never think of doing it. But secondly they ("store bought buns" as we called them) are empty bread products, valued more for their shape than their bread content. So here is another example to help you see how toast worked its way into many meals back in those days. In the 1960's we started making "minute steaks," which are those thin sliced cuts of beef that you can fry and you guessed it right, we served each slice on a piece of buttered toast. It was a cheaper and tougher cut of meat so by putting it on buttered toast it became really tasty and easy to digest and very healthy, as the only fat was the healthy and good small bit of dairy butter. I still remember as a kid when we'd have hot dogs and we'd wrap the bread around the dog and it was great tasting, unlike the "cardboard of store bought."
And my dinner tonight is four slices of the bread, two with butter, and two with olive oil, and a sliced tomato in olive oil, with pepper and salt. Bread is called the staff of life for a reason. It is about the healthiest day to day thing that you can eat. People were healthier and had less diabetes and so forth when they had home made full grain bread (though Wonder bread remains a favorite of mine) and most importantly, they had it in sandwiches, or like me, Italian style, drizzled with olive oil (another wonder food of health) and with glasses of milk. Men drank milk back in the World War II generation and rarely soft drinks. Coffee or tea helped with waking up. But men and women often ordered a glass of milk with their lunch or dinner. Have you ever wondered why dieters are so against bread? Modern dieters are against bread because they recognize that it has a lot of nutrition. Dieting has become so insanely unbalanced. Rather than having healthy moderation in all the way past generations lived, now there are phoney food wars with people looking for magic weight loss remedies and as a result turn away from the healthiest and most stable of foods, like bread. If you truly have Celiac or some other syndrome that is one thing, But if you are not allergic or sensitive to wheat you ought to eat good healthy bread at least once a day and twice is even better. I don't get fancy like having dinner rolls (especially just cooking for myself) but often I have a slice of toast as a "side dish" for my main meal!
Bread also stabilizes the digestive system. So many people with heartburn and bathroom issues don't realize that bread helps to stabilize all of those problems. (Again this applies to the vast majority of people who are not allergic). It takes an effort to reintroduce what used to be the staple of our food now that pressures of fast food and health nut faddish style of eating take people away from classic bread and toast. Grabbing a muffin instead of toast could result in your consuming an extra, yes, not a typo, 500 calories! A slice of bread is about 100 calories before adding butter, peanut butter, or jam. A muffin ranges from 400-700 calories and has unhealthy oils and other additives. When I commuted if I had to "grab a muffin on the way to work" I would always go for a corn muffin, figuring it was tasty but also still marginally healthier. But when I have time I always make toast. So try to get in the habit of having more toast of a good healthy bread and less of pre processed buns, muffin and so forth that are packed with calories and often chemicals and are less nutritious. Also on light nights when you want a simple dinner, you can't do better than what I just did, such as having fresh baked Italian bread with olive oil and a fresh vegetable like a tomato on the side.
I just remembered something about how we ate in the 1950's that will help with this understanding. We never bought hamburger or hot dog buns, we always used slices of bread! So when we made hamburgers at home they were served on toast, and when we made hot dogs we wrapped a slice of bread around it as the "bun." First of all it was expensive and wasteful to buy buns so being poor we'd never think of doing it. But secondly they ("store bought buns" as we called them) are empty bread products, valued more for their shape than their bread content. So here is another example to help you see how toast worked its way into many meals back in those days. In the 1960's we started making "minute steaks," which are those thin sliced cuts of beef that you can fry and you guessed it right, we served each slice on a piece of buttered toast. It was a cheaper and tougher cut of meat so by putting it on buttered toast it became really tasty and easy to digest and very healthy, as the only fat was the healthy and good small bit of dairy butter. I still remember as a kid when we'd have hot dogs and we'd wrap the bread around the dog and it was great tasting, unlike the "cardboard of store bought."
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