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    AntifazClaire Lower
    7/10/16 12:07pm

    have no time to pop your own

    a $20 air popper will make a large bowl of basic popcorn in under 2 minutes with zero burns and always fresh.

    it’s a unitasker, yes, and i would never have bought it for myself, but my wife is a popcorn addict and gets a lot of use out of it.

    it’s waaaaaay faster than going to the store, and you can pop all sorts of interesting kernels, not just the regular yellow stuff. and yes, they have different tastes/textures. here in new mexico we get all kinds— red, purple, white, orange, pink, etc. i like the white kernels we get at the hippy store— they’re dense and have an earthy flavor. elsewhere you can mailorder.

    now if we’re going to talk about caramel corn that’s another story though. because from what i’ve seen making caramel corn is a laborious pain in the ass. i’d much rather buy a bag than make it.

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      DuffmanAntifaz
      7/10/16 1:04pm

      ...and you can pop all sorts of interesting kernels, not just the regular yellow stuff.

      Not entirely true. I am a big popcorn fan and have tried every way to make it including air, stove, machine, and microwave. The air popper is a good option but smaller kernels than the regular yellow (such as black and red) don’t work with an air popper cause they are too light and just get blown out by the fan. The best way to make popcorn, and what I currently use, is a nice little plastic device that goes in the microwave.

      I cannot find it online, but I bought it from Aldi for 8 bucks and it even has a nice silicon insert that measures the right amount of popcorn to put in. You simply fill the insert with you kernel of choice, pop for 3 minutes, and then have a nice bowl to eat popcorn out of, flavored however you would like.

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      AntifazDuffman
      7/10/16 1:26pm

      I’ve never seen black ones! That sounds cool. But the dark reds we use regularly work fine in our popper.

      When things have blown out too much my solution has been to tilt the machine back at a slight angle—not a lot, just maybe 5 degrees?

      But that might not work with superlight ones. I’m curious to find black popcorn kernels now.

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    sgtyukonClaire Lower
    7/10/16 10:04am

    “Best bagged popcorn” is an oxymoron.

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      Just Another Gawkfugeesgtyukon
      7/10/16 6:28pm

      I had no idea “popcorn snob” was even a thing.

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      babylostsgtyukon
      7/10/16 6:57pm

      Bagged popcorn being fresh or not fresh depends on a lot of factors. Most popcorn if it’s sealed will stay fresh for 3-6 weeks. That is without any special gas or gel packet placed in the package. That’s why you see a lot of chips and popcorn bags filled with air because it’s nitrogen that displaced the oxygen to keep the popcorn fresh. What happens when the popcorn tastes like “styrofoam” is because most giant companies air pop their popcorn and usually just flavor it with a simple powder. That’s why it ends up tasting weird and or fake/not fresh. Or they spray the popcorn with caramel mix instead of fully coating it in a kettle.

      My company does not air pop popcorn, and we make all our cheese popcorn with actual cheese and cook all our kettle and caramel in an actual kettle. We make popcorn daily so our stock is constantly being ordered and replaced. So online packaged popcorn from us is always fresh.

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    BeardinalsClaire Lower
    7/10/16 1:15am

    Correct. Not sure how anyone could consider anything but Smartfood.

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