My Popcorn Factory
September 8th, 2008
We are popcorn lovers.
When I was a kid, my mother made popcorn in a stove-top pan with a vented lid. The lid had a handle attached to a stirring rod on the bottom of the pan; it had to be stirred constantly while the popcorn popped, even if your arm was being occasionally splattered with hot oil. These can still be bought today and I’m pretty sure Mom still uses one. Dad would sit in his recliner with a large bowl of popcorn on his lap and we kids would meekly ask him to share with us. (He probably remembers this differently!)
For a few years, we even grew our own popcorn - popcorn is simply a different variety of corn, neither feed corn nor sweet corn - and shelled it ourselves, which was hell on the thumbs. Somewhere my folks found a hand-cranked corn sheller, which we thought was fabulous after hand-shelling the stuff, and we would gleefully toss the ears of popcorn into it and watch the cobs come out clean while the kernels fell out of a shoot and into a bucket.
Growing, hand-shelling, and popping your own popcorn on the stove top is a far cry from what most people do today: Buy a box of prepared microwave bags, unwrap the plastic, and toss the paper bag - artificial butter flavoring and other unknown chemicals included - into your microwave. A few short minutes later - VOILA! - you have popcorn, enough for two people if neither of them is very hungry.
Needless to say, THIS IS NOT HOW WE DO IT AT OUR HOUSE. I have a Stir Crazy popcorn popper that suits us just fine.
For a long time, I was buying bagged store-brand popcorn, but found that the quality was rather inconsistent. Sometimes it would pop up nicely, other times it was full of “duds” - unpopped kernels. I switched to good old Orville Redinbacher’s, but boy the cost difference is huge. Orville’s pops very well, often popping the top off of the popper.
A year ago, DH and I decided to get serious about popcorn. It’s our family’s favorite snack and also the cheapest snack we can come up with. We bought a 50 lb. bag of unpopped popcorn at Sam’s club as an experiment. (yes, FIFTY pounds) First, we had no idea if it would even pop decently, second, we didn’t know how long it would take us to consume it. I bought a large plastic container to keep it in and marked the purchase date on the top so we would know how long it took us to use it up (if we ever did). I spent $13 on the popcorn itself, and another $10 on the container.
That $13 worth of popcorn lasted my family 13 months. Can the math get any easier? We spend $1 per month on popcorn. Now, obviously, the popcorn is the cheap part of this snack - it’s the butter that costs money. I estimate that we probably poured $7 of butter each month onto our popcorn and used maybe $1 worth of coconut oil to pop it in. Approximately $9 per month. I make 3 or 4 batches at a time and freeze any leftovers - it’s great straight from the freezer.
Now, I want to compare it to the same amount of microwave popcorn. (Which - do some research - may or may not cause cancer.) I mentioned that we eat a lot of popcorn, right? I figure each month, the amount we eat comes to about 48 microwave bags. I recently saw the price at Wal-Mart for a box of 8 bags to be $2. I would have to buy 6 of those boxes each month. That’s 12 bucks a month, which is actually a lot lower than I expected it to be, but still higher than I’m paying for real popcorn, cooked in coconut oil, and topped with real butter.
I’m saving $3 per month, eating loads of popcorn, and topping it with all-natural ingredients. If I were using margarine, my cost would be a lot less, but I’m not into hydrogenated soybean oil.
What if I compared my popcorn to potato chips or snack crackers?
Entry Filed under: Mixed bag, Philosophy, appetizers