Sweet and Salty Kettle Corn Recipe

For lots of, kettle corn evokes popped corn aromas wafting by way of the air at county festivals, the place a cacophony of rapid-fire pops from giant kettles on the midway promised a light-as-a-feather cope with.

Why stay up for the sincere? For a quick restore, make this kettle corn recipe at dwelling in minutes. It’s a snack and a dessert multi useful. People who treasure choice from chew to chew will adore its occasional, delicate pockets of caramelized sugar and scattershot hits of salt.

It retains properly, so it’s possible you’ll make batches and parcel them out for lunchboxes or on-the-go vitality boosts.

What Is Kettle Corn?

Sweet and salty unexpectedly, kettle corn is the golden little one in all customary popcorn and caramel corn. Not as cloying or sticky as caramel corn, it employs solely a small dose of sugar, which melts and flippantly coats the kernels as they pop.

No candy-making talents important! And I promise it has tons further character and a cleaner model than an (admittedly helpful) bag of microwave kettle corn can muster.

I’ve noticed every batch is a little bit bit completely totally different. That’s part of its attract. Usually the sugar merely melts; typically it caramelizes.

The Biggest Popcorn to Use

As long as it hasn’t been sitting in your cupboard for years, most any kind of popcorn kernels will work throughout the kettle corn.

Nonetheless, I simply recently splurged on Amish Nation Popcorn, and I’m a convert. It pops up extra-fluffy, with true corn style.

The Biggest Pot for Kettle Corn

For disaster-free kettle corn, use a pot that’s neither flimsy nor cumbersome. A cheapo stockpot? The thin base means the sugar will burn. On the choice end, your heirloom Le Creuset Dutch oven is technique too heavy in an effort to shake fast enough.

Use a pot that’ll keep in any case 5 quarts, has a snug-fitting lid, and a sturdy base.

Gadget lovers and popcorn devotees may want to ponder investing in a Whirley Pop, a specialty stovetop popper with a hand crank that agitates the popcorn. I’ve had mine for years and adore it, nevertheless consider, an excellent stockpot makes fabulous kettle corn.

Kettle Corn Swaps and Subs

Fiddle with style combos to customize your kettle corn.

• Choose your oil: I like coconut oil, additional virgin olive oil, and avocado oil. All of them can keep as a lot as the heat. Nevertheless canola oil or vegetable oil is okay too.
• Swap the sugar: Use brown sugar, turbinado sugar, or maple syrup in its place of normal white sugar (don’t use honey, which is just too sticky and burns merely).
• Spice it up: Mix 1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder and 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper with the sugar and salt or add 1 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice.
• Use one different salt: Kosher salt works merely high-quality proper right here, swapped 1:1 with widespread salt.

How To Retailer Kettle Corn

Though it’s terrific for sudden assaults of the munchies, kettle corn tastes most interesting—crisper and sweeter—an hour or two after it’s made. Cool it totally, and as quickly as saved in an airtight container, it’ll hold crunchy and oh-so-snackable for 3 to 4 days.

Troubleshooting Kettle Corn

Obtained a pot of burned sugar or scorched popcorn? Each the heat was too extreme, you didn’t fully stir the sugar-salt mixture into the corn, your pan has too skinny a bottom, in any other case you cooked the kettle corn too prolonged.

Do you have to scent burned or caramelized sugar, pull the pan from the heat, even within the occasion you suppose you wish to cook dinner dinner it longer. This stuff goes from preferrred to burned in seconds.

Unpopped Kernels: A Phrase of Warning

Our tried and true glorious popcorn has a approach for popping that minimizes unpopped kernels. Kettle corn’s a little bit bit completely totally different, though.

To chop again the hazard of burning the sugar, you wish to pull the pot from heat a tad early—no hopeful additional seconds of cooking to make sure the entire stragglers pop. Greater to err on the facet of warning and deal with quite a lot of onerous kernels than a scorched pot or burned popcorn.

The melted sugar might make unpopped kernels stick with the popped ones, so eat kettle corn with a degree of mindfulness, comparatively than shoveling it in your mouth by the handful, lest you crack down on a rocky kernel. I don’t want you destroying a molar or a filling.

Additional Sweet Snacks

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