Popcorn: It’s what’s for dinner. Well, it’s what’s for those moments between lunch and dinner when you are hanging out on the sofa bingeing through the latest season of Broadchurch. Popcorn is the great in-between meal. It’s cheap, filling, kinda healthy (though let’s be honest, not really), and fun to make on your own. Popcorn is also infinitely customizable, which ensures it never gets stale. Speaking of stale, we’ve got no beef with those bags of SkinnyPop, but fresh-from-the-stovetop always tastes better to us.
So what holds people back from making popcorn DIY style? An annoyingly high ratio of unpopped to popped kernels is second only to burning the batch. You can hear the smoke alarm now. Both of these issues give home cooks pause. And lastly, getting the seasoning part right can be tricky. You’re looking for a middle ground here—a seasoning blend that is interesting, packed with saltiness, but not too weird and out there.
The key to achieving this balance is found at the health food store or the baking section of your local Whole Foods: brewer’s yeast or nutritional yeast. Brewer’s yeast is an inactive yeast that is a byproduct of beer making, while nutritional yeast is grown specifically from vegetable sugar as a seasoning product. In addition to being chock-full of vitamins, brewer’s yeast is high in glutamic acid—a free glutamate that, when mixed with salt (sodium), like in your popcorn, creates monosodium glutamate, or MSG, which has been kindly rebranded as umami, the mythic fifth “taste.” Short translation: delicious popcorn.
But we’re not stopping with just a sprinkling of brewer’s yeast. Dulse is a dried red seaweed harvested off the coast of Japan and in the chilly waters of the north Atlantic. Dulse is a natural salt substitute with a subtle whisper of the ocean. It also happens to be packed with more of those free glutamates.
You could stop there, but we like our popcorn on the slightly spicy side, just enough to tickle the tongue and keep you going back for more. You didn’t know you needed Urfa biber—a dried Turkish chile pepper with a raisin-like sweetness, a subtle spice, and the gentle acidity of a lightly roasted Ethiopian coffee—until you started cooking with it. You can rub it on lamb shoulder or shake it into a batch of chocolate brownies. It’s spectacular in popcorn, adding more flavor (Urfiness) without making your popcorn overly spicy.