Popcorn

I think this is my first ever blog posting that isn't art-related... so if you're looking for popcorn art, you can visit my earlier post on Popcorn & Parrot Art.

When I moved to NYC a couple of years ago I ruthlessly thinned out my kitchen gadgets & tools so that I could better fit into a New York-sized living space. I overdid it a bit and found, after several watery salads, that I actually do need/want a salad spinner. But I didn't especially miss my popcorn popper--I don't really eat popcorn that often and microwave popcorn had been satisfying the occasional need.

Still, I do find microwave popcorn kinda gross (and unnecessarily expensive). It contains all sorts of weird chemicals and, presumably, trans fats.

The other day I was at my corner store buying popcorn and noticed that for the same price as 3 serving of microwave popcorn, I could buy 25 servings of regular popcorn. I decided to give stove-top popcorn a try... and you know what? It's the best method I've come across for making popcorn. I heated 2 tablespoons of oil in a 3 quart pot, added 1/3 cup popcorn, covered it with a lid, and 3 minutes later I had popcorn... and every single kernal popped! There were no old maids or duds!

According to the Wikipedia:

Two explanations exist for kernels which do not pop at proper temperatures, known in the popcorn industry as "old maids". The first is that unpopped kernels do not have enough moisture to create enough steam for an explosion. The second explanation, according to research led by Dr. Bruce Hamaker of Purdue University, is that the unpopped kernel may have a leaky hull.

So it could be that I'm getting such good popcorn performance (yes, I'm reveling in my newly found popcorn geekness) because it's a freshly opened bag of popcorn and the kernels' moisture hasn't gone stale.

But if that's a factor, I think a bigger one is that my gas range is putting a lot more heat on my kernels than an electric popcorn popper does. Perhaps that intense heat overwhelms any kernels that are slightly leaky.

Anyway, what is striking to me about this isn't really that all the kernels popped--it more that I can't understand what purpose electric popcorn poppers serve and how they came to be so prevalent. I imagine most people are like me and find the idea of making popcorn on the stove almost inconceivable (aside from ConAgra Foods's JiffyPop).

Somehow we've been convinced that popcorn poppers are somehow the only way to go even though they are slower, take up storage space, are more difficult to clean, and don't pop as well. I wonder if it started with this (a so-called "back to basics" popcorn maker):
That elaborate stirring mechanism is completely unnecessary... I've been making my popcorn over high heat (which I think helps the kernels pop) shaking only occasionally in the three minutes it takes it to pop. But maybe this once this expensive pot started being used, it introduced a drudgery (of constant stirring) that made people were happy to buy yet another gadget (an electric popcorn popper) to avoid.

Anyway, enough of proving I'm my father's son (he often writes & blogs about the superiority of old-fashioned safety razors to today's cartridge razors)... tomorrow, back to art!

Popcorn & parrot art

Here are two interesting works, both dealing with language.

Talking Popcorn by Nina Katchadourian interprets popcorn popping as Morse code. A text-to-speech program provides simultaneous translation. Since popcorn doesn't have short & long popping sounds, the duration of the silence between the pops create the short Morse code "dots" and long "dashes."

I can see how this could create a series of random letters, but I wonder how it is turned into coherent words. Perhaps it waits until a word appears in the gibberish? The problem with that is you might pop an entire batch of popcorn and only get a couple of words. Perhaps the gibberish is translated into the closest matching word (in the same way that spell-checkers work).

In addition to the popcorn machine, Katchadourian has a nice series of spin-off works including The Popcorn Journal which consists of bags of popcorn along side their text output and Talking Popcorn's First Words which are bronze popped corn from the first batch (which was translated as "we").



may-por-e' is a work by Rachel Berwick in which she attempts to teach them the Maypure language. The Maypure were a South American tribe that were wiped out by the Carib in 1799. Parrots were among the items that the Carib's looted after the attack. A few days later, the German naturalist Alexander von Humbolt acquired one of these parrots. Realizing it was the last speaker of the Maypure language, he phonetically recorded the parrot's language. Using that sole record of the language, Berwick teaches contemporary parrot the Maypure language.