I love food and I love to cook and even bake sometimes. I want to get back into sharing these fun things with you so here is my re-introduction of Foodtalk.
Crunchy Caramel Popcorn is easy! The process takes a little while but it only requires a handful of ingredients.
9-10 cups of popped popcorn, no butter/salt microwaved is fine
¾ stick of butter
¾ cup of brown sugar
Pinch of salt
½ tsp vanilla
1 cup rough chopped nuts-peanuts, cashews, almonds, whatever you enjoy (optional)
Preheat oven to 300˚ degrees. Liberally grease/butter a cookie sheet, set aside.
In a LARGE, preferably wide bowl add popcorn and nuts, set aside.
Over medium heat in a saucepan melt butter, sugar, salt and vanilla, bring to a boil (about 2-3 minutes). Stir constantly to prevent burning. Drizzle 1/3 of caramel sauce all over popcorn and using a silicone spatula quickly stir/toss to coat, stir from the bottom up to pick up any sugar that fell to the bottom. Continue this process till all caramel is gone. If your bowl is not big enough try to work in smaller batches.
Spread popcorn and nut mixture on cookie sheet and place in oven. Every 10-15 minutes remove pan and stir popcorn again from the bottom up. Be sure to completely remove pan from oven or you risk dropping popcorn on the bottom of your oven and burnt popcorn doesn’t smell good. Total baking time is 55-60 minutes to achieve optimal crunchiness.
The recipe sounds tedious but it’s really simple and the sugar syrup cleans up super easy. I recommend a silicone spatula because the caramel comes off very easy. When I say you need a big bowl to mix I mean the biggest bowl you can find. Here is the picture of the bowl I use, it has about a 16-17” diameter but isn’t really deep. If you can’t get your hands on a wide bowl go for deep like a pasta pot. This just makes it easy to really get under the popcorn and get everything coated well.
Enjoy and let me know how it turns out for you!
