This was my first crack at cooking from the Alinea cookbook. Flipping through this massive book with beautiful food porn(photographs), I am filled with a sense of awe. This is not every day cooking, Grant Achatz & his team are really pushing cooking as we know further. by the way he writes a great column here.  

Back to me flipping the book, I was searching for easy recipes to start with, most recipes in the book require a massive mise en place(ingredients).

The liquefied Caramel popcorn was just popcorn, sugar, salt, butter, water & soy lecithin(which I didn’t have). It is so easy to make, the only part where i tripped up was the caramel froth that was supposed to go on top of the liquefied popcorn. According to the recipe, I was supposed to make caramel from sugar, water & simple syrup, which I did. After that was adding soy lecithin & blending the caramel with an immersion blender to aerate it and create a wonderful froth. Well I failed, I had no soy lecithin(which helps stablise foams) & used a regular blender which resulted in no froth.

Anyhoo, my first sip of the liquefied popcorn had me doing cartwheels in the kitchen, this really popped in my mouth. It is sweet, salty, buttery & popcorny at the same time…. Oh my! It rocked. I know you are reading this & can’t share in my excitement or think i’m insane.

So how is it done, since I followed Grant’s recipe in the book verbatim, I can’t reproduce it here. But i’ll run down what I did.

• Make caramel with sugar & water.
• Pop some corn.
• Combine popcorn, butter, sugar, salt & water in a sauce pan, simmer.
• Strain the popcorn mixture then blend it smooth. Set aside.
• Then I tried to froth the caramel, Ideally I should have added soy lecithin & blended with immersion blender.
• To serve, pour warm liquid popcorn into a glass, then add caramel froth on top.

That is it, back to scouring the alinea book for more stuff to try…..

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