Can you make popcorn shrimp in a popcorn maker?

everyone wants to know

Hello, clowns!

Popcorn is one of the most fascinating foods in the world to me, probably because I’m five years old. It begins as a cute little kernel that you heat up, and suddenly you have a ton of this weird explosive puffy snack. Then you can eat about a gallon of it before you start to feel sick and throw up in the aisle of the movie theater. If you do that enough times, you’ll be asked to leave.

I have experimented with popcorn before. In fact, it was close to two years ago, when I found a really dumb recipe that involved stuffing uncooked popcorn kernels into a turkey. I shoved a bunch of popcorn and stuffing mix up a chicken’s ass (a turkey would have taken too long), and the popcorn did not pop, even when I used a goddamn torch on it.

Today’s experiment involves popcorn again, but a different kind altogether: popcorn shrimp. I got this idea from a comment thread a while back.

Reader @hifi (whose real name is Ian) said:

Popcorn shrimp. That's it. That's the whole name.

Make shrimp in a stovetop popcorn maker with coconut oil and the butter-flavored salt just like they use at the movies (which is called Flavacol and available in far too large a quantity).

I suddenly thought about this idea while I was sitting on the couch zoning out the other day. Then I died. After I died, I went to the store and bought a popcorn maker and some shrimp.

Everyone thank Ian for today’s idea. He’s a Chicago-based artist and has a really cool Etsy store where he sells stickers and enamel pins. Part of the proceeds go to Good Bread Ukraine, which is an organization that bakes bread and distributes it to those who need it there right now. Buy Ian’s stuff and donate to Good Bread while you’re at it, clowns!

Now, this is obviously not a stovetop maker like Ian suggested.

It’s an air popper. You see, air poppers were invented to make our lives easier, as opposed to having to labor away in front of a stove, cranking on some metal rod. Heh, cranking. Heh, rod.

I thought I would use modern technology to make popcorn shrimp in a set-it-and-forget-it sort of way instead, hence the air popper. Aldi just so happened to have an air popper on sale for an affordable $12.99, so I jumped on the chance to get one. Plus, the idea of putting shrimp into an air popper was impossible to resist.

I also bought some butter-flavored oil along with some of the Flavacol Ian mentioned in the comment thread.

I am not sure if you are all familiar with this stuff, but it’s what theater concession stands use to make their popcorn taste like magic. This is an open industry secret. Flavacol is basically a fine salt product that has artificial butter flavoring mixed into it, and that’s where all the actual buttery flavor lives. You’d think it’d be in the yellow coconut oil that’s used to pop the popcorn, but nope!

A little goes a long way, and if you were wondering why your popcorn at home doesn’t taste the same way it does when you threw it up at the AMC movie theater, this is why. You can buy it online for under $10 in case you want to replicate movie theater popcorn at home.

First off, I wanted to see if this $12.99 Ambiano (Aldi’s house brand) popcorn maker worked, so I gave it a trial run.

It uses hot air to pop the popcorn, and I’m happy to say it worked pretty well, though shit got violent pretty quickly. Even though there is a cap on the machine, somehow popcorn managed to explode all over the kitchen anyway.

Now that I verified that the popcorn maker worked, I decided to throw some frozen popcorn shrimp in it.

I placed the lid on top and turned on the power, and let the popcorn maker run for a pretty long time. I could hear some sizzling, which was promising, but the air vortex inside of it was not strong enough to eject the shrimp out of the chamber. In fact, I couldn’t hear the shrimp moving around at all.

Eventually I dumped it out and was rewarded with some very burned shrimp, which I seasoned with Orville Redenbacher’s Popping & Topping Oil and some Flavacol.

I tried a piece that wasn’t full of carcinogens, and to my delight, it was nice and crunchy, but it was way oversalted because this is the first time I’ve ever tried using Flavacol. Rather than being grainy or flaky, Flavacol is a very fine powder that’s hard to control; it’s great for clinging to oily popcorn straight from a movie theater popper, but you’ve got to be really careful when dispensing it.

Some other discoveries: When you think about it, an air popper is sort of like an air fryer, because it blows hot air into the popcorn kernels using a fan. But when a kernel is popped, its much-increased surface area lets it carry more wind, eventually whipping the kernel out the top and into the exit chute. Compared to a popcorn kernel, shrimp is heavy, so even if it got all puffy I think the machine would struggle to shit it out.

So I had to come up with a slightly different plan.

I decided to fill the bottom of the popcorn maker with popcorn kernels, and then put the popcorn shrimp on top.

My childish yet sensible reasoning was that the popcorn kernels would grow fat as they popped, and eventually their volume would push the shrimp out the top. Hopefully that would also be enough time to crisp up the frozen popcorn shrimp so I could eat it.

I turned on the machine, and guess what, clowns?

It fucking worked. Some of the shrimp got crapped out the top by an ever increasing amount of popcorn. That’s also when the smoke started.

Unfortunately, the weight of the popcorn shrimp created a traffic jam at the bottom of the popcorn maker, and since the walls of the popping chamber are also heated, popcorn began to burn after it was popped.

The smoke was apparently the popcorn screaming for help. I am happy to say, however, that the popcorn shrimp that did manage to come out before I had to shut the machine off, turned out mostly okay. The centers were a little bit on the cool side, but the outsides were crisped and perfectly edible.

My final attempt was to cook raw shrimp in the air popper with the popcorn kernels using the same displacement technique.

I put three raw shrimp in the machine with some popcorn and turned it on.

While the popcorn all came out on its own, the shrimp did not emerge of its own accord.

So I shut the machine off when the popping stopped and I dumped the contents out to prevent another smoky disaster. Two of the shrimp came out with the popcorn with a third fused to the bottom of the popcorn maker.

I seasoned the popcorn popper shrimp with buttery topping and some Flavacol, and I have to tell you guys, this was a pretty delightful combination, since it just had such a weird and nice movie theaterness to it.

Though the air popper did give the shrimp a sort of weird bouncy texture, the crustaceans had in fact cooked all the way through, which was pretty remarkable. While I’d consider this experiment somewhat of a failure, since the shrimp wouldn’t really come out of the machine, plus there was some smoke involved, it wasn’t all bad, because Davida had a great idea.

Paid subscribers, you’re getting a recipe for popcorn shrimp scampi later this week.

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Hey, clowns, let’s thank Ian for his terrific idea and make his ass famous. Don’t forget to check out his Etsy store, donate to Good Bread Ukraine, and follow his art on Instagram. We can’t make him famous unless you share the newsletter, so here’s a handy button:

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Paid subscribers get a recipe for Flavacol and buttery topping shrimp scampi later this week. Plus you get access to the full archives via foodisstupid.substack.com, which means you have over three years of joy to catch up on.

Finally, if you haven’t seen the news, I started a new newsletter called The Party Cut, which is nothing but dining recommendations from places we’ve been to around Chicago and beyond. People keep bugging me for suggestions so I figured I’d finally just document it all.

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