Salt, oil and popping corn.

Can you imagine how many iterations and combinations of that trio I’ve gone through over the years in search of the perfect pop-at-home theatre-style popcorn?

I lost count long ago.

I’ll try not to bury the lede here.

Theatre Style Popcorn

2 tablespoons of beta carotene infused coconut oil
2 teaspoons of flavacol salt
1 cup of popping corn

That’s it. Heat the oil over a medium heat, testing the readiness with a few kernels. When they pop, add the corn and the salt.

Stir.

Mix.

Pop.

Eat.

My personal pursuit for this particular combination is either the best kept secret behind the eleven herbs and spices …or I’ve just failed to run in the right corn popping circles for the last few decades.

You can, after all, order all of these ingredients from your favourite online retailer’s website for prime next day delivery… though you really need to first know what to buy, I suppose.

We grew up eating popcorn as a snack at home.

We had an air popper, and we would melt (I want to say butter, but it was probably) margarine over it and then sprinkle table salt into the mix. It had a vibe. It was what I knew. And yet, by the time I was about fourteen I was already going to the movie theatre with some regularity and had figured out that my parent’s secret popcorn recipe was not a thing like the bag of deliciousness we scored when we went out.

Was it a trade secret?

I would occasional glimpse the theatre employees filling the popping machines and my takeaway from witnessing this sacred act was that whatever magic concoction they were keeping on the hush behind the counter, it was emerging pre-mixed from unmarked brown pouches. I suspected not even the teenagers making the good stuff knew what was in the blend.

Over the years I fumbled into various online rabbit holes of perfect popcorn speculation. I mean, who hasn’t? While you were researching celebrity sightings and video game rumours, I was poking around forums suggesting that the secret was in using clarified butter or finely tuned temperatures or the stirring mechanism.

I mean, now that I’ve figured it out theatre popcorn is actually just so simple, it almost seems that all those other theories are so much witch-craftery that they are barely worth mentioning. But seriously… that is the path upon which I strolled trying to figure this out.

Theatre popcorn just has this, I dunno, an undefinable quality. The blur of the yellow salt and the chemistry-experiment butter-ness. I think what I had stumbled upon over and over and over and over during those years searching was people acknowledging that theatre popcorn is not necessarily great popcorn. There are definitely better ways to make popcorn. Of course. Undoubtably, the quest for good popcorn and the quest for theatre popcorn are probably not the same adventures into flavour town. There are superior popping recipes, yes. But theatre popcorn has something that is as much soul snacking nostalgia as it is food quality.

I had figured out the Flavacol aspect about a year or two ago. Some of that online research stirred that brand name out of the digital depths and sure enough I could order it online. I popped dozens of batches and cross-mixed the fine yellow salt with all manner of methodology and popping oils. I could tell that it was close. There were hints of the theatre in whatever Flavacol was bringing to the party… but still it wasn’t quite hitting the mark.

One night I was sitting on the couch flipping through some or other social media dreck and the second part of the clue scrolled into my feed like so much serendipitous fortune: coconut oil. But then not just any coconut oil. Of course I had already tried plain old coconut oil and it was close, but not quite right either. (Luckily it is great for seasoning cast iron!)

Instead, there existed a coconut oil product out there specifically for popping popcorn. Dyed bright yellow by beta carotene and blended with a bit of that chemical romance of fake buttery goodness, this was the missing ingredient.

And that’s it. Three ingredients.

I have dabbled in variations of the trio for a couple months now, making myself a big bowl of theatre-style popcorn every other week or so, hunkering down to watch a movie at home.

That’s the recipe. Stupidly simple, but deceptively specific.

I mean, don’t look at the nutrition information, but Cineplex eat your heart out.