Home-Baked Caramel Popcorn (Carmel Corn)

Home-Baked Caramel Popcorn: Deliciously Crunchy 

Stacy hails from America – well, Texas, really – and as my Rotary Exchange host mother, MaryLee, once pointed out to me, Texans are, well, Texan. Part of it, I think, stems from the fact that, in terms of identity, Texans seem to be Texans first and Americans second - not, of course, that they’d consider themselves un-American at all. But what makes a true Texan? No less an authority than the Dallas News, in their yearly award of Texas newsmaker of the year, focus on Texan traits of trailblazing, independence, and staring down adversity. Stacy has all those attributes in spades, but, best of all, she also has that wonderful American/Texan trait of exuberance. 

I remember the first day she stood up at the Monday Morning or mid-week meeting of the Dhahran Women's Group, introducing herself and then saying that she would be giving some scrap-booking classes (or scrapbooking, as the un-hyphenating or unhyphenating Americans will have it). Wikipedia defines scrapbooking, as “a method for preserving personal and family history in the form of photographs, printed media, and memorabilia contained in decorated albums, or scrapbooks.” As in all walks of life, there are the professionals and the amateurs; Stacy just has to be the most (un)naturally organised person I have ever met, she also simply is the über-scrapper. She ran her classes incredibly efficiently and was always, but always, friendly. 

Our friendship began through the Dhahran Women's Group, where I became President and she was my Vice-President, and through what proved to be a wonderful working partnership, we became great friends; Stacy proved to be a marvellous sounding-board, and I phoned her at least once daily, asking her this, querying that – she was an astoundingly good listener given that a lot of the time I was just thinking through the changes we were needing to make: policy, usage of the facility, refurbishment thereof. Although we are of a similar age, she had her children early while I had mine late, and it was one of those friendships that, in my time of small and clamorous children, thrived on phone conversations late at night. 

Stacy, maker of baked carmel corn or caramel popcorn, with Bethany as a baby

My friendship was such that I would phone with an idea, and she would say, OK, now this then will be how it will work – and then I’d go – Oh! Um, well, maybe not, and that in itself made whatever we needed to embark upon practicable. Stacy took that amazing practicality with her into her teaching, and within Stacy’s classes were to be found an entire array of women from different backgrounds. However, you find amongst scrappers a disproportionate number of that particularly efficient kind of American woman – you know, the one who first works out her meals for the week, types in the ingredients, which then end up being sorted programmatically into a print-out of what ingredients are found in which aisle ... Scrapbooking is very much the kind of hobby that requires very linear, logico-sequential reasoning – no clutter, everything in neat boxes. I love being in those kinds of environments, and it was always fascinating to be surrounded by such a formidable array of diverse talents within all these stay-home mums. 

I remember in one class, a lady mentioning how tickled pink her husband was that all these scrappers had been high-powered professionals in a previous existence. Just in that class, we had a lady with her PhD in geophysics, another with an MA in Geology, and an OB/GYN (obstetrician/gynaecologist). In fact, one of the astonishing facts about living as an expatriate wife in a small community in the Middle East was that it was a bit like living with suburban moms on steroids; your average fellow soccer mum was hardly average in the slightest. 

One day, Stacy’s daughter, Madison, was out visiting from boarding school in the States, and Stacy came to the phone, happily crunching on what she claimed was the most marvellous caramel corn recipe Madison had brought out with her. Of course, caramel corn is very much an American tradition, so it is only fitting that this recipe was gained from a Texan American friend. I tried it recently with my kids – and it is good. Of course, I have also gone and looked up other recipes on the internet, but this works just perfectly, so why change it? 

Baked Carmel Corn Recipe

12 cups popped corn 

230 grams butter (1 cup)

400 grams brown sugar (2 cups)

175 g light corn syrup, what we know as Golden Syrup (½ cup or 8 tablespoons)*

1 teaspoon salt – preferably Maldon (gives a soft saltiness needed to break up the sweetness)

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Pre-heat oven to 100C, gas mark ¼, 225F

Pop the corn, remove all unpopped kernels (this is very important, first time out I didn’t think and the laments from my children were long and bitter).

Keep warm in two shallow pans in a low oven (100C, gas mark ¼, 225F) lined with baking parchment.

Melt butter. Stir in sugar, syrup & salt.

Do note that coating the ½ cup measure or tablespoon with a thin layer of oil helps the syrup slide off. 

The tiniest coating of oil, and the syrup simply slides out

Bring to the boil, stirring constantly. However, as soon as it comes to the boil, boil without stirring for 5 minutes:

The mixture must boil rapidly for five minute

Of course, in the interests of science, I put a candy thermometer into the mixture and discovered the temperature registered pretty close to the ‘hard crack’ stage, which is between 300° F - 310° F or 146 – 154 C. On the internet, most of the caramel popcorn sites recommend soft crack stage, which would occur at a slightly lower temperature. However, I like my caramel popcorn crunchy, not soft, and repeated the recipe again - specifically waiting until hard crack stage (between 5 and 7 minutes) and again, it was deliciously crunchy. So then I decided to be a true scientist and forgo time measurements in favour of the thermometer, only to discover Conall in his scientific experimenting had broken it so now I do tend to use both indicators, just in case, and am on the look-out for a candy thermometer that can absorb industrial levels of wear-and-tear. 

If you want perfection in your caramel corn making, then a a candy thermometer (one your experimentalist son does not break) is strongly recommended. However, the timing works pretty OK for this, and you can test for hard crack the old-fashioned way, with a bowl of cold water and dripping a bit of syrup into the bowl until you get a hard, rather than a soft ball of candy syrup forming (just be very careful of burns). So for soft crack, 5 minutes, for hard crack up to 7 - but not much more, since then it goes really hard and starts to burn. (That's what happened when I waited and waited after my son had destroyed the first candy thermometer). 

Lesson learned: never rely only on your equipment, but also on your eyes, ears and sense of timing too.

Remove from heat & stir in vanilla for flavouring and also bicarbonate of soda. According to +Rajini Rao "the purpose of the bicarbonate is to release carbon dioxide gas which bubbles through the syrup and lets it coat the popcorn more evenly. I'm guessing if you made it without the bicarb it would be fine, but not coat evenly", while +William Carter adds to this that, "You also get release of water - 2 NaHCO3 → Na2CO3 + H2O + CO2 - further foaming the sugar. I'm wondering about chemical reactions with the other ingredients - neutralizing acids and bases.  But I think +Rajini Rao's answer is probably the first-order answer." Hence, do use the bicarbonate of soda to ensure even coating of the popped corn by the sugar mixture.

The bicarbonate does react with the acid of the hot syrup mixture, creating bubbles, so do not be surprised if it bubbles up a little (and is yet another reason why you should always put hot sugar mixtures into larger rather than smaller pots on the stove - the bubbling over of incredibly hot sugar mixtures is seriously not to be advocated. 

Pour mixture over warm popcorn, mixing well. 

Pour hot caramel mixture over the warm pocorn

Put back into the oven, bake at 100C degrees for 45 minutes to one hour, stirring every 15 minutes or so – it helps the caramel coat the popcorn evenly. 

Caramel popcorn must be baked in the oven for 45 minutes

Remove from oven, break apart on a piece of paper & leave to cool.

Break apart the caramel popcorn kernels lest they stick together

Store in an air-tight container, lest it go soft, especially if you live in humid climes. If you are so lucky. My kids love to take it to school and swap it for other children’s’ lunches until their efforts were far too successful and they were banned from the practice.