So I check out the news this morning and apparently popcorn salad is “breaking the internet”.
Have you guys ever heard of this stuff? Would you eat it?
I’ll try anything once, but my expectations would be low…
Good grief. I guess they’ve done everything with kale and cauliflower except marry it so now they need to find the Next Trendy Food in a hurry. I can’t imagine it would be anything other than soggy mush once the dressing goes on. I’d try it if someone was insane enough to serve it but my expectations would be low too.
Yeah, seems like a waste of perfectly good popcorn.
There was a trendy place here in Panama that used to sprinkle popcorn on top of a salad. But it was more like a garnish, like croutons, not mixed with the rest of the salad. I didn’t care for it.
I’ve had freeze dried corn as a garnish for chili but popcorn doesn’t seem like it would work as well.
I thought popcorn salad sounded bad, and then I looked at the ingredients. Chopped celery? Watercress? With popcorn? 
I guess we should be glad it doesn’t have chopped olives or hard boiled eggs. I think soggy popcorn would have a very unpleasant texture, with the popcorn hulls and everything. I have tried weird recipes before, but I will not try this one.
Next trip to the supermarket I plan to buy the ingredients for Swedish Fish salad. You can salad tuna. You can salad whitefish. Why not Swedish Fish?
I’ll let you know how it goes.
That at least makes sense. I could see it as a garnish, but I’m not at all seeing how you could have it as a major component of a salad and end up with anything but mush and kernel hulls a few minutes after dressing the salad. Or even before if the other veggies contribute enough moisture.
I think I’ve had something similar in the past and if I remember right, the taste was better than you’d think but the texture was as bad, and the hulls were worse then you could imagine.
I think I’d try it, but the listed recipe turns me off for two reasons -
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Equipment needed, popcorn popper. Really? I pop my corn in a heavy pot, or microwave in a brown paper bag a la Alton Brown. Now, I may be a grumpy food snob, but if you don’t own a popper, why not link to one of a dozen different blogs about popping at home.
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“white Cheddar popcorn seasoning to taste” OMG. Really, what’s the point of hand crafting your dressing and healthy ingredients if you’re going to add some off the shelf popcorn ‘seasoning’. And while there are some homemade variations, again no such links, and since they even said “the popcorn will also be salty,” sounds like they’re expecting the usual crap.
So, sounds like a novel dish, and at least the “serve immediately” would mitigate the risk of sogginess. Certainly, I have no problem with adding a crunchy element to a salad - but the above leads me to put it in the category of ‘food hacks’ rather than quality cuisine.
And I’m with @MagicEyes - hope the host takes the time to pull all the hulls and partially popped kernels out, or it would be hell.
Yeah, that would kind of make sense, or crumbled a bit to give you a nutty kind of texture and flavor. Popcorn doesn’t sound completely out-of-place to me on a salad – I think the flavors can work well, but not really as a dominant element like it is here. It also seems like it would be a bit of a pain in the ass to eat. OK she says eat it with a spoon, which I guess makes the most sense, but then with the greens in there, it’s kind of awkward. But wait. She says it’s a salad for a spoon, but the last scene where she’s digging into the popcorn salad with her friends, they’re all eating it with a fork.
I mean, I’d try it, but it just doesn’t seem well thought-out.
It’s basically a macaroni salad with popcorn instead of macaroni. I guess it all depends on how much you like macaroni salad.
Popcorn’s pretty good on tomato soup instead of crackers.
I remember for a while in the 80s, beer cheese soup with popcorn on top was all the rage at restaurants.
The popcorn salad and popcorn on soup are not for me. Give me a bowl of popcorn with butter and salt the way it was intended to be eaten.
Popcorn question, apologies if it’s ot: if you dehydrate popcorn (shouldn’t take much!), can it be processed into a flour, to be used like other flours?
I saw a demonstration of Vitamix blenders on QVC (yeah, I know) and one of the things they did was grind unpopped popcorn into corn meal. As long as the shells got ground up fine enough I don’t know why it wouldn’t work just as well as regular corn meal.
Anybody use popcorn for meatloaf filler?
I suspect it depends on what you mean by popcorn. If you’re dehydrating whole conventional corn kernels, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal, but the results would probably be a bit lacking, and if you were using dried corn that was specified for ‘popcorn’ use, probably the same. Popcorn varietals are selected (among a long of other things) for very firm pericarps, the outer layer, so that the wet endosperm can build pressure by boiling inside until it explodes. Thus the hard hulls that always stick between my teeth. Even if ground fine, it would probably leave a less than ideal texture in a home grinding environment, although commercial machines would probably work.
If you’re using cornmeal for baking purposes, the moisture content of the original grain, acidity, and sugar all make a difference in how baked goods will turn out, so that would be a huge consideration as well (which was my concern for the ‘conventional’ corn I mentioned earlier). None of this means you can’t use it of course, but would want to allow for differences in baking time, acid balance if using baking powder, and possible difference in browning due to sugar content.
I’ve had popcorn salad in the olden days before the Pinterest people got hold of it. It was mush. Blech. Waste of good popcorn.
I was curious about using popped pop corn, like maybe drying out stale stuff and grinding it. Just thinking it might have a slightly different flavor than regular corn meal, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was identical in taste.
Apparently it’s a bit different, but that can be a pro rather than a con. Check out this -
You can absolutely do a lot with purpose-made or left over popcorn, and this is from a few years ago, so it’s not exactly a new trend. I like this recipe because unlike my (excessive?) gripes about the one in the OP - it goes with the option of popping using on hand cookware, and makes a clear point about removing duds and shells.