Somehow the vegetable oil was enough. This was a frugal guy – he wouldn’t have used butter! 
The more I think about this, the harder it is to imagine a family camping trip without Jiffy pop. That and my Tonka Toaster.
Love the idea about retaining Jiffy as a sporting goods store product. That’s kinda perfect, really, and it would give the old familiar product a new lease on life.
Thanks Conagra. What they don’t mention is that there’s still partially hydrogenated soybean oil. It’s just low enough that they can round down to zero by the labeling rules thanks to the 18 servings per bag. Cite
IME of looking at labels microwave popcorn is also going to have an issue with removing their transfats. Some are going to have a bigger issue since they have a reportable count. Some manage to keep things just below the reporting level like the above. If they can’t use the ingredient though it’s an issue they’ll have to fix. We may all be buying jars of kernel and breaking out the covered pan yet.
You know, if those go bad on you they sure look like they’d have a good alternate life as a combination baby rattle / fly swatter.
Thanks for reminding me. I need to be sure to store them flat, rather than tilted up on their sides. Don’t want all that nummy partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oil to slide to one side and leak through the seams.
A bag that will hold 18 servings? I’m imagining one the size of my living room.
Not if you define one “serving” as, say, 3 kernels.
I was afraid this had to do with Jiffy muffins!
I haven’t had Jiffy Pop in years, but I loved it when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, we would pop enough popcorn to fill a couple of brown paper grocery bags, and take them to the Catskill Game Farm to feed the animals. Can you imagine a zoo allowing that these days?
I grew up in Kingston and we would go there too!
We buy the jars and make popcorn in our wok. Our favorite tends to be popped in olive oil and as soon as it comes off the burner add salt and garlic powder to it in the brown paper bag then shake the heck out of it to spread the garlic and salt around. Some times when we make it we also add dried parsley flakes.
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To be fair to conagra I checked a couple different brands (serving size between 1 bag and 2.5 servings per bag) that still managed 0 transfat for labeling purposes. Partially hydrogenated oils still showed up on the labels of every brand I picked up. Even with that big fat zero on the nutrition data, and without miniscule portion sizes being necessary to achieve it, they all have problems with new rule.
Interesting. I wasn’t sure if olive oil could get hot enough without burning.
You only need it to get to about 325 or so to pop the corn. Enough to get the water content to want to flash to steam when it overpressures the kernal.
Who knew, a plant based pressure vessel explosion could be so tasty =)
Have you seen the Mythbusters! episode where they pop popcorn in a specially-built pressure cooker? They throw the lid open and the sudden drop in ambient pressure pops all* the kernels in about 2 seconds.
*) And by “all”, I mean “about half, and most of those were burnt.”
Cake? Cocoa-y? Damn, Jiffy Pop has really changed from the last time I had it as a child!
I forgot to mention: The message had a paragraph that was cut off at the end. I replied, asking them what was in this mystery paragraph. Two weeks later, at the end of the month (June 30th), they sent me this follow-up:
“We currently still make Jiffy Pop and our team will continue to review the ingredients.”
That is all.
UPDATE 2-May-2016:
I just looked at the Jiffy Pop on the store shelves at Wal*Mart, and the ingredients have changed. The partially hydrogenated oils have been completely replaced with palm oil! I bought one, took it home, popped it, ate it … and I couldn’t tell the difference between the new and old formulas.
THE JIFFYPOCALYPSE HAS BEEN AVERTED!!
Too bad now everyone is saying you should boycott palm oil, saying it’s bad for the environment and for you. So how long until Jiffy Pop changes again?
Probably not for a long while. The only reason they switched out the partially hydrogenated oils was the FDA has put a ban in place with a mid-2017 compliance deadline.
It’s one of the reasons palm oil is as popular as it is.