Seasoning popcorn with dry spices is easy – you just shake it up. But there are many flavors that live outside of this range. These flavors come in the form of sauces, and some of them are pretty good for popcorn as well.
However, if you drip, drip, or otherwise pour liquid flavorings directly onto a large bowl of fresh and fluffy popcorn, it turns into a large bowl of unevenly flavored, moist popcorn, which is not what you want. To evenly and effectively distribute the delicious flavor of your choice, you need to whisk it with butter first.
By emulsifying your sauce with butter (or a vegan butter substitute) you can spread it all over the bowl without accidentally creating wet spots. We have used this technique to make it before Soy sauce butter and Fish sauce butter, but it works with pretty much any sauce or liquid flavoring. Hot sauce is a good one – there are so many hot sauces to try! – but my new favorite is maple syrup, which reads like a sweet and salty kettle corn with little effort (obviously without the kettle corn texture).
To soak in your popcorn, melt two tablespoons of butter or butter substitute in a small pan over medium heat, or microwave cut in 5-second bursts and stir in between until completely melted. Add a teaspoon of the sauce of your choice to the butter and beat in with a fork. (You can scale if needed depending on how much popcorn you’re making.) Try by dipping a piece of popcorn in your mix and adding more sauce if needed. Make sure that you whisk a homogeneous mixture with the popcorn each time you add butter. Drizzle your popcorn and toss it to coat. Then determine which sauce and butter combination you want to try next. Highly recommend the fish sauce, soy sauce, maple syrup, and hot sauce mentioned above, but heap up your spice supply and get creative. You can also combine sauces – maple butter with hot sauce sounds pretty exquisite in my not-so-humble opinion.
