http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/dining/heirloom-popcorn-helps-a-snack-reinvent-itself.html 2014-09-30 22:04:33 Heirloom Popcorn Helps a Snack Reinvent Itself Heirloom varieties you pop yourself deliver more flavor than those store-bought bags. === SHELLSBURG, Iowa — Corn confronts you at every turn in Iowa. It blurs past the car window for hours. Stop for gas and you’re likely to find a patch growing out back. Much of it will fuel cars, feed cattle and sweeten food. But a half-hour’s drive from Cedar Rapids, in front of Gene and Lynn Mealhow’s sturdy farmhouse, ears of corn no bigger than a child’s hand grow from seeds the family can trace back to the 1850s. The small, pearly flint corn has never been genetically modified or hybridized. Its only purpose is to pop into small, crisp puffs that taste of pure toasted corn. Mr. Mealhow, 59, a soil expert who still looks very much like the hippie drummer he once was, spent years driving around trying to sell his precious popcorn. Now, his Tiny but Mighty brand is on the shelves of Whole Foods. For a family like his, that’s akin to winning the lottery. The Mealhows are part of a popcorn revival, the latest reinvention of an enduring American snack that has been retooled every few generations to fit shifts in technology and culinary fashion. With the invention of steam-powered poppers and caramel-coated Now, in an era of farmers’ markets and a do-it-yourself ethos, older popcorn varieties with names like Dakota Black, Tom Thumb and Lady Finger are being popped on the stove in coconut and olive oils, enhanced with just a kiss of fresh butter and fine salt or fortified with rosemary, wasabi powder or nothing at all. “If you look at craft beers, you’ll see that the same thing happened,” said Glenn Roberts, who founded Mr. Roberts sells almost 400 pounds of Appalachian heirloom sweet flint popping corn a week. Chefs are his biggest customers, drawn in part by his corn’s sweet, slightly floral taste. But home cooks, too, are rediscovering the joys of making popcorn on the stove (“a lost art,” Lynn Mealhow calls it) and updating it with flavors like garam masala or sriracha — treating it, in effect, like any other premium ingredient. “Popcorn is a product that comes from a seed that you can make in your own home and customize,” said Melissa Abbott, the vice president of culinary insights for Still, for a nation that knows the pleasure buried in a tub of movie-house popcorn laced with fake butter, or the instant gratification inside a bag hot from the office microwave, the older popcorns are not always easy to love. They cost more, pop up smaller and leave more unpopped kernels than their highly bred commercial brothers. The reward, however, is popcorn with a better nutritional profile, and hulls — the bits that stick in your teeth — that seem to all but disappear. The flavor can be subtle but complex, mixing toast and sweet corn, delivering in taste what the aroma of popping corn has always promised. Elite chefs are already smitten. A couple of years ago, Daniel Patterson of Coi in San Francisco simmered popcorn in water and butter, strained out the hulls and called it popcorn grits. The dish had a cameo in the PBS “Mind of a Chef” programs starring David Chang, and the recipe made it into Mr. Chang’s cult magazine, Lucky Peach. When Mr. Patterson published it in his 2013 book No one is pretending that artisanal popcorn is about to conquer the mass market. Its growth is so small that those who track the snack industry have no hard numbers on its growing popularity. But they do note that popcorn, which has long lagged behind even the lowly pretzel in America’s salty-snack pantheon, is rallying. Sales of bagged, ready-to-eat popcorn jumped 27 percent from August 2013 to August 2014, according to the market research firm “We’ve been watching this category for the last two years and we keep saying. ‘Wow, it doesn’t seem to stop growing,’ ” Ms. Abbott said. Popcorn appeals to several growing constituencies: the weight-conscious, the gluten-free and people looking for healthier snacks. Microwave popcorn remains the favorite, with nearly $900 million in sales in 2013. And although those sales have flattened, a few companies like For small farmers like them, popcorn adds a new revenue stream; the crop needs less land and water than sweet corn or field corn. Theo Bill, an owner of the “Our customer base is interested in taste and flavor and texture,” Mr. Bill said, “but they also want the ability to save their own seeds and plant them year after year.” Charlotte Swancy has given over three acres of her Ms. Swancy makes a pan almost every day, throwing in some chopped rosemary as it pops, or tossing it with curry powder once it’s in the bowl. She finds the low-tech nature of popping popcorn a respite in an age of digital disruption. “It’s just a nice thing to have at the end of the day,” she said. “We shut everything down and eat popcorn.” Here in Iowa, a sense of history and mission drew the Mealhows into popcorn. Mr. Mealhow comes from a family that lost its farmland in the 1980s. He gave up a career in music when it was clear he would need to do something to provide for his four sons. He turned back to agriculture, working as a soil consultant with an eye toward seed selection. He has a certain genius for making temperamental crops grow well, which appealed to Richard Kelty, another eastern Iowa farmer. Like a lot of families in the Midwest, the Keltys had long grown some popcorn on the side for personal use and a little profit. Theirs had been passed down from father to son since the mid-1800s, when as best anyone can tell, the family either found it growing wild or acquired it from Native American neighbors. Only a few handfuls were left when Mr. Kelty decided to revive it and start selling it. He hired Mr. Mealhow to help improve his yield. The Mealhow family bought the business in the late 1990s, selling the kernels by mail order and in local grocery stores. Mr. Mealhow drove hundreds of miles east to Chicago to try to entice managers at Whole Foods, one of whom finally put it on the shelves. Tiny but Mighty now has eight full-time employees and oversees more than 200 acres in Illinois and Iowa. It has expanded, selling pre-popped flavored corn in bags. Whole Foods has lent the company money. Over home-canned tomato juice and sweet rolls at the farmhouse breakfast table, Mr. Mealhow acknowledged that his was a battle that would not be easily won. America is perhaps too deeply in love with size over flavor. He blames “Orville produced a giant popcorn to be a delivery vehicle for butter and salt,” he said. “He convinced the entire world that was the way to go. But it doesn’t taste like anything.” “Maybe,” a friend at the table suggested, “you need to become the Orville of heirloom popcorn.” The farmer shook his head. “I don’t want fame and fortune,” he said. “I just want people to know it’s out there.”