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Welcome to In the Kitchen with Ashlee Marie. Today we're making my caramel popcorn.
Now you can either make just traditional caramel popcorn with this recipe or you can get
extra gooey and make caramel popcorn balls. My kids love these. They're especially
popular on the holidays and they make great gifts but we like them year round
especially for Friday night and the movie nights. Let's get started.
You start with two cubes of butter. Some white sugar. And some brown sugar. And some
Karo syrup. We're going to turn on medium and we're going to keep stirring it until its hit the
soft ball stage on our thermometer.
Our caramel sauce is now at the soft ball stage of 230 degrees so we're going to mix in some
evaporated milk. Get all of that goodness in there. And some vanilla. What we want to do is
stir this until it's combined and then we're going to let it boil for one minute. Now this cooks
6 to 12 cups of popcorn depending on how caramely you want your popcorn. I'm just going
to pour about a third of it on to begin with ... or maybe more like half. Then I'm going to stir
that up together.
Now this does get a little messy. It's a little too hot to handle though. So I don't advise
sticking your hands in here. You can see it's coating really well. By not pouring all of it
together at the same time we can see where maybe something needs more or maybe its
caramely enough and we don't want to add any more.
Now, I don't know about you I'm not sure if it's ever caramely enough but you know just in
case. One of the reasons not to add all the caramel to your popcorn right at the beginning is
also the fact that the caramel is really hot and if you just kind of pour the caramel all over the
popcorn it tends to make the popcorn deflate. And then even though we don't have any
kernels in here because we got them all out using my cool nifty trick, it ends up just being
really hard instead of nice and soft because all the caramel's kind of deflated the popcorn. So
we don't want to do that. So a little bit at a time keeps it a little bit cooler and keeps it from
over deflating.
So now we have everything nice and coated. Extra coated. I will say if you're going to be
making caramel popcorn balls you probably want to go with the more caramely route. If
you're going up like just some snack food that you want people to be able to pick at, then you
want to go the less caramely route because this is going to be sticking together really good.
Right, so it's still too hot to handle so if I tried to get my hands in there and make popcorn
balls right now it'd be a mess and it would burn my hands so and I don't want to do either of
those things.
So we're actually going to split this up and let it cool a little bit. The other problem is if you
make the caramel balls while it's still this caramely, notice if we just try to like put this in a
shape right now; let's say we wanted a tower because the caramel is so warm the popcorn is
just going to keep spreading out as the caramel spreads out so we actually want this a little bit
cooler and then it'll be able to form balls. And that way it'll still be sticky enough that it'll
hold together.
Right so let's spread this out and let it cool. Our popcorn is cool about 10 maybe 15 minutes.
And we're ready to ball it up. So, the key to not making a huge mess in your hands is
actually some kind of non-stick spray. So I'm going to spray over the sink. So you spray
right into your hands so that we're all nice and greasy now. And we're going to take about a
cup I'd say of popcorn up and caramel. Make sure to get some of that caramel that's kind of
stuck to the bottom of the pan, a little bit more. Right and now it's cool enough that we can
touch it. And it's also cool enough that it holds its form. So, put some parchment paper
down.
Sometimes you'll find that one of the balls starts to fall apart and that's simply because it's
still a little bit warm like the ones that were in the very center where the caramel was a little
bit warmer still. I just go back a couple of minutes later and give it one last shape and then it
usually holds together just fine.
I don't know about you but this is the best part of it here. So if you have any extra popcorn
kernels you can always scrape together just a little bit and enjoy it yourself before you share.
This is so good.
I hope you guys enjoyed this recipe. Thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe for
more videos and leave a comment down below on anything you'd like to see here on the
channel. So what do you think?
Princess: Super, Triple, Twice. 100% delicious.
Ashlee: I'm glad. How about you Lego Boy what do you think?
Lego Boy: Five and a half stars.
Ashlee: Five and a half stars, huh? Out of? How many stars are there in total?
Lego Boy: Six.
Ashlee: Ooh, out of six.