Popcorn up close salted and air popped. Pressure from the steam continues to build until the hull ruptures, allowing the kernel to forcefully expand, to 20 india popcorn 50 times its original volume, and then cool.
The Zea mays variety everta, a special kind of flint corn, is the most common of these. Popcorn is one of six major types of corn, which includes dent corn, flint corn, pod corn, flour corn, and sweet corn. Corn was domesticated about 10,000 years ago in what is now Mexico. Archaeologists discovered that people have known about popcorn for thousands of years. Fossil evidence from Peru suggests that corn was popped as early as 4700 BC. Through the 19th century, popping of the kernels was achieved by hand on stove tops. Kernels were sold on the East Coast of the United States under names such as Pearls or Nonpareil.
The term popped corn first appeared in John Russell Bartlett’s 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms. An early popcorn machine in a street cart, invented in the 1880s by Charles Cretors in Chicago. Popcorn’s accessibility increased rapidly in the 1890s with Charles Cretors’ invention of the popcorn maker. Cretors, a Chicago candy store owner, had created a number of steam-powered machines for roasting nuts and applied the technology to the corn kernels. By the turn of the century, Cretors had created and deployed street carts equipped with steam-powered popcorn makers.
10 cents a bag and became popular. Thus, while other businesses failed, the popcorn business thrived and became a source of income for many struggling farmers, including the Redenbacher family, namesake of the famous popcorn brand. In 1970, Orville Redenbacher’s namesake brand of popcorn was launched. Each kernel of popcorn contains a certain amount of moisture and oil. Unlike most other grains, the outer hull of the popcorn kernel is both strong and impervious to moisture and the starch inside consists almost entirely of a hard type. As the oil and water within the kernel are heated, they turn the moisture in the kernel into pressurized steam. Under these conditions, the starch inside the kernel gelatinizes, softens, and becomes pliable.