Popcorn for geeks

[elfs]

Okay, I need a little help from the audience. Here's the recipe:

25g popcorn
2.0g vegetable oil
1.1g salt
4.2g butter
0.3g baking soda


Put the vegetable oil in a heavy-bottomed pot and turn stove to medium-high or high heat. Add three kernels of corn. Wait until they pop and the oil is ready. Put in the rest of the corn, cover, and shake until all the kernels pop. Remove from the heat, let cool slightly, add the butter and shake. Add salt and baking soda.

This is, according to Nature magazine, the perfect popcorn recipe. I tried it. It is actually a damned fine recipe, definitely getting up there on the perfection scale, and doing serious damage to previous recipes I've collected. It also makes a nice, snack-sized batch.

The problem is, "0.3g baking soda" and "4.2g butter" is damnably hard to calculate. Other than "multiply by four" (1/2 cup of popcorn is about 100g) and figure out what the equivalents would be (and do harm to my waistline), are there any suggestions from the audience?

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

You mean aside from making a larger batch and sharing?

Enlighenment

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

I am a popcorn Philestine; why baking soda?

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

My initial guess is that there's an Imperial to SI conversion in there. And some rounding off.

1 ounce is 28.4 grams, so let's see what happens if we scale up and convert to ounces...

1 ounce popcorn
1/12 ounce oil (to be honest, this sounds a bit wrong from the start, but I've never made popcorn)
"a pinch" of salt (1/22 ounce?)
1/5 ounce butter
And another pinch of baking powder... A small pinch.

That doesn't really sound any better. I think we're also looking at a conversion of volume measurements to mass, and all I know about that is that the US measures differ from the British.

Maybe you ought to submit a recipie for mole sauce, with the measurements in moles.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Rumor has it that the common name for 10^-24th power is the "guaco". Since a mole is 6.23 * 10^23 atoms, when you're working with individual atoms, you're working with...

... you can probably take the pun from here.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

WAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

[rapier.livejournal.com]

You're fired.

I'm such a geek

[cadetstar.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I googled the densities of all the ingredients (except the popcorn, which Elf provided). I came up with the following AS values:

25g of popcorn - 1/8th cup of popcorn
2g of vegetable oil ~ 1/2 teaspoon plus a sparse 1/8th teaspoon
1.1g of salt - 1/8th teaspoon
4.2g of butter - 3/4 teaspoon plus 1/8th teaspoon
.3g of baking soda - one quarter of 1/8th teaspoon, or a pinch

Yay for remembering chemistry and the fact that you can't convert straight from weight to volume.

-Michael from Texas

Don't you have a scale in your kitchen?

[danlyke.livejournal.com]

It's hard to be a serious cooking geek without a basic triple beam balance. Too many things are compressible or irregularly shaped, and too many serious recipes specify weight rather than volume. I got mine for working with chocolate, but for baking (after you quantify the protein content in your flours) or any number of other projects you've gotta have a good scale in the kitchen.

Re: Don't you have a scale in your kitchen?

[(Anonymous)]

I spent ~$20 for a small digital scale, I use it for tea. It measures to the 10th of a gram, so it would work for your app...

Joshua Sasmor, math department Seton Hill University
Sasmor@setonhi11.edu (spam filter on)