Popcorn is…my favorite food. So last spring when I was planting the garden, I knew I wanted to try growing my own popcorn. Now, as soon as I went out to harvest it, I really wanted to bring it in and pop it right away.
But I learned you can’t do that. You have to cure it first. Popcorn needs to be between 13 and 14% moisture in order to pop effectively.
How to Cure your Corn
First, harvest your popcorn when it is nice and dry, so the husks and the stocks are nice and brown and dry.
For me, that was end of September and you’re going to want to bring it into the house and let it dry out even more.
So I ended up hanging it with some string along my banister, which ended up working really well. It doubles as a nice full decoration piece.
Or you can use those mesh bags that are typically used for onions at the grocery store and put the cobs in there and hang it up.
I had a few cobs that I put in a box, and the ones in the bottom of the box didn’t have very good airflow and they actually got moldy.
How do you Know the Popcorn is Cured?
And then comes the hard part. You have to wait and wait and wait some more. Now, how do you know when you get to that 13 to 14% moisture?
No, I don’t have some fancy moisture level reader. What I ended up doing was just test popping a little bit once a week or once every other week.
I’d scrape a few kernels off, throw them in my air popper and see if they would pop.
This is definitely an exercise in patience because I would throw those kernels in the popper and watch and wait expectantly and nothing happened.
Another week would go by and throw another batch in and nope, nada, nothing. And this went on for what felt like forever.
Now, most places online said that you only had to wait a few weeks, maybe 4 to 6 at most. So I thought, great, I harvested in the end of September, by the time Thanksgiving rolls around I will be popping all sorts of popcorn.
Not the case. Thanksgiving passed and the Christmas decorations started going up and my popcorn was still not popping.
Now, for a popcorn lover like me, that was a bit disappointing, but I decided to just give it more time and that is all it needed.
In the beginning of December, I got two kernels to pop and that was an exciting night. I knew we were on our way to success.
Then in mid-December, I ended up putting a bunch of popcorn in way more than I normally did for test popping, and it worked.
I got a lot of popcorn. Most of it popped and I knew we were in business.
But once you get to that key moisture level, you can’t just stop there. You have to store your popcorn. Otherwise it could dry out too much and then it won’t pop. It’s kind of particular.
Remove the Kernels and Store your Popcorn
So that is what I’m doing today. My job is to get all the kernels off of these cobs so they can be sealed nice and tight in mason jars and keep the appropriate moisture content.
Getting the kernels off is actually pretty simple. You can just use your hands and sort of twist it and you can see they just fall off pretty easy.
Since I have a lot of cobs to do, I’d probably wear gloves for this because it does get a little bit rough on the hands, but while I was shopping online at Premier One one day, I noticed they had this nifty little gadget, their Hand Popcorn Sheller, to help you get the kernels off of your popcorn cups.
So I decided to give it a try, and it works pretty well. All you have to do is stick it on the cob and just sort of twists it around and all the kernels fall away. Plus it’s really cheap.
So now we’ve got our popcorn off of the cob and I’m just going to put it into a mason jar here and seal this nice and tight and it should last for a long time like this.
All right. We’re just going to put our popcorn on the shelf and that is how you cure and store popcorn that you grew in your own garden.