The food culture of popcorn

Popcorn is an ancient puffed food. Hundreds of years ago, "necklace" gluttons were used by Indians who lived in this continent before European immigrants moved into the "New World". It became popular to eat popcorn. After Columbus returned to Europe, he described to people vivid scenes of Indian children in the "New World" stringing popcorn necklaces and selling them on the streets. It was also the Indians who taught the new European immigrants how to plant and roast corn. A historian also discovered popcorn eaten by ancient Indians 5,000 years ago in a cave in New Mexico, USA. However, due to the limitations of the "craft" at that time, the taste was far less crunchy than contemporary popcorn. . Modern inventors have designed an electric cooker for families who like to eat popcorn. It is said that it only takes 10 minutes to pop a large pot of popcorn. Many local TV stations in the United States often broadcast common knowledge on how to pop popcorn, and also introduce various new flavor popcorn methods. Reton Bahar, an expert who frequently appears on television screens and calls himself the "Popcorn King," has become a household name in the United States. When he takes the stage, he talks about "Corn Scripture."

Popcorn originated in the Song Dynasty of China. Fan Chengda, a poet at that time, mentioned the custom of popcorn in Wuzhong during the Lantern Festival in his "Shihu Collection", and explained: "Popcorn The name of the glutinous rice is Bolou, and the northerners call it glutinous rice flower. "Why is the popcorn called "Bo Lou"? The popcorn is thought to imitate the sound of popping corn, because the local dialect calls the sound of thunder "poulong". Zhao Yi, a scholar of the Qing Dynasty, recorded a poem called "Poem of Exploding Po Lou" in his "Eaves Revealed Miscellaneous Notes": "When one enters the Wu clan from the east, one hundred thousand families will burst the grain to predict their age. Put the golden millet in the pot and turn it over. White jade flowers. The pink beauty predicts happy events, the white-headed old man asks about his life. Dawn comes to decorate his sons, and a few plum blossoms are placed on the temples. "The popcorn written by the poet is not only beautiful, but also full of the interest of life. Fan Chengda recorded in "Wu Jun Zhi·Customs": "In the Shangyuan Dynasty,... the glutinous rice was exploded in the cauldron, named Bolou, also known as rice flower. Each person blew himself up to predict the outcome of the year." On the approach of the New Year, People in the Song Dynasty used popcorn to predict the good and bad luck of the year, and girls used it to predict their own life events. People in the Song Dynasty added food to culture to give it a richer connotation. Popcorn is crunchy and easy to digest, making it a delicious daily snack. The invention of popcorn further reflects the richness and variety of Chinese food. It has a deeper meaning, which is the creation of a food processing method called puffed food. It shows that food processing in ancient China is not just about simply heating and cooking food, but also changing the state and taste of food through the physical principle of high temperature and high pressure. This processing method is the emerging modern puffed food. This processing method turns ordinary unpalatable food into delicious and distinctive food snacks. It can be said that popcorn thousands of years ago is the ancestor of all kinds of puffed food snacks in modern times. It was only a few years ago that popcorn had a trade name. In 2002, a food called "Non-Throwing Popcorn" became popular among the public. After people tasted this popcorn, they felt that it was very different from the previous Baoguhua. Baoguhua was a snack suitable for all ages. Popular casual snacks. The so-called leisure means eating and having fun.

No one can tell clearly in what dynasty and how long the history of Baoguhua originated. In short, this snack has been around for a long time and has long been deeply rooted in people's hearts. There is no doubt that it originated in rural areas.

It is said that before the appearance of Baoguhua, villagers went to the mountains to open up wasteland for farming, and the dry food they brought was rice popcorn. The so-called rice popsicles are made by frying rice in oily sand continuously to make the rice grains bulge and soft, and become a cooked food. Villagers go to the mountains to open up wasteland, and sometimes they have to go out for several days, so they pack the rice cakes in cloth bags and take them up the mountain. When they are hungry, they eat rice cakes by the mountain spring to satisfy their hunger. Later, the villagers thought that the rice cakes fried with oil sand were better than the rice cakes. Firstly, they were fragrant, and secondly, they were hungry. Therefore, the rice cakes replaced the rice kernels and became popular in the vast rural areas. During festivals, weddings and funerals, when you have nothing to do, Baoguhua is the best snack for entertaining guests or eating by yourself. In winter leisure time, when a family or three friends gather around a firewood or charcoal fire, they often put a few grains of rice into the firewood and charcoal ash. After a while, there will be a bang here and a bang there, and the rice will become It turned into a big corn flower, and everyone rushed to eat it, laughing and joking, full of nostalgia, and the whole house was warm.

Later, it should be said that not too long ago, popcorn machines appeared in society, and some people started doing business based on this, from rural areas to towns, and finally entered cities. Soybeans, peas, rice, corn, this popcorn machine can pop popcorn. There are still many people who make a living from this, and the customers are mainly children. The production of Baoguhua has always been a discrete and random act. It became formalized and produced in factories, all thanks to the promotion of the "Zunnuo No. 1 high-quality and high-yielding waxy corn" variety selected by Zunyi City Agricultural Science in the mid-to-late 1990s in rural areas of northern Guizhou. In other words, planting this kind of corn With more corn farmers, the yield of waxy corn will naturally increase, which provides sufficient raw materials for food processing. It is against this background that "Never Throwaway Popcorn" entered the market.

The raw materials and production process of the popcorn are very particular. The raw material is "Zunnuo No. 1", which is a waxy corn. Tested by the Ministry of Agriculture, this corn has a lysine content of 0.48% and a protein content of 11.38%. It is also of good quality, fragrant and sticky.