my profile | my password | search | faq & rules | forum home

» Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE   » Operations   » Ground Level   » Switching from Coconut to canola oil for popcorn. (Page 2)

This topic comprises 2 pages: 1  2

Author Topic: Switching from Coconut to canola oil for popcorn. Manny Montes Master Film Handler Posts: 270 From: United States Registered: Feb 2010 posted 12-06-2014 04:46 PM                     Canola oil will gunk up your popper and there's a lot of carbon buildup. I don't think you'll break even with any repairs, plus as everyone else said, sales will decline as people aren't a fan of the smell nor the taste (from what i've seen)  |  IP: Logged Michael Gonzalez Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 790 From: Grand Island , NE USA Registered: Sep 2000 posted 12-08-2014 11:49 PM                     Of course Coconut oil is the best. Peanut oil is okay. I don't care too much for Canola oil. Used to use a Coconut oil blend (I think with Canola) was fairly decent. Cheaper and no one (at least customer wise) noticed a difference. No one has mentioned this but I lived in a town that had a privately owned discount theater and they used sunflower oil. I actually liked that a lot. That would be my second choice after pure Coconut. I don't know if anyone else has had experience with that.  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 12-17-2014 05:26 AM                        We've experimented with safflower oil as well as sunflower mixed with coconut oil (never with 100% of either of them). While 20/80 (sunflower oil/coconut oil) didn't impact the flavor substantially, the popcorn just didn't have as robust a flavor or aroma. The safflower oil burned to quickly. We even tried adding a little extra virgin olive oil so we could claim "A Healthier Popcorn," tieing into the general public's perception that olive oil is so uber healthy, but it ruined the taste unless we used so little that it became unethical to claim you were getting any "health benefits from monosaturated virgin olive oil," when threshold to what we could add before it ruined the taste of the popcorn was like 1000 to 1 coconut to olive. After dicking around, we went back to 100% Coconut. We tried At-The-Movies brand which adds beta caroteen to pure coconut oil to give it a yellow color and were quite happy with that but we also use plain virgin, cold pressed coconut oil. We allow customers to add their "Buttery Topping" which basically is soybean oil with butter flavoring in squirters as well as Flavorcal salt in shakers. They add their own topping and salt to taste so they can make it as fat and salt free (healthy) as they want, or load it up with as much as they want as well -- it's out of our hands; we hand it to them as a fairly healthy snack. Thing is, it is scruptious as-is and many of the Whole Foods crowd eat it that way and tell us so.  |  IP: Logged Carsten Kurz Film God Posts: 4340 From: Cologne, NRW, Germany Registered: Aug 2009 posted 12-17-2014 05:55 AM                     Canola oil can have very different tastes, depending on crop and processing. Yes, there are some with a very unpleasant taste, and most of these variants smell even worse after being heated up. Canola is as healthy as olive oil (if not better), so it could be used for marketing a 'healthier popcorn'. Coconut oil can stand high heat better, but is not healthy at all (loads of saturated fat). On the other hand, trying to sell a caramelized mix of fat, sugar and starch as 'healthy' is pointless anyway. We use only canola oil for our popcorn for years. We are probably just lucky with our sourcing, it is a rather neutral tasting variant. - Carsten  |  IP: Logged Buck Wilson Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 894 From: St. Joseph MO, USA Registered: Sep 2010 posted 12-17-2014 07:17 AM                     Frank, do you cook your batches with any flavacol or JUST oil and leave it 100% to the customer?  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 12-17-2014 11:05 AM                        I have used Canola popping oil for years and it works well. However, I don't use or offer any kind of topping oil or "buttery flavour". Instead, my topping is real butter, and I am the local Coop grocery store's largest butter customer. The butter that I buy isn't anything unusual, but the Coop brand of butter has less water content than many others. Not something you would notice when you're just putting it on your toast, but when you melt several pounds in a pot like I do the water content separates out and needs to be pumped off before using it on popcorn. If there is water in the butter, the popcorn kernels shrink and get soggy and that's not the effect that you want. Coop butter still has a bit of water content that has to be pumped off but it's a fraction of the water content of some other brands that I've tried. Having "Popcorn with REAL BUTTER!" on my concession price sign sells a lot of popcorn. I don't know of any other theatre or venue anywhere around here that sells popcorn with butter. Several people ask to have some butter added to their container at the halfway point as well as on top when we're filling the container, and I accommodate that request at no extra charge. With lots of butter, with a litte butter, or without butter, my popcorn is the same price. I don't use popcorn bags either. I think they look cheap. I use cardboard containers like this: People pay what I think is a high price for popcorn, so I think they should receive the best product that I can possibly provide. On a regular basis, I have people tell me that I have the best popcorn available anywhere. It's relatively famous in this area. My theatre is in the middle of the downtown area here, and I occasionally have truckers drive in from the highway (about a five block detour) to purchase a "large popcorn" on their way past town.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-17-2014 11:24 AM                        Your popcorn program is exactly the same as ours, except we do use coconut oil, and we don't use real butter -- we use Odell's "Supurkist Two." We used to use the Odell's real butter product (which I forget the name of) and we did a trial of the Supurkist for a month using some free samples we got at a convention. We got a lot of comments saying they liked the new stuff better, so we switched over to the Supurkist which is about 1/4 the price of the real butter. We add the butter flavor to the middle layer of the popcorn on all sizes, and on the extra large (130 ounce) we put two middle layers of the flavor in. I would say about 95% of people get their popcorn with the butter flavoring. We constantly get people in who claim our popcorn is the best they ever had. I suppose a lot of it is what you grow up with and get used to... we've been using the same recipe, ingredients (outside of the butter switch) and even the same machine now for almost 20 years. I suppose teenagers from Billings miss the Carmike popcorn when they go somewhere else to college.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 12-17-2014 12:38 PM                     Without a doubt, SuperKist2 is the best butter knockoff. Odell's Real is their Real butter and it is water-free so you don't have to skim it.  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 12-18-2014 07:46 AM                        quote: Buck Wilson Frank, do you cook your batches with any flavacol or JUST oil and leave it 100% to the customer? Buck, I tried no salt or no flavacol at first, but found out that even for people who claim they don't want salt on their popcorn, there really is an expectation for just a tad saltiness. I started putting just a pinch in with the oil and label it as "very lightly salted," although we will make up a batch that is totally salt-free if asked (we encourage anyone who needs it to be completely salt-free for health reasons to just ask and we accomodate).  |  IP: Logged

All times are Central (GMT -6:00)

This topic comprises 2 pages: 1  2

Printer-friendly view of this topic

Hop To: Select a Forum: Category: Operations -------------------- Digital Cinema Forum Film Handlers' Forum Large Format Forum Ground Level Feature Info, Trailer Attachments & REAL Credit Offsets Category: Community -------------------- Film-Yak Film Handlers' Movie Reviews The Afterlife Bob Maar's Joke-A-Thon Category: Classified -------------------- Equipment and Supplies Wanted/For Sale Help Wanted/Seeking Employment Category: System -------------------- Software Beta Testing Forum

The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.