Ghee, or Indian-style clarified butter, is butter that’s been simmered and the milk solids (proteins and sugars) skimmed off. This leaves a clear yellow oil that doesn’t smoke when it’s heated and doesn’t go rancid quickly, but has a distinct toasty butter flavor.
Popcorn fans often want a buttery flavor, but plain butter is a bad choice for popping popcorn in a pot, because the proteins and sugars smoke and burn around the same temperature where it’s hot enough to pop the kernels.
Vegetable oil is either flavorless or faintly bitter, and some high-temperature vegetable oils tend to start polymerizing (i.e. becoming plastic) when heated in small amounts. This is also not good for popcorn.
Good-quality popcorn popped in ghee reliably produces lots of “butterfly” popcorn with few unpopped “duds” and no scorched kernels or batches ruined by smoke.
Try it! I’m sure not going back to canola oil.
I’ll give this a try. At my theater we use peanut oil because we are a small single screener and don’t need to pinch every penny and use flavicol or something else less natural. It tastes good to me though I am peanut intolerant (not a major allergy but it upsets my digestive system, which upsets those around me).
At home, corn oil is my go-to as I am just cooking corn in corn and then melt some butter and salt the butter and toss the popcorn with it to get it evenly coated.
One other trick we do at the theater and you might be able get your place to do is when they add ‘butter flavoring’ is to ask them to half full the bag, pump some on, shake up the bag, add the rest of the popcorn and add more flavoring. It makes the bottom levels of popcorn more consistent with flavor.