Blend Up Popcorn For A Tasty Addition To Your Baked Goods

As far as pantry items go, popcorn is incredibly versatile. Whether you go savory or sweet, there are endless possibilities. You can top popcorn with nutritional yeast for the perfect umami-rich snack, season it with boxed macaroni and cheese mix for a cheesy treat, or make black pepper and blue cheese popcorn. If you're in the mood for something sweet, popcorn is amazing drizzled with chocolate and caramel or as a garnish atop butterscotch ice cream. You can even eat popcorn as an alternative to breakfast cereal or use it to make frozen caramel popcorn pops. Here's one use you may not have thought of, though — using popcorn to make flour.

In this video posted by the YouTube channel Simple or Not Kitchen, the narrator shows how she uses popcorn to make cornbread. She uses her blender to grind popped kernels into a fine flour. She then simply combines the flour with cornbread mix, eggs, and milk to create her batter and bakes it as normal. When we first heard about this hack for popcorn cornbread, we envisioned a pan of cornbread chock full of chunky bits of popcorn, but this is not the case. Once ground, the popcorn flour blends well with the mix to create a fluffy, delicious cornbread. The YouTuber also mentions that you can use popcorn flour to make bread or thicken gravy, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. This DIY flour is a great addition to a variety of baked goods.

There are several advantages to using popcorn flour. For starters, popcorn is much lighter than traditional flour, meaning a little goes a long way. It's incredibly fluffy, so it works well when added to breads, cakes, waffles, pancakes, or any other baked good that would benefit from extra fluffiness. It's a healthy, whole-grain flour rich in dietary fiber; according to the American Heart Foundation, popcorn packs more fiber per serving than whole-wheat bread. Since popcorn flour is so light, it provides an easy way to add whole grains and fiber to baked goods without weighing them down or sacrificing taste. Sharyn Carlesso, Founding Owner of King Valley Popcorn Flour, shared in a LinkedIn post that popcorn flour "looks and tastes like a whole meal flour but softer."

Popcorn is also naturally gluten-free. If you're baking or cooking for a gluten-free guest and don't have any all-purpose gluten-free flour on hand, homemade popcorn flour is an easy workaround. Plus, as Carlesso notes on LinkedIn, because of its texture, there's no need to add thickeners and stabilizers like guar gum, which are added to some gluten-free flours. The best thing about popcorn flour is that you can make it from a common pantry item. Whether you add it to cake, bread, or cornbread waffles, popcorn flour is an easy way to add amazing fluffiness to your favorite baked goods and breakfast foods.