Pork Popcorn Meatballs? We know popcorn isn’t a typical ingredient when it comes to meatball making but Jessie of Jessie Bakes recently experimented with our Crispy Bacon & Maple Syrup popcorn and her meatballs look tiptop tasty!
What you need to make these Pork Popcorn Meatballs:
(Makes 30 small meatballs!)
25g Crispy Bacon & Maple Syrup Portlebay Popcorn (one small ba
500g pork mince
1/2 onion thinly diced
1 egg
Tbsp Oregano
Tbsp Nigella Seeds
What To Do:
Add your mince, diced onion, herbs and egg into a mixing bowl and thoroughly combine.
Roll the mixture into meatballs, up to you how big or small!
Grab a pestle and mortar; grind the popcorn into smaller pieces.
Coat your meatballs in the popcorn, akin to bread crumbs.
Guest blogger Bella created this scrumptious recipe which we think is da bomb!
About Bella
Lovely Bella is the owner of the recipe based blog Sprinkle Of Goodness. After falling unwell two years ago with ME, Bella started to take great care with what she was eating and developed a real passion for cooking as she experimented with healthy recipes. For Bella, cooking has not just been about about eating the right things but also it gave her a reason to get out of bed when she was unwell and helped her to regain her strength. Today Bella is fully recovered and her passion for cooking has flourished further, checkout her blog and Instagram for many more yummy recipes!
Sesame And Tamari Stir Fry Topped With Wasabi And Ginger Popcorn
Serves 2
Ingredients:
· 1 tbsp sesame oil
· 2 nests brown rice vermicelli noodles (if using another type of noodle, adjust cooking time accordingly)
· ½ a courgette
· Large handful purple sprouting tops
· 200g baby button mushrooms
· 1 carrot
· 2 tbsp tamari soy sauce
· ½ a small bag Portlebay Wasabi and Ginger Popcorn
· Salt, pepper and a pinch of chilli flakes (optional)
Method:
1. Firstly prepare your vegetables. Cut the courgette and carrot into small cubes, wash and cut up your sprouting top and slice your mushrooms.
2. Heat the sesame oil in a pan over a medium heat and then add the mushrooms and sprouting tops, and cook for a few minutes, stirring frequently.
3. In the meantime, boil your kettle ready for the noodles.
4. Add the courgette and carrot to the pan and cook for 2 minutes.
5. Put the noodles in a heatproof bowl and cover with boiling water for 2 minutes.
6. Add the soy sauce to the pan, stir in well and then drain and add the noodles.
7. Stir for a minute or so before serving into bowls, top with the popcorn, and add a sprinkle of chilli flakes. Enjoy!
Winter is the time for hot chocolate. It’s cold, we all like chocolate treats and we love being a big kid from time to time! So, we took the time to experiment with some Portlebay Popcorn inspired hot chocolate recipes and they were delicious! Have a read below, experiment and pop us a message about your hot chocolate experience! (It’ll be yummy we promise!)
Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate with a Splash of Rum, inspired by Lightly Salted Portlebay Popcorn
Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate
You will need:
25ml of spiced rum
2 tsp dulce de leche or thick caramel
250ml whole milk
75g milk chocolate chopped
Sea salt
Whipped cream to serve
(serves one)
Step 1: Mix the rum and dulce de leche in small bowl, until they are smooth.
Step 2: Warm the milk in a saucepan over a medium heat until it starts to simmer. Then remove the saucepan from the heat and pop in the chocolate, stir until the chocolate has melted.
Step 3: Pop the saucepan back on the medium heat until warm and then add the rum mixture along with a pinch of sea salt. Pour the chocolate goodness into a mug and add the whipped cream and raspberries!
Alcoholic Raspberry Hot chocolate, inspired by Very Berry Portlebay Popcorn
Alcoholic Raspberry Hot Chocolate
You will need:
250ml milk
140g of dark chocolate chopped
100ml double cream
25ml chambord
Whipped cream, jam and Raspberries to serve
(serves one)
Step 1: Add all ingredients excluding the Chambord, whipped cream and raspberries to a saucepan over a medium heat. Stir until the chocolate is melted.
Step 2: Once the chocolate has melted continue to stir, as the mixture should thicken. Then add in the Chambord.
Step: Pour into a mug and top with whipped cream, jam and raspberries.
Chilli and Cinnamon Hot chocolate, inspired by Cinnamon Portlebay Popcorn
Chilli and Cinnamon Hot Chocolate
You will need:
250ml milk
1 cinnamon stick
1 tsp chilli powder
150g milk or dark chocolate chopped
whipped cream to serve
(serves one)
Step 1: Heat the milk and cinnamon stick in a saucepan over a medium heat, for 6-8 minutes or until boiling. Set aside for 10 minutes to infuse.
Step 2: Strain the milk into a clean saucepan and discard any captured solids. Heat again over a medium heat for 3-4 minutes or until hot (don’t boil). Then reduce the heat to a lower temperature and add the chocolate. Stir the mixture until the chocolate has melted and add the chilli powder.
Step 3: Pour into a mug and top with whipped cream! YUM!
Bored of your regular smashed avocado on toast? Fancy kicking your pancake game up a notch? Using no flour and no sugar, these banana oat pancakes are a barely naughty alternative to your regular Sunday brunch!
For 1 person you will need:
• 1 banana
• 1 egg
• 65g of rolled oats
• ½ a teaspoon of baking powder
• A pinch of salt
• A pinch of cinnamon (depending on your cinnamon taste levels)
• Whatever you would like to serve! We used maple syrup, fresh raspberries and cherries, and a sprinkling of Cinnamon Swirl Popcorn.
Method:
• Use either a blender or tonnes of elbow grease to mush up the banana and egg, and then use your remaining strength to mix in the oats, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.
• It can be as smooth as you like it – we used a blender so it was silky smooth, but I’m sure it would be just as nice with a few chunks of banana inside!
• Let the batter have a little time out for 10-20 minutes so it can thicken.
• Heat a frying pan over a medium heat, and plop in a blob of coconut oil (or any oil you prefer).
• Fry generous spoonful’s of batter on both sides until golden brown, and good enough to wolf down in one bite.
• Serve with a drizzle of maple syrup and lashing of popcorn and fruit!
Makes | 8-10 popcorn balls (depending on if you’d like them bite-sized, or if “gob-smacker” is more your style)
Prep | 10 minutes
Cooking time | 10 minutes
Ready in | 30 minutes
Over Easter we showed you some of our beautifully sculpted and oh so easy to make popcorn balls! They could not be simpler to recreate, and you can let your imagination run wild with any littles extras you’d like to top them with.
Ingredients
75g of butter
75g bag of Portlebay Popcorn
120g of mini marshmallows (plus extra for nibbling)
Food colouring of your choice, and any extras you desire
Method
Melt the butter gently in a large saucepan under a medium heat, and then add the mini marshmallows.
Keep stirring marshmallows as they mix with the butter, until they’ve fully mixed together. If you think the mixture is still too oily, add a few more marshmallows to the mix (provided you haven’t gobbled them up already).
Take the mixture off the heat, and pour into a mixing bowl. Now’s the time to get creative! Add your favourite food colouring, dried fruit, chopped buts, rainbow drops, whatever! The world is your oyster…but not seafood, pretty sure that would be horrible.
Once that is mixed together, bundle in your popcorn and make sure to coat every last kernel with your glorious concoction. The mixture should be slightly hardening by now, so this is an excellent time to start working on your Michelle Obama arms.
Once it is fully coated, use some of the butter to rub on your hands, and start moulding into balls.
Place on to greaseproof paper, and chill in the fridge for 30 mins. Once they are keeping their shape, they are ready to enjoy!
As soon as Autumn tumbles around it seems all of our internal tummy clocks start craving the gentle warmth of cinnamon; whether it be sprinkled over hot chocolate or dusted over pancakes, nothing quite beats the humble cinnamon cookie.
We had Lucy Rocks Paleo’s glorious popcorn and granola cheesecake last week, but for week 3 we’re heading back to biscuits, or more importantly cinnamon swirl and blush granola cookies (yay!).
For this recipe you’ll need to get yours paws on:
225g of soft salted butter
250g of demerara sugar
1 large egg
300g of self raising flour
1/2 tsp on baking powder
1 tsp of cinnamon
75g of Portlebay Cinnamon Swirl popcorn
40g of Lucy Rocks Paleo Blush Granola
Chocolate or toffee sauce (or both) for decorating
Start off by preheating your oven to 180 °C, and lining a baking tin with baking paper. If you don’t have any, lining it with butter and flour works just as well.
Next, you’ve got to beat the butter and sugar together with an electric whisk; once it’s combined, whisk in the egg as well. This isn’t going to be you’re smoother-than-smooth cake batter; it looks a bit like sugary quinoa, so not the best for whisk licking based on personal experience…
From quinoa…
…to edible pop-pourri!Next, tip the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, Cinnamon Swirl Popcorn and Blush Granola in the bowl, and get your guns out because I would NOT recommend mixing this with an electric whisk. Popcorn and granola will fly everywhere, and you’ll end up with more of a popcorn dust than a popcorn crunch; that isn’t personal experience, but pure bakers intuition… and common sense.
Once that’s all combined and you have a stiff mixture of cookie dough, start rolling the dough into golfball sized balls, and put out on to your beautifully lined tray from earlier. Make sure there is a bit of a gap in between them, as they do tend to spread. Leave them there for 12-13 minutes, or until they’re golden brown; if they’re still a little bit soft on top not to worry, they will harden as they cool.
From balls of dough…
…too fully fledged cookies!And they you have it! Decorate them as you like them; we drizzled ours with toffee and chocolate sauce, because we just couldn’t decide between them, and serve with a tall glass of milk or a nice cup of tea. The perfect little Autumn treat!
As with last week, show us your bakes on Facebook or Twitter, using our recipe or your favourite, and win some lovely samples from us and Lucy Rocks Paleo!
To celebrate the glorious return of one the best loved baking programmes on the British television, we’ve teamed up with the lovely people at Lucy Rocks Paleo to bring you a baking competition you can do without stepping inside that fabled Bake Off tent.
You can try out our recipes, or make up your own, they just have to be delicious I’m afraid. How difficult can that be when you’re smothering everything in chocolate?
Week 1 kicks off with a classic tray bake (just without the bake): Rocky Road! You may remember we featured our Popcorn Rocky Roads online a while ago, well now they’re back with the delicious addition of Lucy Rocks Paleo Golden Granola.
If you’d like to try out the recipe yourself, you will need:
1 smallish, deep baking tray, greased and lined
75g of Cappuccino Portlebay Popcorn (although other flavours will work just as well)
200g of Golden Granola from Lucy Rocks Paleo
50g of Mini Marshmallows
300g of Dark Chocolate (or whatever chocolate is your favourite)
50g of Salted Butter
A dash of whatever you would like to decorate your masterpiece with
For you Rocky Road purists out there, I’m sure you’ll be crying out “Where’s the raisins?! Where’s the cherries?! What is this sham of a Rocky Road recipe about!”. Do not fear cake lovers, as Golden Granola has all of these elements and more! With mulberries, goldenberries, coconut chips and tonnes of other healthy bits and bobs, it’s a wonderful alternative to give your bakes that extra crunch!
Get ready for a picture heavy post, with tonnes of craving inducing images of melted chocolate, because that’s going to feature a lot! First of all, melt the chocolate and the butter together in a heat proof bowl, over a shallow pan of simmering water. Make sure the water doesn’t touch the bowl, and the chocolate doesn’t get too hot! Chocolate cement is great for tiling a ginger bread house, but not for much else.
This is what chocolate and butter looks like in a bowlJust keep on stirring……until it’s glossy and smooth
Right now you’re going to be fighting back urges to plonk yourself on the sofa and tuck into that bowl of chocolate heaven with a teaspoon and a sense of reckless abandon. Hold yourself together! The next bit is a piece of cake…sorry.
All your tiny marshmallows (bar a few for decoration), Portlebay Popcorn and Lucy Rocks Golden Granola need to be mixed in with a lot of added elbow grease, to make sure every grain and popcorn piece is thoroughly coated in your butter and chocolate mixture. If you can’t quite get everything covered, melt a little bit more chocolate in the microwave to cover those last few patches. It should look a little something like this:
It will get messy, but where’s the fun in keeping everything tidy, eh? Once it’s all mixed together and coated as much as you can get it, you need to start piling the mixture into the baking tray, making sure to get it into as many nooks and crannies that you can. A little like this:
You can decorate yours in any way your chocolate loving heart desires; we’ve used sugar sprinkles you can find in any supermarket or baking shop, and of course more mini marshmallows.
Place in the fridge to chill for a couple of hours until the chocolate is firm and holds it’s shape, or put it in the freezer for about an hour if you just can’t wait to tuck in! At the end of it all, you will end up with some beautiful popcorn-y granola-ry goodness.
And there you have it! A simple treat to try at home, and loved by all.
Share your own fantastical tray bakes on The Portlebay Popcorn or the Lucy Rocks Paleo Facebook, for your chance to win some scrumptious popcorn and granola!
The lovely thing about making your own popcorn is, well, just that. We pop it, ship it and run everything from under the same roof, which is really rather special. We have a whole host of Popcorn Flavoursmiths working away, filling our little packets of sunshine as we like to call them, and making the whole office smell delicious.
The journey from kernel to popcorn is a short one, as anyone who has made popcorn at home before would know, but there are no massive microwaves here at Portlebay Popcorn. Instead, we use bloomin’ big saucepans to heat up a mix of rapeseed oil and raw cane sugar, to give all our popcorn kernels that glorious crunch.
A whizz with a wooden spoon
It all starts with this guy, our chief popper and commander. Those saucepans are not to be trusted to pop away without supervision, and Marek is the guy to do it. From here, it’s a race against time to get our popcorn packed away; luckily we’ve mastered popping to bagging, so there’s no popcorn losing crunch and gaining that horrible polystyrene squeakiness. That’s OK for packing tellies, no good popcorn!
All beards must be bagged, luckily Angus doesn’t mind too much
On to the flavour maker! I’m afraid this stage is pretty hush-hush, so just imagine magical popcorn fairies, delicately dusting each and every popcorn puff with our Original Crispy Bacon & Maple Syrup flavour. All that natural goodness is whisked together, and then it’s on to the bagging!
An overlooked, but integral part of the operation
From here we do all sorts of technical tests to make sure our popcorn is the best we know it can be.
Anthony there is doing very important things, checking the bagging temperature, pressure, speed and all other kinds other technical buzzwords.
Why do you think Lucas is laughing so much? Because he has it on Easy Street, Professional Taster indeed.
In all seriousness we do need to do regular checks to measure the levels on salt, sugar, crunch and general tastiness. Lucas is the lucky duck that gets his own tasting booth to measure all of these delicious elements!
And here is the finished product! Our signature and original flavour Crispy Bacon & Maple Syrup. This is just a tiny part of the popcorn mountain we eventually end up with, but each bag is just as delicious as the last.
This is just a taster of what we do to make sure our packets of sunshine are full of that yumminess you know and love. If you’re a blogger, vlogger or a fellow popcorn fanatic, and would like to get up close and personal with our crew of poppers and our delicious produce, get in touch! We’d love to have you 🙂
Get in touch with Lucy at lucy@portlebaypopcorn.com, or call us on 01752 231 713 if you’d like a guided tour!
We are Portlebay Popcorn; a small crew, tucked away in the depths of Devon, popping away our rather scrumptious popcorn. You may have seen our nautical style bags brightening up the shelves of shops, or you may already have firm favourites of our many weird but oh so wonderful flavours. But for the very unfortunate amongst you, you may not know us at all! *GASP*
Here’s a little about us to get you introduced:
We first opened our doors back in 2012, when two chaps named Jonty White and Neil Adams came together to make a popcorn company. Influenced by popcorn trends happening across the US, this motley pair wanted to make a delightful snack that is bursting with that sunny, happy feeling which only comes from eating something that is nutritious and delicious!
I know what you’re thinking, anything that you can buy at the cinema, often smothered in butter or saturated with sugar probably has the same nutritional value as a deep fried Mars Bar – and you would be right! That’s why we don’t do either of those things.
Our popcorn has half the sugar of a Pink Lady apple, we don’t use any mutant ingredients (only the good ol’ natural stuff), and it has almost half the fat of your bog standard potato crisps. That’s a win win win right there!
This blog will be dedicated to exciting popcorn news, what goes on behind our Poppery doors, and talking to you lovely lot about any questions you have about what makes us tick! Pop us a message, we’d love to hear from you 🙂
Portlebay Popcorn 