The Savory Add-In Your Caramel Popcorn Is Missing

Popcorn may just be the snack to end all snacks. It's fairly inexpensive, especially if you pop the kernels yourself, filling without being too heavy, and surprisingly tasty when dressed with nothing more than a little bit of butter and salt. However, popcorn is also a fabulous blank canvas for almost any flavor you can name, which may be the main reason why it's so popular. Lending itself beautifully to sweet and savory flavors alike, there are many seasoning blends you can use on popcorn to tailor it to whatever you're craving at that moment.

When it comes to sweet varieties, caramel popcorn is especially popular because it coats the popped kernels with that signature buttery flavor along with a sweet, crunchy layer that takes it from movie theater snack to tasty dessert. If caramel alone is a bit too sugary for your palate or you love sweet and savory in equal measure, there's a simple ingredient you can toss into caramel popcorn to add lots of bold flavor and even more crunchy texture — bacon. 

Bacon caramel popcorn may sound a bit odd, but when you consider that popcorn is delicious with both sugar and salt, and that you can also candy bacon to give it a sweet flavor boost for BLTs, it's easy to see how these three flavors come together. The best part is that this snack isn't difficult or complicated to make, whether you build it from scratch or take some culinary shortcuts to save on time.

Making bacon-y caramel corn can be as simple as sprinkling a handful of (real) bacon bits into a bag of your favorite store brand of caramel-coated popcorn and giving everything a shake. However, if you want to impress guests with a fancy snack for movie night, there are some other techniques that will produce a more cohesive result, and none of them are terribly complicated. The first is to toss together plain store-bought popcorn with your favorite brand of caramel sauce and the previously mentioned real bacon bits. This creates a more cohesive bite and fresher flavor.

If you have a little more time, it's also pretty easy to make this tasty snack almost entirely from scratch by rendering down a few strips of bacon until they're nice and crispy — just don't toss that grease! Instead, use it to build the perfect flavor base for stovetop popcorn by whisking in some brown sugar to create a beautiful caramel sauce. If it's not thick enough, a dollop or two of butter should help bring things together.

Once you've stirred this savory-sweet sauce together with the popcorn and crumbled bacon, letting it cool for a few minutes creates a delightful, semi-crunchy texture that's delicious eaten out of hand, or as part of an artisanal ice cream sundae. Think creamy, cold Dutch chocolate or vanilla bean, or even something more daring, like fudge-forward moose tracks or rich peanut butter swirl topped with the sweet-salty popcorn.