Daily Herald Column: Popcorn Cornucopia

By Lee A. Litas
The Daily Herald

The sanctuary rumbles and shakes. The sound is deafening. Indiana Jones whirls around on his heels only to realize that thundering after him is an enormous ball of… popcorn?

Well it could have happened that way. It’s certainly big enough to at least play the understudy. Brainchild of The Popcorn Factory in Lake Forest, the gargantuan and completely edible sphere unveiled in early October is a whopping eight feet in diameter, 25.5 feet in circumference and weighs in at a svelte 3,423 pounds. Officially, the largest popcorn ball in creation, it is nearly ten percent larger than the current Guinness World Book of Record holder and almost 50,000 times larger than the average popcorn ball.

“This was a labor of love because there is no formula for creating something like this, just good ‘ole American spirit coming together to create something nifty,” said Tim Hopkins, President of Specialty Brands at 1-800-flowers.com, Inc., parent company of The Popcorn Factory.

Hopkins had first presented the idea to Marty Dennis, Production Manager and chief architect of the orb, back in September as a segue to promote the company’s new secret popcorn ball recipe.

“I thought he was kidding,” said Dennis who soon realized that this was not, in fact, a joke and set about making the necessary calculations for creating the largest popcorn ball in the world.

Construction took place in three phases comprising the initial idea, conceptualization and actual building of the Ball. The planning phase took four weeks during which time the lower half was built in forms shaped to look like an over-sized salad bowl from a series of compound curves.

“We had to figure out a way of making a form that was round out of things that were flat so we designed a form that would be eight feet in diameter so that we knew that we at least had the size right,” said Dennis. To secure it, the Factory designed a section at the bottom of the sphere to look much like a golf tee so that the ball wouldn’t roll off.

Dennis, along with a team of mechanics and handymen, took two weeks to build the forms. Once construction was completed, the actual building of the Popcorn Ball only took eight hours.

So that they could take the hot kernels to a height of eight feet, Dennis hooked up a conveyor he calls the ‘continuous caramel machine’ built by the Creators Company after Charles Cretors, founder of C. Cretors & Company. Cretors introduced the world’s first mobile popcorn machine at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago back in 1893 creating a new snack sensation that appeals to this day.

“My hat is off to the team at the Popcorn Factory,” said Hopkins. “It was a combination of a number of moons being aligned what with the timing of the National Popcorn Poppin’ Month, the unveiling of our new popcorn ball flavoring and the introduction of our new mechanism for producing the balls.”

Not content with just knowing that they made the World’s Largest Popcorn Ball, the goal of The Popcorn Factory was to get into the Guinness World Book of records and to unseat the current record-holder weighing an emaciated 3,100 pounds. For that, the ball also had to be edible.

To qualify, the Factory brought in the lab that does their shelf-life and nutritional information testing certification. “They watched our process as we were making the thing, which is held together by 1900 pounds of corn syrup and about the same amount of sugar, then gave us the nod,” said Dennis.

Now the creators are just waiting on the ink to dry on the Guinness Certification, according to Cheryl Zatz, vice president of marketing. In the meantime, the enormous ball is waiting patiently for its next unveiling.

According to Dennis, there has been some talk lately of installing the ball either at the Daily Plaza or at Navy Pier.

“We’re actually not going to put it at the Daily Plaza. It was going to be there for their Halloween Fest but they were worried about securing it down because they have high winds there,” said Zatz.

“Imagine that rolling down Michigan Avenue,” laughed Hopkins conjuring up images of other rotund monstrosities recently captured on celluloid and again underscoring the idea that the World’s Largest Popcorn Ball could soon indeed be Hollywood-bound.

Really Corny Trivia

• The oldest popcorn ever found dates back about 5,600 years and was discovered in the "Bat Cave" of central New Mexico.
• In the 4th Century A.D., Zapotec funeral urn found in Mexico dating to about 300 A.D. depicts a Maize god with symbols representing primitive popcorn in his headdress.
• In some tombs in Peru and Northern Chile, archaeologists found ancient kernels of popcorn that were so well preserved that they could still pop even though they were well over 1,000 years old.
• Popcorn balls were among the most popular confections in the late 1800s & early 1900s.
• Some of the popcorn flavorings used during the mid 1800s – 1920 included: orange & lemon juice, rose, peppermint, honey, vanilla, molasses and sugar.
• An old 19th century method of cooking popcorn advocated pouring kernels of corn into a vat of lard and then skimming the popped kernels off the top as they surfaced.
• The first cookbook to mention popcorn was in 1846.
• Americans consume some 17 billion quarts of popcorn each year. That’s 54 quarts of popcorn for every man, woman and child.
• In 1999, then Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman, proclaimed October ‘National Popcorn Poppin’ Month.’