This is so easy, you’ll never buy that horrible, cloying, sprayed-on caramel corn at the supermarket again. The recipe comes from, Amish and Mennonite Kitchens, by Phyllis Pellman Good and Rachel Thomas Pellman. It is, by the way, a wonderful cookbook. I was well into my thirties by the time I learned to make a pie crust from scratch and it is their recipe I rely on.
You will need:
3 ¾ quarts popped popcorn (I popped mine in oil the old fashioned way on the stove)
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup margarine (I used butter)
¼ cup light corn syrup
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon vanilla
Preheat oven to 200 degrees F.
Pour popcorn into a large roasting pan. Mix sugar, margarine, corn syrup and salt in a saucepan and cook gently over medium heat until it comes to a boil, stirring constantly. Then boil for five more minutes. Remove syrup from heat and stir in vanilla and baking soda, stirring until it becomes foamy. Pour over popcorn and stir to coat (note, it will not “coat” in the sense of covering every inch of popcorn the way commercial caramel corn is-not to worry though, it is plenty sweet and makes for a nicer texture). Bake for 1 hour, stirring every fifteen minutes. Cool,(if you can get your family to wait that long) and crumble into small pieces.
I stored mine in paper bags which my husband polished off during his commute to work this morning.