Snacks · Chips, popcorn & trail mix
Stovetop popcorn
The original whole-grain snack, three minutes in a pot: kernels, a little oil, salt. Ounce for ounce one of the biggest bowls of food any snack can buy you.
- Time
- 7 min (2 prep + 5 cook)
- Servings
- 4
- Per serving
- 148 kcal
- Protein
- 3 g
Ingredients
- 1/3 cup kernels air-popped popcorn, measured before popping80 g
- 1 1/2 tbsp canola oil20 g
- 1/2 tsp, fine salt3 g
- 1 tbsp butter, melted (optional)15 g
Every ingredient links to its food page — same data, same score, same formula.
Steps
- Heat the oil with 3 kernels in a big lidded pot over medium-high. When all three pop, the oil is at temperature.
- Add the rest, lid on, and shake the pot every 15 seconds so nothing sits still and scorches.
- When pops slow to one per 2 seconds, off the heat and lid off immediately — trapped steam turns crisp to chewy.
- Salt while hot (fine salt sticks; flaky salt falls to the bottom), butter if using.
How is popcorn a reasonable snack?
Volume. A serving here is a big bowl for about 148 calories — fiber and air that takes twenty minutes to eat. The score looks brutal because it's computed per 100 g and popped corn barely weighs anything; by the bowl, few snacks beat it. Skip the butter and it's lighter still.
Why this score
engineered against fullnessFat and refined carbohydrate converging the way engineered food does; dense calories with little protein, volume or fiber to fill you up.
Three routes to fullness — one is enough
What pulls it down
Computed on the finished dish, not an average of the parts: 594 kcal goes into the pot, 118 g of ingredients comes out as ~100 g of food → 594 kcal per 100 g. Cooking moves water, and energy density is the score's biggest lever — so we show the math. Full formula here.
Per
- Calories
- 594
- Protein
- (7%)
- 10 g
- Fat
- (53%)
- 36 g
- Carbohydrates
- (41%)
- 62 g
- of which sugar
- 1 g
- Fiber
- 12 g
- Sodium
- 1,267 mg
Percentages are the share of calories from each macronutrient.
Computed from the ingredients' USDA data — nothing typed by hand. Every number is traceable, every score recomputable.
More snacks
Photo: AI-generated. Nutrition and score are computed from the ingredients with the published formula — this recipe hasn't been kitchen-tested by us yet.