 In our upcoming video, we're exploring what is possibly the oldest snack food, popcorn. But before we dive into that history and some of the ancient methods of making it, I wanted to explore a little more of the science behind it. So let's explore why popcorn pops, what other seeds can be popped, and then push it to the next level and experiment with the device that allows even more items to be popped, which was invented 100 years ago and revolutionized the breakfast cereal game. Let's try and shoot some food from guns, using probably the most dangerous method to cook popcorn. And maybe even see if we can make our own cocoa puffs. First, why does popcorn pop? Popcorn kernels come from a specific breed of flint corn, one that I've grown myself for our next video. Let's design to replicate some ideal circumstances that allow the seeds to pop. Flint corn in a few other varieties can be popped, largely due to its hard outer shell, for which it's named, for supposedly being as hard as flint. This hard outer shell acts as a pressure chamber, so when heat is applied, the moisture inside expands into steam and slowly builds pressure. Inside, the popcorn seed contains starch, which when heated with a small amount of water inside the shell, gelatinizes into a soft, swelling substance. As the pressure inside builds up to around 135 pounds per square inch, the hole fails and the superheated steam forces the gelatinized starch outward, which then solidifies into popcorn. So for the pop, it needs a hard outer shell, and the right amount of moisture and starch inside. Popcorn is probably the best grain for undergoing this process, but a variety of other grains can also be popped. So I have a few different ones that I've either grown or in the process of growing, so let's try them all out and see how well they pop just on their own before we go to the more advanced cannon. Let's give it a shot. All right, so I went through and tried popping a variety of different grains here. We got different results. Popcorn is obviously the best. So I think it was probably the closest. The little itty bitty popcorn kernels. Wild rice was, I think, pretty reactive and got some decent pops. Regular rice, also a lot of them didn't pop, but a few did. Similar to popcorn, the pre-cooked rice actually puffed up and looks like a little Rice Krispies. This is the Amaranth, which mostly just puffed just a little bit. Pretty similar with the quinoa, puffed just slightly, and the teff. Barely see it. Very small little puffs in there now. And then the wheat. None of them really popped, but they definitely kind of expanded. But what if you want to pop something that doesn't have that strong outside shell? Well, then you're going to need a special device that I happened to stumble across wandering around the streets that she had in China several years ago. Following a loud bang, I discovered a vendor using a unique apparatus to explode a bag of popcorn all at once. Since then, I've always been intrigued and curious its history and how it works. When you research the popcorn cannon, as it's often called, frequently it's referred to as a traditional method of making popcorn by street vendors in China and other Asian countries. However, digging deeper, I was surprised to learn this foreign technique was actually invented back in the US by Alexander Anderson in 1901, and the exact method was refined in my own hometown of Minneapolis. And his invention was instrumental in producing many forms of breakfast cereals we eat today. As you know, Quaker Puffquit and Quaker Puff Rice are shot from guns. We'd like to show you this process. Knowing more as the puffing gun, he debuted it in the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, where he would puff rice using eight cannons, often advertised as food shot from guns. This technology was utilized by many different breakfast cereals, and a version of the puffing gun was instrumental in the invention of kicks and cereals. So we've got here is a little popcorn cannon right from China. The box was horribly beat up and like half the pieces were missing. So I had to kind of improvise and go a little frame to hold it, put everything else is here, and I should be able to still operate it. It's a pretty similar setup to what they first used when they invented it. There's a variety of like different temperatures and pressures you want for different grades. So it's going to be kind of a wild guess at this point on which ones will work at what point and how it will turn out and everything. So with mentioning that this is potentially super dangerous, China has different safety standards than the US. Something like this would not be possible to sell in the US. This is basically a pipe bomb if it goes wrong. If it overpressurizes and goes beyond the capacities of the actual container, it's going to explode and that won't be good. We might die. So I'm going to try and take some precautions, not be in direct range of it when we have it going. I have it set up with our ball mill motor to kind of rotate it, so I don't have to be by it and hopefully reduce any potential risk. So don't do this at home. Give it a shot, see what it does. So basically just load up a few cups of grain inside here, seal it up, tighten it up, then apply the heat with a torch, rotate it so that no one side burns. Then once it reaches the desired pressure, whack it open and it all goes flying out. All the starch will instantly expand and you'll have puff grains. And fully open. Oh, it's got to lift it up. Oh, that's my fault. So it made the mistake of not lifting it off. The lid of it connects to the bar there. So when I released it, it could open all the way and just kind of puffed inside of it and trapped it all and then because it's still hot, I'll have it burnt. Some of them came out pretty good. It tastes pretty good. This looks like more standard popcorn. So they're generally known for coming out more like this where they look puffed instead of popped. We're not popping corn, we're puffing it. That was a successful fire and that was the most dangerous way to pop popcorn. It's still pretty good. It's good stuff. Try the next grain. Next let's do rice, which is what it was originally intended for. Kind of the predecessor for Rice Krispies. Their process of making Rice Krispies now is a little bit different but this kind of would have inspired it by puffed rice. So slurred up. Just have a medium grain rice. See what we get? A little snap, crackle, pop. Boom. The first attempt didn't pop much. So let's try again at a little bit higher pressure. I'm off there. Try to lift it down. But, huh, that definitely puffed. It's like popcorn. I don't quite the result I was expecting. Literally looked like popcorn. It tastes like popcorn. Almost a little bit more bland popcorn. Yeah, that's popped rice I guess. Almost like the Rice Krispies. A little different. So we're done. It's kind of scary as it just started shooting way up really quick. Right into the red. Less pressure maybe? It is now a sauna in here. So I think I got a little overcooked. Feel it close. It did pop. Little, little pop guys in there. Mostly charcoal. So puffed charcoal is anything edible in it? Not horrible. That one's a little bit more horrible. We try that again. We try a lower pressure to get a better result. After some issues with the gauge, had to reset and do some adjustments to get it working again. Then back at it again. This time with some wheat berries. This is wheat. I don't know if they fully pop. They're supposed to puff. So we got some dried sweet corn here. Going to give that a shot. See if you can make popcorn out of the sweet corn. Oh my god, look at the wall. Looks like we just drove through a thing of flies. That last blast completely knocked out the cheap gauge on the cannon. So time to pick up a new one and reset once again. But in the meantime. Since we have the puff cannon now, we are going to use it to puff some cereal. I'm going to make my very own version of cocoa puffs. Using cocoa, cornmeal, sugar, and some oil. I am a great baker. I'm lying. All right, here I go. Does not look good. Oh god. New gauge. Who dis? I've got my beans. All right, so I tried a few different grains and got mixed results with those. So now I'm going to try something a little bit different. Beans. So you have a wide variety of different beans. We've got soybeans. We've got mung beans. Then we've got some bling beans that I dehydrated. All you kind of standard bean soup beans. Throw them all in there and see if they work. As I've previously proven by making beer or just wine out of beans, they do contain a fair amount of starch and these are all dried. So it should meet the qualifications in that regard. And it'll just be the lack of a hard outer case that prevents them from normally popping. So with the use of the cannon here, in theory, she'll get some puff beans. Beans. They did something. Green bean. Pretty much charred with the lime of bean. Nice and puffed. Black bean. Kind of puffed, but not too well. Lime beans look interesting. They've definitely puffed. That should be good. Kind of like a chip. I believe this is soy bean. Ooh, that's very hard. Looks like a pinto bean possibly. Also very hard. This might be a mung bean. Not too bad. Try one of these green beans. Mostly char. Not very good. Lime beans definitely showed the most impact. They definitely puffed and actually pretty edible. So definitely worked. Got a bunch of success with the beans. But next up I'm going to try some different starches. Potatoes and sweet potatoes. Both have a lot of starch. Should be expandable. So I cut them up into slices. Basically chips. Dried them out. Now I'm going to see if they puff. See if we get some nice, puffy potato chips or something. Maybe better if they were cooked first. I'm not sure. I'm going to try them raw. See what happens. Check out the damage. Definitely worked. These guys are certainly puffed. See how they taste. I think this is a sweet potato. It's like styrofoam. They did work. They did puff. They are definitely thicker, fluffier. I think this is a potato. All right. The last and not least, I have the cocoa puffs that I had Lauren put together. For now they're kind of just dry dough balls. One of the main ingredients in this is corn flour. So that should expand with the starch inside of it. And get a little bit more puffier. These are basically just kind of biscuits. So the big question is how moist they should be. Let them dry out because I didn't want them to all gloop back together into one ball. The one reference I found to like when they made cakes and stuff was it was still damp. So I kind of re-moistened them so they aren't completely dry. Who knows what will happen. Load it up and give it a shot. All right. So basically everything broke in my last attempt. The ball didn't stop working and they torched. Stopped working consistently. The camera stopped recording. And yeah, I didn't die at least. I don't think I did much. I don't think it worked. It was a little bit puffier but not a whole lot better. I was after several days of experimentation trying out the popcorn cannon or puffing gun. These are pretty much all the results. Besides the ones that are stuck to the wall. There's a fair amount of like trial and error you need to do to actually get good results. Pretty hard to get things to adequately puff but not burn. Probably took years of research to figure out how to make these cereals. So probably not going to get in the first attempt. Potatoes and sweet potato. Very weird. They don't have much flavor and they're very foamy now that they've expanded pretty bland. It just seems like I'm eating styrofoam. If I had seasoned them before, it might have been a much better result. Same with some of the beans. The lime beans are probably the best ones. They're still pretty hard and then the green beans and such were just charred. So it might be better to actually precook them and then dry them again and then fire them. I'm not sure. Lots of different things to try out. Not a lot of documentation because not many people do this now. Probably because it's dangerous. The cocoa puffs were not very successful. They seem to be pretty much the same consistency as before. And my suspicion is that they are just not moist enough. They probably dried out too much. They do have these weird little white specks on them which looks like it's expanded starch. So I think it was kind of a partial reaction because it didn't have enough moisture. The wheat didn't puff as much as I thought it would. I was hoping to get more like a cereal. They're like really puffed. These are pretty similar to what happened when you cooked them in oil. So of all of them, probably the rice and the popcorn turned out the best and most edible sort of one was pretty good as well. Sweet corn was kind of a long shot. It doesn't really have enough starch to be effective and that just kind of splattered all over the wall. So that was fun. Yeah, so this has been a fun experiment to kind of see why things pop and what are kind of the extremes of it. And tune in for next week's video. We're gonna actually go through the history of popcorn. I'm gonna grow my own popcorn and we're gonna make popcorn. So stay tuned for that. Hope everybody enjoyed this. Thank you to all of our patrons and thanks for watching. Thank you for watching. We'll see you in the next video.