When to season popcorn

For me, I use the microwave's power setting. This is sometimes a misunderstood feature. When you don't set the power level, then it is 100%. This means during 100% of the cook time the magnetron inside the microwave is active and radiating your food. If you set the power level to 10, then during the cook time, the magnetron will not be active the entire cook time, instead it will be active during 10% of the time. "Power" is a bad term because it does not effect the power level of the magnetron. It affects the amount of time it is active.

This is helpful to know if you also understand that microwave energy does not penetrate very deeply into your food. It enters about 1 to 2 inches. This mean the surface of your food gets really hot when the magnetron is on, but the deeper parts are not getting hot. You use this to your advantage by setting a lower power level which allows the heat to conduct through your food naturally when the magnetron is not active. It is a way to warm the entire product without blasting the outside of it.

If you are microwaving something thick, then reduce the power and increase the time.

If you have a microwave safe shelf, then use it! That allows more microwave energy to come in conduct with more of your food's surface. The waves "bounce" inside the box, so being on a shelf lets some wave bounce under it and hit the bottom of your food.

A better instruction would be "do not rely entirely on the functionality of the popcorn button on your microwave, since microwaves vary widely as do bags of popcorn." But that's longer, and kind of complicated, so they abbreviate it "do not use popcorn button".

There's no problem with the power setting of the popcorn button, only with the timing. You should hang around near the microwave, and when you hear the pops slowing, stop it, no matter what your popcorn button thinks. And if you get a lot of unpopped kernels, and the popping didn't slow before the button said the microwave was done, consider doing it yourself next time and letting it pop for a little longer.

The problem with leaving it in too long is that the corn scorches (usually from the centre out) and the whole bag is inedible. If the energy is no longer going into popping kernels, it's going in to scorching what you already have. Get it out before that happens.