How much water is in Popcorn?

      First of all, this lab was pretty awesome to me, because i never ever knew that popcorn had water in it! But without water water, the kernels wouldn't wouldn't be able to pop. The water is trapped underneath the thick skin of the kernels, and when the pressure gets high enough, it makes the kernels pop. In this lab, we first got a big glass beaker and put enough vegetable oil in to cover the bottom, and took a big enough piece of aluminum foil to make a tight cover over the top of the beaker, then weighed it and got 422.1 grams. Next we added about 30 kernels to the glass beaker with the vegetable in it and poked a few holes in the top of it for the steam to escape, and weighed it again and got 430.5 grams. We then put the beaker on the ring stand with the gas torch underneath it for the kernels to pop. When is started getting hot enough, and the pressure of the kernels got high enough, they started to pop. After they popped we had to wait for them to cool down, so we went and mad us our ow bag of microwave popcorn to eat :). It was pretty good. After we were done with that, we took the beaker with the popped popcorn in it and got that it weighed 429.2 grams. So it lost some mass because the water escaped and the fluffy popcorn was just a little lighter. We figured from our data that our popcorn had 15% water in it.

YUMMY!!