Guy Fieri's Jalapeño Bacon Parm Popcorn Dressing Is Revolutionary

Somewhere in Guy Fieri's career as a star chef and TV personality, he earned an equally famous moniker: the mayor of Flavortown. The nickname is so widely used that an entire website dedicated to the fictional town exists on the internet, and Bud Light was only too happy to rope in its mayor in a 2022 Super Bowl ad to reveal a new seltzer flavor.

Nothing that Guy Fieri cooks is subtle, which explains the pseudonym. Per Food Network, his turkey chili, named after his son Ryder, packs in a ton of heat with chilies and spice powders. His French toast takes after bananas Foster with a rich caramel sauce and a splash of orange liqueur, making it more of an after-dinner dessert than the first meal of the day. Even mac and cheese isn't the usual cheese, milk, and pasta dish in the Fieri household, where the cheese sauce is cooked with garlic and shallots in a whole lot of bacon fat.

It's safe to say, then, that the selection of popcorn in Flavortown isn't going to be limited to salt, butter, cheese, and caramel, either. Instead, a recipe in his 2016 cookbook, "Guy Fieri Family Food," shows that the only popped kernels served in Flavortown are those that come with cheese, bacon, and chilies.

You'd think that Selena Gomez's pickle juice and Tabasco popcorn would be the spiciest and most revolutionary corn kernels on the block, but Fieri's popcorn dressing is here to prove otherwise. Per the recipe, the Food Network star cooks the popcorn the old-school way with a good ol' pan, a lid, and a stove. Before adding the kernels to oil in the pot, however, Fieri fries smoked bacon and sliced jalapeños in it first. He then pops corn kernels in the bacon fat and jalapeño juices, mixes in the fried bacon and jalapeño pieces, and finally sprinkles a heap of parmesan all over it.

While the combination of bacon, jalapeño, and parmesan may be unique to Fieri's recipe, several Redditors vouch for the addition of at least one of those ingredients in popcorn. One user says that saving frozen cubes of bacon fat to cook popcorn in was quite possibly the best kitchen hack they learned from their mother. Another confirms that the combination of bacon fat and chili powder in popcorn is, in fact, incredible, and yet another vouches for a parmesan and chill powder dressing for popcorn. If these comments are any indication, Fieri's jalapeño bacon parmesan dressing may be the best new way to eat popcorn.