“Popcorn is a product that comes from a seed that you can make in your own home and customize,” said Melissa Abbott, the vice president of culinary insights for the Hartman Group, a market research company in Bellevue, Wash. “There’s a real D.I.Y. feel to it.”

Still, for a nation that knows the pleasure buried in a tub of movie-house popcorn laced with fake butter, or the instant gratification inside a bag hot from the office microwave, the older popcorns are not always easy to love. They cost more, pop up smaller and leave more unpopped kernels than their highly bred commercial brothers.

The reward, however, is popcorn with a better nutritional profile, and hulls — the bits that stick in your teeth — that seem to all but disappear. The flavor can be subtle but complex, mixing toast and sweet corn, delivering in taste what the aroma of popping corn has always promised.

Elite chefs are already smitten. A couple of years ago, Daniel Patterson of Coi in San Francisco simmered popcorn in water and butter, strained out the hulls and called it popcorn grits. The dish had a cameo in the PBS “Mind of a Chef” programs starring David Chang, and the recipe made it into Mr. Chang’s cult magazine, Lucky Peach.

Image Credit... Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

When Mr. Patterson published it in his 2013 book “Coi: Stories and Recipes,” he chided his tribe for its lack of popcorn skills. “It’s amazing to me how many well-traveled, well-trained cooks have no idea how to pop popcorn,” he wrote.

No one is pretending that artisanal popcorn is about to conquer the mass market. Its growth is so small that those who track the snack industry have no hard numbers on its growing popularity. But they do note that popcorn, which has long lagged behind even the lowly pretzel in America’s salty-snack pantheon, is rallying.