Meghan Markle’s Netflix show has left viewers baffled after they were stunned by a bizarre recipe for ‘on the cob’ truffle popcorn.
Eagle-eyed viewers spotted the Montecito-based ex-royal bringing out a £3 bag of Whole Foods 365 organic popcorn with her ingredients as she prepared to create snacks for her guestroom.
43-year-old Meghan said she learnt the trick to making microwave popcorn ‘very, very recently’ as she gushed about the new-found recipie.
The popcorn makes part of a gift-tray for visiting make-up artist pal Daniel Martin, alongside a lovingly packaged bag of peanut butter pretzels.
To make these, she tears open a pre-packaged bag of the Trader Joe supermarket treats, transfers them into her own plastic bag and carefully secures them with a neat string bow and a hand-written label.
The former Suits actress reveals to an enraptured audience that they can put dry corn in a paper bag, fold it, put it into a microwave – and miraculously turn it into the puffed-up cinema treat.
Bizarrely, she has to move the bag twice in a continuity mess-up that sees her repeatedly putting the store-bought package appear on her right side.
The brown paper bag hovers unnervingly at the side of the shots as she puts the kernels into the electronic oven and has ‘quite a bit of fun’ listening to them pop.
‘You guys!’ the Duchess of Sussex exclaims as she opens the paper bag to reveal that it had, indeed, turned into popcorn.
Next to her luxurious £21,400 Cartier ‘tank Francaise’ gold watch and £4,544 Cartier yellow gold bracelet, the popcorn is in full focus – prominently displaying the American supermarket’s branding.
Meghan goes on to remove the cobs of corn from the bags and discards them – refraining from collecting the popped kernels that remain on the stick.
Again she picks them up and places them on the rented home’s wooden worksurface, directly in front of the popcorn bag.
To this the lifestyle-guru adds truffle oil and lashings of truffle salt – before adding more non-truffle salt to her taste.
As she packages it up into a cellophane bag and adds a handwritten label, she wisely advises that you should use a bow or it may be difficult to untie.
Stunned viewers were quick to notice the bizarre saga of the supermarket popcorn, as they debated whether it was deliberate or a glaring mistake.
One, Elijah, said: ‘In Meghan Markle’s Netflix show she’s making popcorn “on the cob” but you can see a bag of 365 microwave popcorn in the shot.
‘The show is actually so funny like she went on Pinterest and put some mood boards together!’
Another, Kelly, joked that the show was ‘oozing with authenticity’.
But other Meghan super-fans were quick to rush to her defence, blasting amused critics for ‘nitpicking’ and being ‘really weird’.
One raged: ‘1)The bag of microwave popcorn isn’t open 2) She said she was trying something new 3) We actually saw her put the cob in, run the microwave and take the cob out 4) The energy you’re putting into the watching & nitpicking of a show of someone you clearly don’t like is really weird.’
If the Netflix show is too hard to follow, Tadum, the streaming channel’s website, gives a recipe for viewers who want to make Truffle Popcorn at home.
But unlike Meghan’s version it is not made in the microwave – and says home cooks should use oil to make the perfect dish.
Once the kernels are popped, they advice readers to take things a step further than Meghan and season them with truffle oil, truffle zest, truffle salt and flaky salt before packaging them up.
During the cooking show, the former actress said she always liked to ensure her guests are provided with a late-night nibble, before sharing her recipe for microwaved truffle popcorn and re-packaged pretzels.
‘This, we’re just going to put into a different bag,’ she said slyly, with fans spotting the recognisable Trader Joe packaging of the peanut butter flavoured snacks, which Meghan said she’d be ‘eating forever’.
After pouring the pre-made snacks into her own bag, the duchess made sure to label the bag as containing peanuts – though she acknowledged she already knew her friend didn’t suffer from a nut allergy.
‘I know that Daniel loves peanut butter but I’m going to label this anyway, you always want to be conscious if someone has a nut allergy,’ she said.
In 2017, Kate Middleton proved her admirable pretzel making ability when she and Prince William were on a state visit to German city of Heidelberg.
The royal couple were given a lesson in making pretzels in the town square.
Locals were impressed by the two’s efforts, with baker Andreas Gobes joking that Kate was ‘a little bit more talented’ than her husband when it came to the finished product.
‘Catherine was a little bit more talented than William but they both did a great job. This type of pretzel is a speciality for the region so we wanted to show them that. In this region it has a special shape – thin arms and a thick body – with salt and it’s red-brown colour,’ he said.
Meghan’s documentary has failed to make waves with TV critics and home viewers alike slamming the show.
Hollywood magazine Variety panned the Duchess of Sussex’s series as ‘a Montecito ego trip not worth taking’ in a no holds barred review.
But the delayed lifestyle series was slammed by critics after its premiere as ‘gormless lifestyle filler’ with a ‘tangible desperation’.
The show received a lowly 11 per cent rating from viewers, and sat at number six on the streaming channel’s Top 10 behind Kate Hudson’s basketball comedy series Running Point and WWE.
‘The show plays out like a forced march, one in which Meghan’s guests must, as the price of getting to share an afternoon in a made-for-TV kitchen with her, praise her first,’ they wrote.
‘With Love, Meghan is made with a great deal of love — in the sense that the greatest love of all is the one that a person has for herself.’
The series also has an 11 per cent rating from more than 250 viewers on review site Rotten Tomatoes.
A scathing one-star review quipped: ‘This isn’t even a fun hate watch. It’s just bad.’
A fellow low scorer said watching With Love, Meghan was the ‘worst few minutes of my life’.
‘Couldn’t watch the first episode. So boring I wanted to go into a coma. Nothing new, nothing innovative, nothing interesting. Can’t put myself through anymore. I give up. I’m crying Uncle!!!
Meanwhile David and Victoria Beckham sent fans into a frenzy in 2023 when they released their Netflix documentary, The Beckhams.
The couple, who are reportedly worth more than £350 million between them, opened up about their decades-long relationship in the spotlight which appealed to viewers with its nostalgia theme as it looked back to the days when Beckham was dubbed Golden Balls.
The Beckhams and the Sussexes were once close friends after David and Victoria reached out to Meghan when she moved to the UK to live on the Kensington Palace Estate.
According to the Mail on Sunday, the couples bonded because Izzy May, David Beckham’s communications director, was friends with Markus Anderson, chief membership officer for private social club Soho House, who helped arrange Meghan’s secret dates with Harry.
A member of the designer’s staff is also understood to have helped Meghan with facials and hairdressing.
But the royal couple allegedly had a suspicion that the Beckhams leaked stories about Meghan’s help from Victoria to the press – a claim the former Spice Girl denied and left David reportedly feeling ‘absolutely bloody furious’.
Last night, Meghan shared a new photograph with Gloria Steinem on Instagram where she revealed that she’s ‘filmed something fun’ while in New York.
Taking to Instagram, she shared a clip of her walking in a hallway from behind while dressed in a pair of wide-leg trousers and a simple white vest, with the words: ‘Filmed something fun in the city today’.
But her new lifestyle series could be the last TV show she makes for Netflix as part of her $100million deal, commentators said, after the programme received a raft of withering reviews from critics.
While the Sussexes’ first documentary Harry & Meghan about their lives in 2022 was a major success in terms of audience numbers, two further productions about other subjects – Heart of Invictus in 2023 and Polo last December – slumped in the ratings.