Twinkie, Deconstructed (11 page)

Food starches have been separated from vegetables since ancient Chinese and Egyptian times (wheat starch was used to make papyrus, cosmetics, and must have helped keep the pleats in the pharaohs’ royal outfits, but there was no corn there—corn is an American thing). Refining corn for food use started in the United States with the founding of Thomas Kingsford’s eponymous Oswego, New York, firm in 1848. By 1880 it was the largest company of its kind in the world, with a thousand employees making thirty-five tons of cornstarch daily. Kingsford’s Starch, originally used primarily for laundry, was (along with baking powder) one of the first truly national consumer products that was advertised extensively, and the firm is credited with revolutionary innovations in corn refining that led right up to today’s modern plants. One of the post–World War II accomplishments occurred when drying tables hundreds of yards long were replaced with centrifuges that spun the water out; another was angling the “steep tank” walls so that new corn could be added (on the side) and continuously removed (from the center). These seemingly simple changes allowed for faster, continuous processing with less labor, assuring a low and popular price.

Kingsford’s merged with Argo, a Nebraska firm, in 1899, but both brands are still sold today, a testimony to consumer loyalty. The catch is that Kingsford’s brand is only found in Philadelphia, southern and northern California (though apparently not in central California), Denver, and, in a considerable leap of logic as well as ocean, Hawaii. You gotta love those marketing guys.

Cornstarch can be found in products as varied as mayonnaise, gumdrops, and chocolate candy fillings. Because it soaks up moisture so well, cornstarch, used dry, keeps confectioners’ sugar and packaged cake mixes dry and free-flowing. It works so well in baking powder that it is found in all the major brands, and sets the flavors on the surface of snack foods like Wise
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Cheez Doodles
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. Used wet, it helps both candy and salad dressings set, extends Cheerios
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crispiness in milk, and binds moisture in processed meats like Oscar Mayer
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Turkey Bologna.

At home, you can make classic white sauce with it ( just cook gently with milk and butter), and make a passable cake flour from all-purpose flour by adding a little cornstarch to it. Mixed with baking soda and water, it makes some fun modeling clay; a little dumped into a tub of warm bathwater soothes irritated skin (a lot dumped in makes for a major plumbing problem).

But because cornstarch tends to form a gel after it is heated, it’s a great thickener and texturizer (imparting “body”) for moist things that you cook: soups, sauces, gravies, custard, fruit pie fillings, and puddings (cornstarch essentially
is
the pudding in simple recipes, along with sugar, milk, and egg yolks or margarine). Heat some liquefied cornstarch in a bowl by itself and it forms a chunk of gel that stays moist on the inside for days.

Starch helps keep Twinkies’ sponge cake springy and prevents crumbling, thus extending its shelf life. And along with modified cornstarch and dextrins, it provides texture (firmness, creaminess, and aeration) as well as moisture control to Twinkies’ creamy filling.

A P
OCKLE
N
OW

As anyone who has struggled to make gravy knows, regular cornstarch has to be heated and stirred just so in order to avoid congealing. Since it also doesn’t last long—it simply swells and then disintegrates—the big bakeries demand something a little more forgiving, something that doesn’t require the loving care and attention of a home cook.

Just after World War II, scientists successfully made starches dramatically more useful, and especially so since 1960, with the cultural push for convenience foods. As a result, the big food processors can order something called a pre-gel, or pregelatinized starch, which has been chemically altered to thicken at various temperatures, including cold ones, and then stay swollen, providing a huge time and handling advantage to industrial bakers. (Unfortunately, no consumer version exists.)

To get starch to do this, though, there’s a trade-off. It’s put through a chemical bath that one chemical engineer prefaces as “the part you’re not going to like.” He is right. In the most common process (there are many), regular cornstarch is mixed in reactor vessels that can hold up to sixty thousand gallons (the size of a dozen tank trucks), along with propylene oxide (a petroleum product made from natural gas, chlorine, and lye or hydrochloric acid) and a watery, volatile, pungent liquid called phosphorus oxychloride that is so reactive it is handled as a hazardous material. Made from phosphorus, oxygen, and chlorine (P-O-C), which give it the rather cute nickname of “pockle,” it reacts violently with water to make hydrochloric and phosphoric acid and modifies and chlorinates the target molecules. Besides making Twinkie ingredients, pockle makes an unlikely group of products that includes pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and dyestuffs—but, as industry members say, has been used safely in food for fifty years. That may be because it is used here in a strength of less than one-tenth of 1 percent.

Sometimes the starch is bleached or treated with sulfuric or hydrochloric acid specifically to make such things as pie fillings. It takes only a few hours in the reactor vessel, agitated by a spinning propeller, to make this miracle food. The strong chemicals, bleach, and acids are easily washed out before the starch is dried and ready for making dessert.

The resulting liquid is sprayed into giant hot-air tanks, flash-dried to form a white powder that not only helps Twinkies seem denser, but above all, moister. Modified cornstarch is all about texture through moisture control, the home equivalent of expensive and hard-to-handle eggs and cream, which is why it saves food companies big bucks.

While the process may not be, modified starch is easy to swallow and makes drinks extra-smooth, and so finds its way into nutritional beverages for the elderly and the infirm; it provides the all-important gelling ability in instant puddings and Kraft
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Jet-Puffed
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Marshmallows. It improves the freeze-thaw behavior in microwave meals. And it mimics, with few or no calories, that smooth mouthfeel and tongue-coating that used to be the exclusive domain of fat in low-fat desserts and salad dressings, frustrating dieters who are trying to avoid all processed carbohydrates while eating low-fat foods. It is the primary ingredient in Knorr
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instant Hollandaise Sauce Mix, which contains no eggs. That’s why it also plays an essential role in forming Twinkies’ creamy filling, and it doesn’t need any cooking. It locks in water, keeping it from “weeping” into the cake while on the shelf. In short, modified cornstarch helps us cheat, but cheat well.

This unique property is what allows Dave Krishock, baking instructor at the Kansas State University Department of Grain Science and Industry, to describe the stabilized creme filling in this way: “You pump it in and it stays forever.”

D
RINKING AND
F
IREFIGHTING
D
ON’T
M
IX

The thick liquid cornstarch flowing from the wet mill gets hit with a double whammy of heat and acid when it is made into dextrins, also called thinned starches, which despite the name tend to be very concentrated. The dextrinizer, which holds ten to twenty thousand pounds of starch powder, heats and mixes the starch with a touch of hydrochloric acid, causing a chemical breakdown that turns it dark, sweet, and, most important, sticky. Later, the starch is dried to a white or yellowish powder, depending on what the mix master wants to make (more often cardboard than cake). Food is a sideshow, here.

Among its many uses, dextrins are responsible for the glossy sheen on printing paper, the glue on postage stamps and envelopes (due to its marvelous ability to remain inert when dry but turn adhesive when wet, and—let us not forget—to not poison us). Much of it is used to provide the glue in paper bags and corrugated cardboard boxes. Still, despite these rather unappetizing uses, it is still a regular food product, just not a good-tasting one.

Using cornstarch as glue was accidentally discovered, the legend goes, in Dublin in 1821, during the celebration of a visit by King George IV. A fire broke out in a textile factory that used potato starch for finishing cloth. Six workers, drunk on whiskey, fell into the starch water tank while trying to man the fire pump. When they finally got out, they were stuck together, and a new use was found for starch (as well as a new image for teamwork). The official version is far less dramatic, noting only that a worker observed after a fire that this roasted, brown stuff made a thick, adhesive paste when dissolved in water. No matter where the truth lies, in a slap to Irish separatists, it became known as British gums.

W
HISKEY AND
T
WINKIES

Corn flour is the odd man out here. First of all, it is not a thickener like the starches, though it almost works like one. And unlike cornstarches and corn syrups, which are wet-milled, corn flour is dry milled, an older and simpler process with its roots in a popular product quite unlike Twinkies. ADM’s giant, Peoria, Illinois, dry-milling plant, which dominates much of the city’s Illinois River waterfront, is itself dominated not by its twenty-story grain elevators, web of train-size conveyor belts, or ten-story-high processing towers, but by massive and handsome antique brick buildings that were built during its previous life as a Hiram Walker whiskey distillery. Unfortunately for me, no whiskey odors remain.

Despite its incessant drive to use the latest and greatest technology, and despite calling the process dry milling, industrial corporate dry millers use a technique to soften the outer shells of corn kernels that was developed by Native Americans millennia ago: they give the kernels a quick soak in, or a spray with, a hot water and caustic soda (lye) solution. Whether making tortillas or Twinkies, it starts the same way. After that, the process for making corn flour resembles wheat flour milling except that a lot of it goes into making food alcohol, usually for whiskey, or nowadays, ethanol, for fuel.

First, rollers crush the kernels so that the germ can be removed for making corn oil. The subsequent series of mills crush the remaining parts into descending levels of coarseness: coarse grits (hominy), flaking grits (for cornflakes and other breakfast cereals), brewers’ grits, cornmeal, and, ultimately, fine flour. Various grades of crushed kernels go on to become cattle feed or even diesel fuel (biodiesel) and explosives. Milling for tortillas and real corn chips skips the degerming part—that’s why traditional chips have such a nice, crunchy texture. And the brewers mentioned here include more than whiskey makers: they brew beer, antibiotics, industrial enzymes, and even vitamin C with corn grits. Corn is fertile stuff.

Surprisingly, corn flour is an important addition to the wheat flour used in making Twinkies. Not simply relegated to dusting countertops, it provides a unique gel-like texture to the crumb that holds both the structure and the moisture in a little bit and, of course, helps to prolong Twinkies’ shelf life.

The whole corn product team is one big moisture-holder and life-extender for Twinkies, but its value extends far beyond cakes and fillings to salad dressings, snack foods, and meat. Simply put, starch is practically an Olympic athlete among food additives. And yet, despite its impressive accomplishments, it can’t claim to bring everything to life—that’s a job for plain and simple H
₂
O.

CHAPTER 9

Water

W
ater is the only ingredient that isn’t delivered to the Twinkie bakery by vehicle, and it is the only truly local ingredient at any bakery, yet even
it
is processed. It’s one of the few Twinkie ingredients that is used in the exact same form as we use in our homes. But even water’s source is traceable and not without intrigue.

New Jersey’s Wanaque Reservoir, opened in 1930, supplies more water than any other facility in that populous state: more than 173 million gallons per day. Six and a half million gallons of that travel to Wayne, New Jersey, so there is plenty to supply the big Hostess bakery there that makes Twinkies for most of the Northeast. And it is good, clean water, freshly chlorinated and filtered, delivered straight from the water main by the Wayne Township Department of Public Works.

There are plenty of water treatment options for an end user like a major bakery, including coagulation, disinfection, pH adjustment, ion exchange, membrane filtration, and carbon filtration (especially effective at removing chlorine and fluoride), but in Wayne, New Jersey, very little is required, and whatever, if anything, is done is confidential. All bakeries wrestle with local water quality. For example, sometimes a recipe ends up needing to be modified with a little extra calcium sulfate or flavoring to balance acidity. Whatever it might take in Wayne, it would not be a big challenge to the Twinkie bakery.

N
O
G
OOEY
M
ESS

Bread may be known as the staff of life, but water is what turns flour into bread. Water is essential for life—and water brings life to Twinkies, literally bringing a dry mixture of powders alive. I love that moment of truth in baking, the point of no turning back, when I pour the water into the dry ingredients and start mixing. That’s when the action really begins.

The Twinkie, like anything cooked by recipe, is a kind of ecosystem in which each ingredient plays out its role in relation to the others; but water is the one ingredient that ties all them all together. Once the bakery mixes water into the dry ingredients to form a batter, it starts reacting in ways that eventually transform passive powders into active reagents, each with specific roles in numerous chemical reactions to come (the technical term is “baking”). This crucial moment is often just that—two to five minutes in a five-foot-wide “mixing bowl” that stands three and a half feet high (and holds up to two thousand pounds) before the batter is pumped into the continuous mixer, vigorously massaged for ten to twenty seconds, and then squirted into the rapidly moving Twinkie molds that are proceeding, twenty-four hours a day, into the conveyor ovens (at 500 million Twinkies a year, things move quickly).