Twinkie, Deconstructed (28 page)

I’m surprised to find that the flaker isn’t hot, given that a dry powder is the goal. In fact, it doesn’t dry the mixture—it actually cools it, so that it solidifies in a matter of seconds on the chilled drum surface, much as candle wax solidifies on your finger. It tastes like it looks, and that’s not good: soapy wax. No surprise: soap is a salt of a fatty acid; sodium stearate is a common soap ingredient, and I’ve just inadvertently put some in my mouth, bringing back memories of childhood punishments. I begin to wonder about my taste buds recovering, and how Twinkies succeed in absorbing this taste (hint: there’s only a touch of it in the batter).

The opaque wax dries clear. As the drum rotates, a long blade fixed against it, the waxy stuff is scraped off and allowed to fall in a snowy cascade. I look down to see a snowbank of sparkling flakes, some reflecting light like the mica that sparkles so dazzlingly under streetlights during a nighttime snow shower, providing a delicate angle to this machinery-laden scene.

The newly broken flakes then fall one story down, through a ten-foot-wide funnel, only to be conveyed back up four stories to a grinder, then dropped back down into a large, vibrating tub called a classifier, which is filled with screen sieves so that only the desired powder falls into the fifty-pound, plastic-bag-lined boxes below it. Boutté and I head across the steel grates and down to the next level of humming machines to snag a sample, which is indescribably fluffy, a superfine powder that coats my hands instantly. It is almost impossible to wipe off, but since it’s soluble, it washes off easily (and blends into batter really well).

Each box is filled with a whoosh and sent on its way down the roller conveyor to be shipped out. And we’re shipping out, too. I’ve got soapy SSL on my taste buds and dinner on my mind, grateful that Kansas City’s famed barbecue is only minutes away. I just hope that there’s no sodium stearoyl lactylate in the barbecue sauce.

Sodium steroyl lactylate is fascinating because it is manufactured mostly from things you would never eat, like soda ash or stearic acid or field corn, and it largely duplicates the role played by egg yolks. You don’t need it at home. At least sodium caseinate, which is made from at least one toxic raw material, originates primarily from a familiar and tasty raw material—milk.

CHAPTER 22

Sodium and Calcium Caseinate

T
he very best casein, the protein part of milk that usually gets made into cheese, comes from the Waikato region of New Zealand, an area described to me by a New Zealand trade emissary as
Lord of the Rings
land. It doesn’t come from the United States, that’s for sure. No American dairy can afford to process casein into caseinates, the least profitable part of milk. U.S. dairies much prefer to transform milk into more profitable cheese, which also leads to the very profitable sweet dairy whey. But then we go and import well over 200 million pounds of casein each year to make Twinkies and a host of other food products, despite our being the largest dairy-producing country in the world. Let’s hope that the cows of Belarus graze upwind of Chernobyl, because Belarus, along with Russia and Poland, is where a lot of the cheaper milk we use to make lower grades of sodium and calcium caseinate comes from.

Lucky for us, New Zealand and Ireland (our two biggest suppliers by far), where the most expensive milk comes from, don’t turn all their milk into beverages or cheese, hence the endless supply of casein. There, caseinates are made directly from fresh milk; elsewhere the milk is dried first and has to be rehydrated back into milk once it’s imported here—a seemingly unnecessary and rather unpalatable extra step. They also work within various and complex trade agreements (and loopholes in GATT, apparently) to facilitate dairy exports. New Zealand is the world’s largest casein exporter, half of which goes to the United States.
13

R
EMEMBER THE
A
LAMO!

In the late 1800s, casein was used to make “milk paint,” something house restorers today curse still as they struggle to remove it; it was also made into glue, which might explain the paint’s tenacity, something old house restorers can certainly relate to (it is still used in latex paints). Casein helped form the first plastics, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when it was mixed with formaldehyde and hardened into pens, buckles, and knife handles; casein buttons were the norm at the turn of the twentieth century, made into imitation tortoiseshell, jade, and lapis lazuli. (It was certainly not considered a food ingredient back then.)

Major domestic production stopped as far back as the 1950s. Then, casein had long been treated as something of a waste product, being part of the skim milk left over from butter-making or excess curds from cheese-making. Much as with whey, now another valuable food additive also found in Twinkies, it was often used for pig feed or simply tossed out. And wouldn’t you know it, around that time the big food companies spearheaded a hunt for food additives that would increase shelf life and extend the usefulness of, or replace, traditional ingredients such as eggs and milk. A dried milk component—dried milk had been on the scene for years—was an obvious candidate to explore as a possible functional ingredient. And it turned out to be high in protein, making it nutritious.

Until the 1950s, Borden
^®
, of Elsie the Cow fame, had used casein to make Elmer’s glue and paste for elementary school children. (That was the paste you could eat, at least technically, because it was made from milk. That paste is no longer around, though some argue it was simply moved to the cafeteria.) And that’s not the only reason Borden’s is a memorable part of American culture and history. Gail Borden Jr., who invented canned milk in 1856 (and put an eagle on his brand of sweetened condensed milk, the one that remains on market shelves to this day), made a fortune during the Civil War. But he has a more dramatic claim to fame: in 1835, he founded a small newspaper, the
Telegraph and Texas Register
, in Galveston (which he also helped lay out and found) before becoming a dairyman in New York State. Borden’s paper was one of the first to report on the Texans’ battles for independence from Mexico. His March 1836 headline helped to immortalize the famous battle cry, “Remember the Alamo!” The (temporarily) victorious Mexicans responded by throwing his printing press into a river and may have thereby convinced Borden to focus on canned milk instead of politics, much to our collective benefit.

N
UTRITION AND
W
HIPPED
T
OPPINGS

Caseinate, whether sodium or calcium, is a top source of protein, and rich in the eight essential amino acids. Eighty percent of the protein in milk can be found in the casein (the rest is in the whey). While nutritional value is helpful if you are making an energy bar or protein-fortified meal replacement drink—both caseinates are in Nutrament
^®
“energy and fitness drink” and Slim-Fast Optima™—it is less important if you are baking, say, a snack cake like a Twinkie. In fact, there is no home equivalent for this white powder other than milk itself. (You don’t really need sodium caseinate unless you make your own sausages, and then it makes a strong binder when powdered milk just won’t do. Sausage makers used dried milk for years—as did cake bakers like Hostess—before modern technology brought us sodium caseinate.)

In Twinkies, proteins aren’t there to promote strong bodies. Caseinates, especially sodium caseinate, work mainly in the filling, emulsifying, stabilizing, gelling, and absorbing a little water. Though definitely minor players, they nonetheless play an essential role in keeping that filling aerated and just a little bit foamy.

They play a more important role, however, in many other foods. Caseinates help make dough uniform in mass-produced doughnuts, muffins, and waffles, and block the excess absorption of fat in fried foods. They emulsify and stabilize packaged milk shake/drink bases; carry flavors and minimize shrinkage in ice cream and other frozen desserts like Breyers
^®
Carb Smart Ice Cream Bars; bind and emulsify fat in processed meats (sausage, luncheon meat); and clarify wine (fine particles coagulate with the protein in casein and are easily filtered out). Caseinates help extend eggs (whole, white, or yolk), they support meringue and other foods made of egg whites, and form the films on edible glazes. They also add some authenticity to synthetic milk additives (they are rather important in coffee creamers like Coffee-mate
^®
), stickiness to edible adhesives, and, being dairy products, a bit of legitimacy to analog (fake) cheese, which can be made from not much more than sodium caseinate, flavor, salt, stabilizers, and water, though a more complex version, based on soy, includes casein too (Veggie Slices
^®
Cheese Alternative American Flavor Organic). Low in calories and high in nutrients, caseinates function well as fat replacers.

The most fascinating industrial role casein plays is in making concrete. Part of a new system of products that reduce the amount of water needed so much that the curing time is cut by half, casein is saving oodles of money for builders. And in keeping with its historical tasks, casein is also used in high-end furniture glue. With a long list like that, casein has come a long way since elementary school paste.

W
HITE
P
OWDER INTO
W
HITE
P
OWDER

In New Zealand and Ireland, milk is converted to dried caseinate right at the dairy. A bit of hydrochloric acid (instead of an enzyme like rennet) separates milk into curds and whey, only this time the curds get made into Twinkies and energy drinks instead of cheese.

The process is actually pretty simple. Washing curds with a dilute alkali solution, made either with a sodium solution (this would be sodium hydroxide, or lye, again) for sodium caseinate, or a lime solution (calcium hydroxide, or lime) for calcium caseinate, neutralizes the acid milk product, making it into a more useful salt. After the wash, the caseinates are spray-dried—atomized under high pressure into a stainless steel spray-drying chamber that can be as much as five stories high and 375°F hot. There, the liquid caseinate hits the heat and instantly drops to the bottom of the chamber as a fine, pale yellow powder, ready for packaging and shipping to bakeries. The big plants in New Zealand can top an astounding thirty thousand pounds per hour doing this. The process may be simple, but the volume is high.

Because powdered minerals—calcium and sodium—are mixed with caseinates, they essentially become dairy products. Not so with the last mineral on the list, calcium sulfate. Almost nothing happens to it.

CHAPTER 23

Calcium Sulfate

H
ere’s yet another rock that we eat, and it comes from only one place in the country. In spite of its chemical name, and in spite of the fact that its sister product, plaster of Paris, is used to make casts and walls—two decidedly uncakelike items (depending on who’s doing the cooking)—calcium sulfate shares the distinction (with eggs, salt, and water) of being the least processed of Twinkie ingredients. We hardly do anything to it before eating it. Like salt, it comes from an ancient marine deposit near the earth’s surface, and like salt, it is essential to our health.

O
KLAHOMA
O
CEAN

Although gypsum is one of the most common minerals in the world, nowhere else is it found—and used—in such quantities as in the United States, and most is found in Oklahoma. The purest gypsum, the only gypsum approved for use in food, is found in the northwestern quadrant of Oklahoma, in a rolling area called the Gypsum Hills that sparkles with glasslike crystals. Canyons in nearby Gloss Mountain State Park (sometimes called Glass Mountain—the name was apparently given by an upper-crust Brit whose strong accent disguised his intent) show dramatic layers of white rock alternating with red earth. Even the earth is calcium enriched.

Rising not-so-grandly 150 to 200 feet above the nearby Red Beds Plains area farmland, many of these small hills are—or rather, were, until they were quarried—capped by layers of gypsum five to eighteen feet thick. In the tiny town of Southard, just northwest of Oklahoma City, the United States Gypsum company (USG), makers of the familiar wallboard, Sheetrock
^®
, operates the quarry that yields just about all of our food-grade calcium sulfate.

USG and a nearby, small competitor mining the same vein, Allied Custom Gypsum, use this source for agricultural and industrial gypsum products, too—only about 5 percent of the rock is used for food. The same gypsum deposit covers much of the central United States, another Twinkie ingredient (like salt, limestone, and phosphates) laid down hundreds of millions of years ago by an expanded Pacific Ocean. Where the gypsum approaches the surface there are now mines or quarries and wallboard facilities (and towns like Gypsum, Ohio; Gypsum, Colorado; and Plaster City, California; Southard, Oklahoma, is an exception, being named after the first miner here, George Franklin Southard).

Despite being a mere mineral, calcium is really a so-called earth metal, like sodium, and a reactive one, too—it is always found attached to something else. In this case, it is found attached to sulfur and mixed with water—and, in addition to being called gypsum, it’s known as hydrous calcium sulfate, or calcium sulfate dihydrate. (The “di” means that there are two molecules of water attached to each calcium sulfate molecule.) You might find calcium deposit in your own home, especially if you have hard well water (though this would be calcium carbonate, not sulfate) in the form of a white crust left behind after you’ve boiled water. There’s a reason the word “gypsum” is derived from
gypsos
, Greek for “chalk.”