Twinkie, Deconstructed (3 page)

Modern food technology was Twinkies’ salvation. The chemical industry worldwide exploded with innovation just after World War II, driven in part by the war itself. Simultaneously, American demand for convenience foods (and higher profits) blossomed along with the maturing of our highway system for efficient distribution. In the 1950s, Twinkies’ shelf life extended along with its ingredient list.

The result today is a cake known for its secret recipe and long shelf life. Its taste is so appealing that Hostess claims it sells 500 million a year, yet most of us don’t have a clue how the Twinkie’s major, basic food ingredients (wheat, sugar, soybeans, and eggs) are processed, let alone how its more unfamiliar ingredients are made—or even what they are.

Understanding the ingredients in the greater context of food industry rather than simply understanding the recipe for this particular snack cake became my goal. Investigating ingredients such as sodium stearoyl lactylate or enriched, bleached flour—with ingredients coming from various states and/or foreign countries—makes you wonder why we work so hard to make any food, especially a nonnutritive snack food. After all, most of these ingredients are in the thousands of other familiar processed foods we eat, including salad dressings, sports drinks, bread, and ice cream. Examine these and you are examining much of our modern food supply.

Some ingredients, like most of those at the top of the Twinkies ingredient list, retain aspects of their agricultural origins, while others, like most of those at the bottom of the list, are either minerals or are so highly processed that they really do qualify as chemicals rather than foods. While exploring complex industrial or chemical processes, I became eager to learn how we came to know how to do this, often finding the answer rooted in history. Phosphoric acid may be an important ingredient in Coca-Cola
^®
, but how did we come to use it in baking powder? Why did we start using chlorine for bleaching flour? What did we use in cakes before, say, polysorbate 60 or sweet dairy whey? Are any of the chemically named items extracted from vegetables or fruit? (I thought for sure something must be extracted from cranberries or tree bark, and wanted to find out.) And perhaps the most important question of all: if you can make a cake at home with just flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and water (OK, and a little flavoring, plus cream for a filling, and baking powder if you insist), how is it that thirty-nine ingredients are needed to make a Twinkie? Why do they use so many unfoodlike ingredients at all?

And then there were the intriguing, inspiring tidbits that made me want to dig even deeper, like a dictionary definition of phosphates (part of baking powder) that says, “Obtained from phosphate rock…Phosphorus was formerly used to treat rickets and degenerative disorders and is now used as a mineral supplement for foods; also in incendiary bombs and tracer bullets.” Sure makes you wonder about what’s in those cakes. Since when—and why—do we grind up rocks for food? Or, for that matter, since when do we find it necessary to reduce naturally occurring resources like corn, soybeans, and petroleum into a brown goo that is so strong in its pure form it will blow out your taste buds, yet apparently is fine to consume in cake form? How are noxious-sounding substances transformed into innocuous processed food ingredients? How is calcium sulfate (the food additive) different from calcium sulfate (the soil amendment), or from its most common form, plaster?

If you are what you eat, then it behooves you to know exactly what you are eating. Especially if you eat a lot of polysorbate 60, cellulose gum, and Red No. 40.

Finding out where, at the lowest level, these subingredients come from, tracing every finished product back down the processing chain (doing what scientists call a root tracer) is a way to give a sense of place to each ingredient. And there are some surprising stories about how each ingredient came to be made and used. Every chemical in the Twinkie comes from somewhere, and is made from things that come from somewhere else—usually from the ground. (That leads to “Aren’t they all natural if they come from the earth?”—a question that dogs me still.) Organic Twinkies, not. What they are, how they are made, and how or why they are used and interact with the other ingredients are the bigger, guiding issues.

It became evident that the Twinkie is a dynamic, complex food system, where the proteins (flour, caseinates, whey, and egg) build structure and the fat and sugar (oils, emulsifiers, and sweeteners of many kinds) fight with that structure, in order to provide moisture and tenderness. Everything else on the list serves to balance out these two tendencies, some siding with moisture preservation (think “Shelf life! Shelf life!”) and some helping the batter to stand up to the rigors of the commercial baking process (and to reduce overall cost). And then there’s the difference between the foods at the top of the list and the chemicals at the bottom—what’s that all about? Why don’t I need those ingredients (calcium sulfate, sorbic acid, coloring, etc.) in my homemade cakes? Sometimes it became difficult to relate the massive industrial and technical activities involved to making the ingredients for a simple baked good. There is, in fact, quite a disconnect.

As I watched mountains being moved to get at a mineral or visited mile-long factories to see things being refined, brewed, reacted, crushed, or dried, when I began to consider the awesome number of truck, ship, and trainloads involved, when I became aware of all the cooking and slicing and dicing of molecules, I began to question how we managed to engage serious science in the pursuit of creating something that isn’t even necessary to our existence. I tried to find out how we came to make food additives on a global scale, and I had to wonder why we make such an enormous industrial effort to create artificial replacements for relatively unprocessed things like sugar. I wondered where this industry fit in with the major industries of the world.

And, from the start, I wanted to know: when can I go see where they come from?

CHAPTER 2

Wheat Flour

F
lour, along with fat and sugar, is what defines a cake. Every other ingredient—including those infamous chemicals—is in the recipe to help make the flour into something light, tasty, and a delight to eat. But flour is the base. Believers of urban legend, take note: Twinkies are not just made of chemicals. They are made mostly from flour, one of the most important and ancient foods we eat. That’s why flour is first on the ingredient list, and the first ingredient I explore.

For many of the Twinkies bakeries around the country, wheat for their cake flour comes from traditional, family farms like those in what the farmers call the Delmarva area (short for Delaware Maryland Virginia). A typical farm is the one thousand acres in Queen Anne, Maryland, that Jimmy Boyle’s family has farmed for generations. Thanks to modern combines (harvester/planter machines) and other high-tech equipment, he can farm his land with only a couple of helpers, delivering wheat by truck to a nearby grain elevator, which acts as a dealer and sells the wheat to the big eastern flour mills. The favorable climate allows Boyle to grow three crops on the same land every two years by rotating with corn and soybeans. Maximum return for maximum effort. Boyle keeps his land busy.

The relatively small size of the farms in this area is what creates the alluring patchwork pattern of fields in much of the mid-Atlantic and eastern part of the Midwest, and its beauty is what cheers me as I drive to one of the biggest flour mills in the country to see wheat milled into cake flour for Twinkies.

The genial wheat and baking expert I meet there is eager to explain everything about the process to me, but his employers are slow to respond to his enthusiasm. He decides to show me around anyhow (while keeping certain rooms and information off-limits), as long as he and his conglomerate-like company remain nameless. For the purposes of this narrative, I’ll call him Bob Alexander.

Every spring, Alexander tours hundreds of traditional, small family farms like Boyle’s in eastern Pennsylvania, western New Jersey, and the Delaware-Maryland peninsula. He’s a total professional, and loves the science and art of baking (and loves talking about it). A man on a mission, he travels the fields to test and find the proper wheat to turn into Twinkies. Some of the farms are Amish, which provides a nice irony: the arch nonconsumers supplying the arch consumers.

On a typical visit, Alexander measures the protein, starch, and moisture content of each farm’s soft red winter wheat, the wheat used for cake flour. Nature is inconsistent, but the Twinkie recipe must be respected, so Alexander examines and travels and talks and buys and hopes to get to the best crops before his several competitors do. Most of what he reveals paints a surprisingly complex image of what most of us take for granted as plain old flour, a common kitchen staple. But like everything else in Twinkies, just because it is common doesn’t make it simple.

S
OFT
R
ED

Turns out, wheat is not just wheat. There are six kinds, and each varies in moisture and in gluten, the primary protein complex in wheat and the main thing that influences how it functions in a particular recipe. Gluten—and the proportion of it found in each kind of wheat—is what makes certain types of wheat better and more appropriate for various uses. Hard red spring and hard red winter wheats (high-gluten/high-protein wheats from the vast wheat fields of the northern Great Plains) are used for bread and pizza flour; hard white (from California and Kansas) makes good bread flour. Soft white (from northern New York and the Northwest) is best for noodle and cracker flour. Durum (extra hard, from the north central states) is used for pasta flour. And soft red winter wheat, from the mid-Atlantic (i.e., Jimmy Boyle’s farm), South, and Ohio and Mississippi River valleys, makes the best cake flour.

Twinkies (according to Hostess) consume 7 million pounds of this flour yearly. That’s 3.5 million of the two-pound bags of flour you buy at the grocery store.

Cake flour, by definition, is milled from soft, low-protein, high-starch wheat that absorbs very little water. Because it has the lowest protein of all wheats (7 to 9 percent in cake flour versus 12 to 14 percent for bread flour) and thus a low gluten content, it works best with almost equal amounts of sugar and the heavy emulsifiers, which blend the oil and water. The flour, which is ground much finer than regular wheat, is perfect for Twinkies and their high-volume, fine-textured, delicate crumb. But cake flour’s low protein can also be too much of a good thing—some cake recipes actually have to add a bit of powdered wheat gluten, not only to strengthen the weak flour, but as a stabilizer and thickener as well as to add some smoothness to the cake’s inside and surface.

Flour professionals sneer at the consumer’s trusty standby, “All-Purpose” flour blend, which varies in its blend from brand to brand and region to region. “It’s good for nothing if it says ‘good for everything,’” Alexander snorts, while standing in the midst of the giant mill where he works. Dough made from high-gluten (high-protein) flour, like pizza dough, is cake flour’s polar opposite: its texture, made tough from all that protein, means it can stretch and hold big bubbles of gas without much more than water and yeast.

G
RINDING
G
RASS

Wheat, which is a grass, looks like regular lawn grass for most of its life. When Boyle harvests it with his giant combine, the bushy top, which holds the seeds (called wheat kernels or wheat berries) is removed and collected. Twinkies literally start here, in the field.

The stems are dried for straw (hay is made from another kind of grass) and the grain is conveyed from the top of the combine into a grain truck, which looks like a normal semi but for the big udders (hanging from its bottom, where the grain is discharged), and its convertible, canvas top. These trucks deliver and sell grain to a local co-op, or to a group of storage silos owned by a dealer who in turn sells it to a big food processing company like Con-Agra, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), or Cargill. Around flour mills located in urban areas, you can spot spilled wheat berries on city streets. Rural grist for urban mills.

Wheat stores well. At the big flour mill I visit, there is a wall of office-building-size storage silos out behind the main plant, each of which holds half a million bushels of grain, 150 railroad cars’ worth. The scale stems from the need for tons of backup grain to keep the huge mill functioning in case of any interruption in supply. Plus, of course, wheat is a seasonal crop. Still, that is one mighty big wall.

Wheat milling began, old pros like to say, when some prehistoric soul wandering through a grass field took a bite of a raw wheat berry. If it was soft red winter wheat, it was soft enough to chew, and the first evolutionary step toward civilization and Twinkie-making was taken. (If it was hard winter wheat, it felt like chomping down on a pebble, and no progress was made, except possibly toward the invention of dentistry.) Early millers, as far back as 6700 (some say 7500)
BC
, simply pounded the berries with smooth stones, something primitive people still do today in preparation for their daily meals. Ever since fully mechanized flour mills became popular in the early 1800s, and especially since the invention of the superefficient roller mill in 1879, mass consumers have been convinced that whiter, finer flour was the way to go, setting the stage for Twinkies.

Today, modern millers erect multimillion-dollar mills to mill the wheat berries—a process of seventy to eighty mechanical steps overall, making the finest flour a baker could ask for, at least for making Twinkies. The mill itself (which I have agreed not to identify, but which is similar to the others I have visited) is an agglomeration of different kinds of buildings, including a small clump of ten-story-tall, cylindrical silos made of cement. Like most mills, it is well served by a country road as well as by a rail line. There’s lots of pavement out front—parking for dozens of open-topped grain trucks and tank-like, cylindrical flour trucks suggests urban congestion in an otherwise fairly rural area. Conveyors, some caged in steel latticework, others in enclosed boxy shafts, tie the bigger buildings and silos together. And the squat, steel grain storage silos out back provide a visual balance to the slender cement silos out front. A white, cement office building that houses a dozen workers appears only as an afterthought.