Twinkie, Deconstructed (5 page)

In 1879, two important developments occurred to bring us closer to the perfection of cake flour and the birth of Twinkies. The UK Patent Office (one of the oldest in the world) granted a patent for using chlorine as a bleaching agent, and modern roller mills were introduced. Soon after, in the early 1900s, when chlorine gas first became widely available in the United States, millers found that they could duplicate the three-month, natural maturation process in only a matter of seconds by pumping minute amounts of chlorine gas (less than 25 ppm) into the flour, simultaneously achieving three results: bleaching; oxidation (taming the protein or starch to the point where it is practically nonfunctional, so as to yield bread and cakes with a soft, delicate crumb); and balancing (reducing the pH by generating just a bit of hydrochloric acid to further tame the protein). Once this became evident, in 1912, chlorination started in earnest.

It is not clear exactly how this all works; what is clear is that this treatment makes bleached flour the only kind that works in sugar-heavy and “high-ratio” (more sugar than flour) cakes like Twinkies or birthday and wedding cakes. Not only do you not need chlorinated flour to make bread, you don’t want it—chlorination knocks out gluten’s strength. Cakes made with unbleached flour and approximately equal amounts of sugar, like pound cakes, tend to be heavier, coarser, or denser than tender sponge cakes. In other words, no chlorine, no Twinkie.

P
IG IN A
P
OKE

Because it is so dangerous, chlorine for bleaching flour is usually shipped in accident- and bullet-proof, seven-foot-long pressurized tanks called pigs. They are so heavily constructed—some of the steel is 1.5 inches thick—that an empty one-ton (2,000-pound) capacity tank actually weighs 1,500 pounds.

When the chlorine-filled pigs are finally delivered to Alexander’s flour mill, they are penned in a tiny, specially constructed, high-security, negative air pressure, hazardous material bungalow. A timid glance inside reveals that they look especially small and unassuming for something so potentially dangerous. And the chlorine just barely trickles out of the pigs into the mill, where it is fed into an agitator, the last step in the milling process. This agitator is not a political troublemaker, but rather a seven-foot-long, submarine-like mixing container. The flour is pushed through it by five-inch-long, maple paddles that fluff up the flour to keep it airborne so that it can mix easily and continually with the chlorine gas being sprayed in. In this otherwise stainless steel world, wooden paddles are one of the few things that stand up to the highly corrosive chlorine. The reaction is instant, and the flour emerges properly bleached and acid-balanced after only a few seconds. The now white flour shoots out a large tube over our heads and out across the road to the blending building to become enriched with vitamins, the final treatment before it can be used in cakes.

The short story is that the mill has to put back into the flour what it took out of it, plus a little extra for good measure (and good health). The long story is that it has to go all around the world to get what it needs.

CHAPTER 4

Enrichment Blend: Ferrous Sulfate and B Vitamins—Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Folic Acid

I
n 1915, ten thousand people in the United States died of pellagra. If you haven’t heard of pellagra or anyone dying of it lately, that is thanks largely to enriched flour. If everyone ate a well-balanced diet, or used only whole wheat flour, and/or took vitamin supplements whenever they were needed, enrichment—the process of adding back vitamins and minerals to foods from which they were removed—would become unnecessary and obsolete. (Fortification—adding vitamins and minerals to foods that don’t normally have them—is a different animal.)

In 1938, the U.S. government realized it could fight pellagra, beriberi, iron deficiency anemia, and other diseases by fortifying commonly consumed foods with nutrients in the form of vitamins and a mineral (iron). Because flour was not only the most commonly eaten food in America at that time, but also one that was easily modified, and because industrial manufacturing of some vitamins had recently become a commercial reality, on January 1, 1942, the FDA simply directed the flour mills to add certain vitamins and minerals to white flour (an inexpensive national health plan without angst). The list hasn’t changed since then except in 1998, when folic acid was mandated for inclusion in the mix as a means of preventing spina bifida and other defects of the brain and spinal cords of developing fetuses.

While people learned, over the ages, to treat certain diseases with specific foods—night-blindness with liver, scurvy with citrus or pine needle extracts—it wasn’t until 1912 that the concept of vitamins was conceived. Polish biochemist Casimir Funk coined the name “vital amines” (
amine
is the chemical term for something made from ammonia and containing nitrogen) while he was trying to isolate the “anti-beriberi factor” from brown rice (this was based on the observation that people who ate brown rice seemed immune to the disease, while those who ate white rice weren’t). Somehow the words got combined, the
e
got dropped (when it was discovered that not all of them were amines), and an industry was born. All thirteen vitamins were discovered by 1948 and synthesized by 1972.

As simple and inexpensive as enrichment seems, there is a catch: it is hard to make vitamins and minerals. Research into how best to manufacture them simply and cleanly takes years and millions of dollars. Patents and secret processes abound. The factories are complex and require specialized raw ingredients. The actual chemical synthesis of vitamins might be quick, but it is dirty, and it is a challenge to handle the nasty solvents and waste products involved. Cutting-edge biotechnology and genetic engineering are central (fermentation, the biotech route, is overtaking chemical synthesis as the way to go). And the companies aren’t talking—months of dead-end research proves that. It is virtually impossible to find anyone who will explain the manufacturing process, which changes daily and therefore leads to a lot of false information. Especially galling is that the multinational companies that claim to make the vitamins are changing so fast that even they don’t know, or won’t say with any authority, who makes what.
3

Some of the flux is typical, but, nevertheless, it’s not good business. In 1999, the six major vitamin companies that controlled 80 percent of the world market were caught in a price-fixing scandal, the billion-dollar settlement of which led to the disappearance of some, the mergers of others (Dutch giant DSM, the world’s largest vitamin manufacturer, paid more than a billion dollars to acquire Hoffman–La Roche’s vitamin business in 2003), and a huge drop in prices (in the neighborhood of 75 to 80 percent). Between the penalties and the price drop, the business became a burden for most of the big Western companies. BASF, the other giant, has started several “joint ventures” in Japan and China since 2001 that even it seems to find difficult to identify. Because of the price-fixing lawsuit, and because the Western world has intensified its pollution laws (vitamin manufacturing can take a heavy environmental toll), the industry is moving quickly to countries such as India and especially China. Most of the minor players seem to have joint ventures or distribution deals of various sorts that allow them to call themselves manufacturers when all they really do is resell Chinese chemicals—a far cry from the farmer’s market.

It is likely that most of us, as I did before starting this book, think that vitamins are squeezed from fruits or somehow extracted from vegetables. That’s where our mothers told us to get them, after all, and eating naturally vitamin-rich foods is still the best way. But, in fact, it is actually harder to extract B vitamins from natural sources than it is to create them synthetically. Even though they are chemically identical, lab-made vitamins are better because they are consistent in strength and quality, while the amount of a vitamin in each of several pieces of fruit, for example, varies widely with the crop and storage specifics, how much you eat, and how well your meals are balanced.

So eating a little enriched white flour isn’t necessarily a bad idea—and in the United States, it’s your only option.

The B vitamins in enriched flour come from elemental ores, petroleum, bacteria, or fungi made in ways you would never allow in your house. Some are a total chemical synthesis, and some are fermented. There are four vitamins and one mineral in the enriched flour that’s used in Twinkies, and they don’t grow in the local wheat fields. Most of them come from lands far, far away: Switzerland and China. Iron, the lone mineral, is the only one that can still come from the States, and has a popular foreign alternative.

F
ERROUS
S
ULFATE
: I
RON
S
ALT AND
P
ICKLE
L
IQUOR

The touch of iron in a Twinkie usually begins not only in iron ore mines in Minnesota, which is no surprise, but also in oil wells, which is.

Sulfate, as the name suggests, is derived from sulfur, which is no longer mined but instead refined out of high-sulfur (“sour”) crude oil, a step developed primarily to lessen air pollution when the oil is burned. Almost all of the refineries around the country, such as those near the Gulf Coast, buy crude oil from sources around the world, remove sulfur as a gas, liquefy it into elemental sulfur, and ship it at just below 300°F if by truck, or in steam-jacketed rail cars if by train (it has to be heated up and remelted at the destination) to sulfuric acid manufacturers. Most acid plants are located near the refineries. Giant chemical conglomerates DuPont and Rhodia are the leading manufacturers, with their biggest plants in Houston, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. These acid companies in turn burn the sulfur to get sulfur dioxide (some sulfur dioxide is used to process corn into syrup and starch) and then pass that gas over racks of expensive vanadium catalysts in building-size towers and mix it with water to get sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is part of the processing of a number of unrelated Twinkie subingredients (phosphoric acid, lactic acid) and one ingredient (artificial vanilla), but contributes sulfur directly only to one: ferrous sulfate.

At 165 million tons per year, sulfuric acid is the most produced chemical in the world. The United States is the world leader, making about a quarter of that sum. It is so useful that it plays a role in just about everything that’s manufactured, from fertilizers to gasoline, including Twinkies. But the workers at the wells, refineries, acid plants, and steel mills haven’t an inkling that what they’re producing actually ends up in food.

In a Midwestern steel mill, iron ore is baked and reacted into steel and then squeezed into continuous thin sheets up to 1,400 feet long in hot rolling mill lines that look like oversize printing presses. The buildings can stretch to a mile long. A rusty, crusty, oxide scale forms immediately on the surface of the fresh steel and must be removed quickly by what is known as the pickling process, which doesn’t have much to do with vinegar and cucumbers. Still, it is part of a small food chain that links petroleum to a vitamin supplement to nutritious flour. Steel pickling involves running that continuous sheet through sulfuric acid in tubs up to eighty feet long and seven feet wide. The acid is known as the pickle liquor, one liquor that is not recommended for consumption but that plays a key role in making ferrous sulfate for Twinkies.

At the end of the day, after thousands of feet of steel roll have been run through the tub (impressively named “deep tank technology”) and rolled into the six-foot-wide, seven-foot-diameter rolls you see carried on flatbed trucks, the sulfuric acid has become saturated with iron and is pumped out for separation. Iron sulfate crystals, an iron salt of sulfuric acid, drop to the bottom so that the acid can be poured off and recycled for further pickling. The crystals are then partially dried into dark, sandy clumps, and shipped by the truckload to the ferrous sulfate processors in one-ton supersacks.

The biggest ferrous sulfate processor in the United States, by far, and one that specializes in the purest food-grade additive, is Crown Technology in Indianapolis, Indiana, according to their VP of Operations, J. Scott Peterson. Crown dries and purifies the crystals from Midwestern steel mills and grinds them into a metallic gray powder, shipping many thousands of pounds a day in fifty-pound boxes. The finest, most consistent particles are sent to flour enrichment companies like those that supply Hostess.

Much of their ferrous sulfate is used in nonnutritious ways, products and processes that include fabric dye, ink, water purification, wood preservation, and weed killers. But fortification is also a lucrative business, and the next big thing seems to be adding iron to tortillas in order to fight rampant anemia in Mexico.

Twinkie bakeries sometimes switch between reduced iron and ferrous sulfate (FS), probably based more on pricing and availability than on nutrition or chemistry. Reduced iron is made from food-quality iron that has been reacted with carbon monoxide and/or hydrogen to get ferric oxide (technically the same as rust) that is then ground into an ultrafine, dust like powder. Reduced iron is less expensive but not as strong as ferrous sulfate; the more finely it is ground, the more digestible, but also the more expensive it becomes. This said, it comes mostly from India and China, where labor costs are dramatically lower than in the United States, so cost is an issue vaguely in its favor.

Reduced iron is also less likely than FS to cause rancidity in fat.There are some negatives, though: its little specks might darken the Twinkies, and when flour companies pass their product through strong magnets, looking for errant nuts, bolts, or wedding rings, it’s possible that the reduced iron dust might pop out, which would be embarrassingly counterproductive, to say the least.