Twinkie, Deconstructed (14 page)

We will always, it seems, strive for the best of all possible worlds in our quest for the perfect cake.

Creamy Oil

In the thick of such complex science, it’s important to step back and appreciate that the goal, at the end of the day, is simply to make a better form of fat. You need fat in cake to make it tender, light, and delicate, and, as in all foods, to carry flavors and nutrients. Butter may have better flavor, but it doesn’t leaven as well as our favorite heavily processed soybean product.

The primary advantage of shortening is that its high melting point and crystalline structure ensure an airy cake or a flaky crust. But shortening offers another advantage: it makes cakes tender by coating the flour proteins with oil, keeping them from absorbing moisture, and “shortening” (hence the term) the gluten strands. Try tearing a piece off a crusty boule of peasant bread, which has plenty of gluten, and compare that heroic effort with the effort needed to tear off a piece of cake. Twinkies are so tender, the hardest thing to tear off is the wrapper.

Shortening’s also essential to providing some slippery fat in the Twinkie filling, where it is whipped up with water, sugar, corn syrup, and a host of emulsifiers and thickeners. (That famous creamy filling has no cream in it, of course, which is why it is spelled “creme.”) Partially hydrogenated vegetable shortening is one of the main ingredients in cremelike products, such as Kraft’s Cool Whip
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non-dairy whipped topping and ready-made cake icings. It’s found in some brands of peanut butter (or fully hydrogenated oil, in order to avoid trans fats).

Fat not only shortens the dough in Twinkies, it holds the batter together. It tenderizes, moisturizes, and aerates the crumb, and gives both the cake and the filling a nice, rich mouthfeel. What more could you want in a snack?

I
SOLATION

Soybeans are considered healthful because they are such an excellent source of protein. So it would seem that isolating that protein would be useful in a variety of food products. As if processing the oil into shortening and lecithin weren’t enough, at least one company has staked its future on specialized products such as soy protein isolate: the Solae Company, in St. Louis, Missouri, created by food and technology giants Bunge and DuPont.

A crusher plant like Ag Processing ships its oil-less flakes across the state to Solae, where the softened flakes are dumped, a liquid railcar’s worth at a time (more than 20,000 gallons), into a vat of warm water and lye (or lime, ammonia, or tribasic phosphate), creating a soggy mess akin to a thin milk shake. After about an hour of gentle agitation, the proteins and sugars are dissolved and the protein can be extracted in an airplane hangarlike building full of centrifuges, ranging in size from that of a small up to a full-size car.

The second step is a lot like making cheese. A bit of acid, usually hydrochloric, is added to the moist mix in a 4,000- or 5,000-gallon tank, which triggers a curdling reaction, somewhat like how tofu is made. In an ironic twist for this well-known dairy alternative, the proteins are called curds and the watery effluent whey.

Finally, the third step is to dry the soy protein into the desired shapes and sizes—finely powdered for drinks and baking, larger for soy “meat.” Three tons of flakes make one ton of isolated protein, explaining why it costs about five to seven times as much as soy flour. What makes it so valuable is that it’s 90 to 95 percent protein—a superior concentration to soy flour that makes it useful in a lot more items than cake. Soy protein isolate finds its way into frankfurters and bologna, to help bind fat and moisture for added firmness and also to replace more expensive meat and dairy proteins. It is a central player in soy-based infant formulas and dietetic or nutritional meal supplements. It boosts the protein content of many commercial bread brands as well as pasta, and provides a nondairy, cholesterol-free, all-vegetarian alternative additive for coffee whiteners, whipped toppings, Power Bars
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, and bacon bits. In Japan, it is part of surimi, the “restructured fish product” that we know as fake crabmeat or “sea legs,” most often found in California rolls. One of its greatest attributes is that it has no taste, so it’s infinitely adaptable. And, like so many of the other Twinkie ingredients, soy protein isolate has industrial applications as well, including binding the shiny clay coatings on cereal boxes.

Given its myriad manifestations, it would appear that you can’t bake Twinkies without soybeans, a plant that barely registered on Western consciousness a hundred years ago. Soybeans in cake. Who knew?

But certainly you’d expect a cake to contain eggs.

CHAPTER 11

Eggs

T
winkies bakeries use a million eggs a year. Imagine if the bakers actually had to break each and every one of them by hand! In this mighty industrialized process, the big bakeries simply buy eggs that are already broken—dried, liquid, or frozen—from companies that do nothing but break eggs. Turns out that egg-breaking is big business.

I had never, ever even remotely imagined that there exists in this world a specialized industry for egg-breaking, so nothing prepared me for Papetti’s Hygrade Egg Products, the country’s largest egg-breaking facility, in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Papetti’s breaks 7 million eggs a day at its New Jersey plant, located in an industrial park near Newark Airport. The mere idea of breaking, let alone handling, that many eggs, even over a lifetime, is hard for a mere mortal to conceive. But here at Papetti’s, big tractor-trailers arrive hourly and tank trucks depart almost as often, each loaded with 6,000 gallons of fresh, whole, liquid eggs. It is the largest egg plant in the country, and we’re not talking a prize-winner at a state fair. Its corporate parent, Michael Foods, processes more eggs than anyone else in the world.

M
IRACLE
G
LUE

Whole eggs are the last item listed on the Twinkie label before the “2% or less” category, so, much to my surprise (not really), there isn’t a lot of egg in a Twinkie. A “scratch” sponge cake recipe calls for a quarter of an egg or more per Twinkie-size cake. (A little math based on the figures cited on Hostess’s Web site claims they use 1 million eggs to make the 500 million Twinkies they sell each year, which equals 1/500th of an egg per Twinkie, or two-tenths of 1 percent. But eggs are more prominent on the ingredient list than that figure indicates, and Hostess won’t confirm either way.) Nutrition isn’t the point of including eggs in cakes like Twinkies—they’re there because they are the glue that holds everything together.

Eggs leaven cake in a variety of ways, helping to structure the dough by serving as a binder or emulsifier, holding oil and water together in the form of a nice crumb. The yolk’s fat (5 percent or five grams in a large egg) acts like a lubricant, softening the dough’s texture. Egg white is almost entirely pure protein, and, especially once it is whipped, helps leaven the batter by creating and maintaining bubbles when it is baked. (Twinkies, of course, use chemical leavening, unlike a true sponge cake.) Toward the end of a cake’s baking time, the fat and protein in the egg yolk and white contribute to browning through the Maillard reactions, where sugar and the egg’s amino acids, notably lysine, react with heat and turn the cake brown in a series of complex chemical reactions.

However, as we know, Twinkies are meant to have a long shelf life, and eggs normally present problems of spoilage from mold. The bakeries meet this challenge by using mostly dried eggs, which lessens both the moisture level and the microbe risk. And, of course, the food scientists at Hostess have thrown a whole bagful of tricks at this problem in their Olympian efforts to extend shelf life, using a combination of lots of sugar, a dash of salt, and a smidgeon of a powerful preservative called sorbic acid. The eggs found in Twinkies are as good as dead, as far as microbes are concerned.

The egg business is evidently a good one. Papetti’s makes more than three hundred egg products, some of which are remixed in different percentages of yolk or white for clients’ recipes or budgets, or as a low-cholesterol product. The combined egg mixture—or just yolks or just whites—is packaged in cardboard cartons after processing in order to extend its grocery store shelf life up to an astounding twelve weeks, versus six weeks for shell eggs, and that’s pushing it.

Papetti’s goes way beyond plain egg products. The rest of the egg mixture in the New Jersey plant is preprocessed for various food companies by mixing in ingredients like sugar, corn syrup (for ice cream), salt, and nonfat dried milk. The fresh, frozen, and processed egg customers include some of the best-known national brands of ice cream (such as Ben & Jerry’s, which buys yolks for flavor enhancement and rich taste), pasta (Ronzoni
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—yolks, mostly for color but also richer taste), cakes (Entenmann’s—whites for leavening and crumb, yolks for taste and browning), mayonnaise (Hellmann’s—yolks, as an emulsifier), and cookies (Famous Amos
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—whole eggs for flavor and browning), dozens of whose packages are proudly displayed in Papetti’s lobby.

Eggs (in some cases just the whites, in others, just the yolks) also bind meat and fish in loaves or croquettes, thicken custards and sauces, emulsify mayonnaise-based sauces and dressings, coat or glaze breads, clarify soups and coffee, retard crystallization in candies and frosting, and leaven soufflés and, of course, sponge cakes (added emulsifiers do these jobs in Twinkies). Egg promoters call eggs “the cement that holds the castle of cuisine together.” With reason.

B
REAKING
P
OINT

Egg-breaking starts with a riot of colors in the loading area. John Gill, Papetti’s plant manager, offers a warm welcome and escorts me into a chilly (45°F) reception area the size of an airplane hangar, where pallets of egg cases, as they call the plastic trays, are being unloaded from trucks and stacked. The cases, which are made from randomly colored recycled plastic, are green, red, yellow, and black today, in stark contrast to the white of the eggs that peek through. Each case holds thirty eggs. There are thousands of them here, with a thousand arriving or being removed at every moment (no eggs stay here for more than a few hours).

About twenty-five tractor-trailers arrive throughout the day, each filled with more than 22,500 dozen eggs, fresh from regional farms. As you might imagine, the forklift operators must have a delicate touch and a goodly amount of self-assurance, as they move stacks of well over a thousand eggs at once with nary a nick.

The stacks meld the natural with the industrial: next to the bar codes that track the eggs’ industrial origin in minute detail, the occasional feather and bit of straw reveal their rural origin. These are fresh; some, hatched barely a day ago, are called nesters. Of course, in order to have eggs, you gotta have chickens.

W
HICH
C
AME
F
IRST?

The chicken. That takes care of
that
.

Egg farms that supply the Elizabeth facility are scattered throughout Pennsylvania, western New Jersey, and Ohio. Some are small, with as few as 50,000 hens in one long, low henhouse, while others top out at more than 300,000 layers. The average egg farm contains about 100,000 hens. Most are small, family farmers working under contract to supply unbroken eggs to the big egg-processing company. (The larger, corporate facilities in the Midwest break eggs right at the farm for drying and freezing.)

The hens are all Leghorns, bred for their remarkable egg-laying ability (unlike their country cousins, the big-breasted hens that are bred for food). No visitors are allowed in the henhouse, for fear of infection that could spread quickly among so many chickens in such close quarters. And while the exclusion of visitors is first and foremost for the chickens’ safety, it strikes me as a good idea. The inside of a crowded henhouse is simply not somewhere you want to be.

The hens arrive as day-old chicks or fourteen- to eighteen-week-old pullets (teenagers) and start laying eggs after about eighteen weeks. They require twenty-one to twenty-six hours to lay an egg, and they dutifully produce good, solid eggs daily, if all goes well, until they are about seventy weeks old (about sixteen months). Some farmers take them out of the egg-laying rotation for about a month at this point in order to let their systems rebuild calcium supplies (via reduced light and a change in feed). After that they might lay for another eight months or so, until they’re about two years old. “Spent hens,” as they’re called, are not good candidates for packaged chicken meat intended for supermarket shelves because they’re pretty scrawny, weighing about half of a “meat” chicken. So after contributing their best eggs to the Twinkies cause, the hens end up in chicken soup, nuggets, patties, pet food, and pig feed.

The hens spend their days in a controlled environment, eating a powdered feed that is usually about two-thirds corn and a quarter soybean meal, plus calcium, salt, and various micronutrients that include amino acids (such as lysine), vitamins, and minerals. Some farms grow corn and soybeans nearby expressly for chicken feed, supplying the mixture by a conveyor connecting the two facilities. The lights are carefully manipulated to maximize egg-laying with an optimum day-night cycle, and the cages are tilted seven degrees so that the freshly laid eggs roll right onto a conveyor belt that runs continuously (and gently) alongside the cages.

Most hens lay their eggs by morning, but some dillydally about until noon. These eggs are moved via conveyor to merge with a flow of eggs from a larger conveyor that brings all of them to a packing head where workers place them onto the colorful trays that are eventually delivered ever so carefully to Elizabeth. Surprisingly, the eggs usually survive their trip quite well. It’s the loading and unloading where things can easily get messy.