Twinkie, Deconstructed (16 page)

Hundreds of gins—small factories, really—are scattered across the South, especially in Mississippi, Texas, and Arkansas. These gins separate the cotton fibers from the seeds, so that the long cotton fibers can be transported to cotton textile spinning mills to become blue jeans, while the fuzzy, peanut-size seeds travel by the truckload, perhaps several hundred miles, to a cottonseed oil mill, such as the Planters Cotton Oil Mill in Pine Bluff, down in south central Arkansas.

Before Planters crushes them for their valuable oil, machines full of spinning blades defuzz the seeds. That fuzz, the linters or “seed hair,” is almost 100 percent cellulose, and, however unpalatable that may sound, the target for Twinkies. After cutting and cleaning, these fibers remain light brown, yellow, red, or even green, and Planters Cotton Oil Mill ships six-hundred-pound, three-foot-long bales of them—each less than two millimeters long—by the trainload from Pine Bluff to processors like Buckeye Technologies in Memphis, or ADM in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, the linters get digested the same way wood chips do.

Once the fibers have come this far, whether from wood or from cotton, they are processed somewhat the same way, though cotton fibers are cooked once more in enormous digester vats, until the desired fiber length and molecular weight—breakdown—is achieved. Next: bleaching (in a warm, caustic soda solution) and washing (to remove the soda). Some plants do this at a rate of forty tons an hour, day in and day out, all in the name of creating inexpensive food.

The resulting mush is dried on wide screens, which are actually created for paper-making. Formed into sheets of what appear to be thick blotter paper, they are then cut into four-foot-square sheets or rolled onto one- to three-foot-wide spools about nine feet in diameter that weigh as much as 1,200 pounds (pros often refer to them, charmingly, as “giant rolls of toilet paper”). On the way to becoming food, some of these fibers are converted into film used for creating rayon, cellophane, and an edible version of cellophane for sausage casing; others go on to become cigarette filters and paint additives. Specialty products made from cellulose fibers find their way into LCD panels, wide-screen, plasma TVs, and non-glare outdoor billboards. Only the purest cellulose is reserved for food-grade gum and used in Twinkies.

When those rolls of “blotter paper” arrive at Hercules Incorporated’s Aqualon division, near Williamsburg, Virginia, the only cellulose gum processor in the United States, they are ground up and tossed into a reactor vessel to be cooked in a chemical bath containing lye and sodium monochloroacetate, a pungent, toxic, white petrochemical generally associated with making dyes and herbicides rather than snack food. The resultant mush is washed with water and solvents until it has been transformed into a water-soluble food product known to the geeks as sodium carboxymethyl-cellulose, but thankfully, to the rest of us, as CMC. CMC is not a food you could ever imagine making yourself, or even an ingredient you could imagine using in a recipe, but it is technically food nonetheless.

Dried and ground into a tasteless, odorless fine powder for use by the bakeries, cellulose gum is ready at last to be blended into the mix for Twinkies filling. You better believe that the fifty-pound bags cellulose gum is transported in are well-lined with plastic to keep the CMC dry: its major attribute is that it soaks up water like a sponge.

T
HE
S
ECRET
R
ECIPE

I once casually asked a Hostess employee point blank for the creamy filling recipe. Instead of the expected formal denial, “I’m not at liberty to disclose such confidential information,” or the bracing, “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” I got a great, big, Cheshire cat grin. Nothing more. Perhaps Hostess feels it is its favorite secret, or that while anyone can make a cake, only Hostess can concoct a great creamy filling (with a twenty-five-day shelf life). But while greatness can be deliberated or debated, only cellulose gum can make the creme filling work.

Despite Hostess’s secret recipe, most food scientists will tell you that while the main ingredients in the filling are superfine sugar, shortening (oil), corn syrup, water, polysorbate 60, and salt (and certainly not any cream), the key is that old pastry standby, cellulose gum, which can absorb fifteen to an astounding twenty times its own weight in water. A pinch sprinkled on water floats like a jellyfish. A moistened spoonful becomes a clear, gelatinous, slimy glob in a matter of minutes. Intriguingly, though, if left out in the open (as scientifically verified in my office, of course) it dries out in a day or so to leave nothing but a small piece of crisp film (it’s a polymer, like latex paint). Air-tight packaging is obviously key.

Cellulose gum hangs on to the water in Twinkies filling, and thus, like so many other ingredients, keeps it slipperier, longer. Its fibers plump the filling up, replacing fat (i.e., real cream) with a moist, glossy, fatlike texture, without contributing a single calorie to the cake because cellulose gum is not digested. Food scientists call it a fat-reducer ingredient. It can be used to reduce oil, butter, or sugar and still keep dressings, icings, and syrups smooth, spreadable, and thick (sample the Slim-Fast Optima™ French Vanilla Shake). It’s what helps hold a flavor on the back of your tongue, and, quite literally, helps Twinkies filling to shine.

Cellulose gum also plays a rather magical, if minor, role in the crumb. Food scientists say that the gum “stabilizes” a cake’s crumb, or that it “controls staling,” which, of course, goes back to the all-important shelf life.

These are the showy accomplishments, but cellulose gum works hard behind the scenes, too. It goes to work early in the cake-baking process, creating an oily smoothness that helps the batter flow properly through the various tanks and pumps that squirt it into the famous finger-cake molds. This means, among other things, that it helps suspend air bubbles in the batter while being crushed by the hundreds of pounds of pressure that are created on the bottom of a two-hundred-gallon batter holding tank. Cellulose gum also captures the pressurized air that is injected into the batter as it enters the continuous mixer right before it hits the oven. You don’t have this problem at home, of course, where a whipped batter that weighs mere ounces is poured into molds immediately after being made.

Cellulose gum is not a household item, although its close cousin, pectin, is a popular ingredient for making jams and jellies and is responsible for thickening (and maintaining the suspension of ) a Starbucks
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Frappuccino
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.

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Totally transparent, tasteless, and versatile, it’s obvious why cellulose gum is a popular ingredient found in abundance in your pantry and on your table. It’s responsible for the smoothness in McCormick
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Au Jus Gravy Mix as well as Swiss Miss
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Hot Cocoa Mix, and Starbucks
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Low Fat Latte ice cream. To make a low-calorie pancake syrup, you need something viscous to take the place of corn syrup and sugar. Cellulose gum to the rescue! It’s the same for many fat-free salad dressings, including Wish-Bone
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Fat Free Chunky Blue Cheese.

CMC works in some nonfood products, too, such as bulk laxatives, cosmetics, toothpaste, and that lovely counterpoint to Twinkies, denture adhesives. Cellulose gum is known as a film-former, and helps coat paper, finish smooth textiles, and—I’m not making this up—glaze ceramics. Various versions of cellulose gum are found in at least two hundred different products, including diapers and napkins (for absorbency), drilling fluids (for slipperiness and thickness), and liquid detergents (for a syrupy consistency). All are unlikely cousins to Twinkies creme filling, but are cousins nevertheless.

But cellulose gum is not the only gum with these talents. There are similar gums, each with slightly different gelling, binding, or thickening characteristics, that are often found on ingredient labels and hail from diverse and somewhat exotic sources. Gums may come from trees (locust bean, tree seeds from the Mediterranean, and acacia gum, or gum arabic, from acacia tree sap in the Sahel region of Africa), seaweed (agar, carrageenan, aka Irish moss, and alginates, mostly from the Philippines), pealike plant seeds (guar gum, from India, Pakistan, and the southwestern United States), and bacterial fermentation (xanthan gum, fermented in good old Midwestern corn syrup). Travel to see gum and you’ll see the world. Even Osama bin Laden once owned part of an acacia gum firm in Sudan, but was forced to sell out when Sudan booted him in 1996.

Trees and cotton are chopped down, chopped up, soaked, cooked, dried, and chopped and cooked again, all in the name of Twinkies. Former waste products are changed into versatile, natural, and extraordinarily helpful food additives for Twinkies’ crumb and filling. Gum is full of surprises. And milk, too, it turns out. Like the crafty few who saw almost limitless potential in cellulose gum, cheese-makers who caused weeds to grow in Wisconsin for years discovered yet another miracle food.

CHAPTER 13

Whey

W
hey starts with weeds in Wisconsin.

Watching twenty-pound blocks of mozzarella cheese squeeze out of a stainless steel machine and plop into a bright, pale, yellow-green river that flows through a white fiberglass trough does not exactly stimulate the appetite, but it does evoke curiosity. This is cheese-making, Wisconsin-style. I’m at the biggest cheese factory east of the Mississippi, perhaps the third largest in all the country, to find out how they make whey, the twenty-third ingredient on the Twinkies label.

W
HY
W
HEY?

Sometime in the 1950s—no one seems to have kept track—enterprising local farmers couldn’t help but notice the sturdy weeds growing along streams behind cheese-making plants, and somehow realized that the cause of this fecundity was the watery waste spun off at the beginning of the cheese-making process, which was discharged out the back of the plant, and had been since the first big plants were built in the 1800s. Ever resourceful, these farmers started using whey as a natural, low-cost, effective fertilizer; but it wasn’t until 1962 that anyone conducted a formal study to confirm that whey, in fact, did facilitate plant growth and might well be safe for human consumption (it came from milk, so this should not have been a stretch). Within ten years, this waste product had become a profitable by-product, and one of the most recent additions to Twinkies’ list of master ingredients.

Whey may be good for you—whey is high in minerals (like calcium), lactose (80 percent), and protein (10 to 13 percent)—but that’s not why it’s used in Twinkies. Sure, it is nutritious in a concentrated form (creatively named “whey protein concentrate”), but sweet whey is often used in baked goods to aid browning and help develop flavor, something particularly important in a recipe like Twinkie’s, which lacks real dairy. The browning occurs as whey’s lactose reacts with its protein at conveniently lowish temperatures, presumably allowing for a shorter baking time. Processed food manufacturers like Hostess like dry whey because it minimizes the need for eggs and milk, both of which are costly, difficult to handle, fat-laden, and which spoil. And whey is considered a totally natural ingredient—the processing involves only separating and drying, no chemical reactions—so you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Whey is actually found in your kitchen, in the form of milk, cream, or butter. For years, commercial bakeries used nonfat dried milk to make things like Twinkies before they switched to the more efficient (and less expensive) whey and whey protein concentrate in the 1980s.

Why is whey so popular with bakers of both bread and cakes? Because it helps bind water, slow staling, and keep cakes “moist and fresh” after days or weeks on a store shelf. But bakery products only account for about 10 percent of the whey produced. Over half goes into dairy products like yogurt, yogurt bars, cheese products like Kraft
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American cheese or Velveeta
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cheese sauces, and macaroni and cheese mixes. It is the main ingredient in Kraft’s Cheez Whiz
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cheese dip as well as the aerosol American cheese product, Easy Cheese
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. Whey and whey protein concentrate bind water in processed meats like sausage and hot dogs, add substance to soups, and suggest the “cheese” or “cream” in snacks such as Doritos
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and Wise
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Sour Cream and Onion Potato Chips. The amount of water retained is a major factor in the way processed foods taste, but not just because of moisture. As whey is baked, its proteins react chemically to create what food scientists call “favorable viscosity” and “heat-setting gel characteristics” (or “gelation”), and what you and I call a smooth texture—just the feeling that Hostess wants you to have when eating a Twinkie.

Better than milk, whey dissolves easily and has only a mild dairy taste, and the way it holds water makes it an excellent emulsifier, fat replacer, and a good source of nonfat dairy solids. As such, it works well in frozen desserts like Good Humor
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ice cream bars and Fudgsicles
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, or Tollhouse
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Mint Brownie Bars. It helps improve and stabilize ice cream’s texture, reducing freeze-thaw.