Twinkie, Deconstructed (18 page)

Around 1802, Oliver Evans, the American inventor of the first steam-operated vehicle as well as the high-pressure steam engine, opened the first steam-powered flour mill, in Delaware, producing lighter, finer flour than was ever possible before (while Scottish engineer James Watt had built the first one in England in 1780, American relations with the Brits were a bit troubled just then, putting a damper on transatlantic commerce). In the early 1800s, as the country became more developed, educated, and urbanized, Americans were focusing a lot of research on household chemistry. Ways to achieve convenience and lightness in baking with the newly available finer flour naturally followed.

But there was a problem with the early baking powders: acid. Sour milk isn’t the most reliable ingredient, it seems, and other alternative acid sources such as lemon juice, vinegar, or tartaric acid (derived from cream of tartar, scraped from the sides of wine barrels, and imported from Italy and France’s wine-making regions) tasted pretty bad or were too expensive to be used widely. Finally, no available acid source could be premixed with the dry base (whether pearlash or sodium bicarbonate) without it reacting prematurely.

The big breakthrough—the perfection of modern baking powder—came in 1859, from none other than Harvard University.

B
UBBLES AND THE
C
OUNT

Eben Norton Horsford was a chemistry professor at Harvard for sixteen years, from 1847 to 1863, where he had occupied the Rumford Chair of the Application of Science to the Useful Arts, a Harvard chemistry professorship endowed in 1814 by Benjamin Thompson, an American inventor and scientist. (Thompson was one of the discoverers of the law of conservation of energy and applied it to the famous Rumford fireplace, a state-of-the-art heating appliance of the 1790s. Later, he was given the honorary title of “Count Rumford” because he worked for the Bavarian government for a long time.) The chair was dedicated to those scientists who showed exceptional achievements in “the useful domestic arts,” what we might have called home economics. Not only did Horsford’s invention lead to a company that exists still, but the product he invented is essential to anyone who calls him or herself a cook (a professional or amateur), and has been since 1859. Twinkies, for one thing, could never have existed without him. Thank you, Harvard.

After years of experimenting with hundreds of acid sources in Cambridge and Germany, Horsford found that by saturating animal bones from nearby slaughterhouses in sulfuric acid, he could manufacture a crude form of monocalcium phosphate that could be dried into a powder and mixed with sodium bicarbonate to create a dry chemical leavening that fizzed when wet. But he still faced some challenges. Phosphoric acid alone meant that most of the leavening action was brought on by moisture, so he worked to refine the monocalcium phosphate for more consistent and better-tasting results. The 1885 discovery of a sodium acid phosphate that gave off gas in response to heat, not water, led to its inclusion in the mix, for a “secondary action”—the action that gave us the term “double-acting.” Now, when Horsford mixed it with sodium bicarbonate, he had the first phosphate-based, stable, reliable, affordable baking powder, which he packaged as Rumford
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, in honor of the great Count, whose beribboned, ponytailed cameo still graces the label on cans today. Horsford’s success was so significant that the original Rumford, Rhode Island, site of his business, Rumford Chemical Works, has now been designated by the American Chemical Society a National Historic Chemical Landmark, complete with a museum (run by the East Providence Historical Society) of baking soda–related paraphernalia, such as cookbooks, kitchen tools (given away as premiums), company photographs, patent records, and original cans. The company was eventually sold to Clabber Girl, which sometime in the 1960s moved Horsford’s laboratory intact to Terre Haute, Indiana, where it is now a small museum at Rumford’s current corporate headquarters, one of the city’s fine attractions and further testimony to Horsford’s success.

Rumford Baking Powder was one of the world’s first convenience foods to be offered to the modern housewife, though it met with a little resistance. Some associated it with poor, lazy, or unfeminine wives, who, it was felt, should take no shortcuts with their breads. On the other hand, when Louis Pasteur revealed the presence of microbes to the public, old-fashioned, natural yeast instantly seemed unappealing. The clean, white, chemical powder suddenly became a popular alternative in the consumer’s new and energetic quest for cleanliness. It didn’t hurt that its chemicals were already found in the human body, either.

Although other scientists developed baking powder at about the same time in England and in Germany, it was Horsford who helped usher in the glorious concept of truly American cooking by making possible such chemically leavened items as blueberry muffins, biscuits, cake mixes, and, of course, Twinkies.

But whether an industrial or consumer product, leavening is made from the same basic recipe today, often with a touch of cornstarch or calcium sulfate (both of which are Twinkies ingredients) to improve shelf life or control humidity. And all the major brands boast old-fashioned-looking logos and labels, a testimony to legendary brand loyalty among home cooks. (Clabber Girl’s dates back to 1899, though the girl on the label is modern, by comparison, having arrived in 1923. Rumford has the oldest consumer product label found in grocery stores, dating back to the 1860s.)
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The big bakeries have to mix their own baking powder to meet their more demanding manufacturing conditions, usually requiring more secondary action to closely control the rising in the oven. So they often buy the three ingredients—sodium bicarbonate, monocalcium phosphate, and sodium acid pyrophosphate—directly from their manufacturers, such as FMC in Green River, Wyoming, and Innophos in Chicago, Illinois. In order to make all that gas, you need rocks, and to find out where these gas-producing rocks come from calls for a trip out West. An underground trip, it turns out.

CHAPTER 15

Baking Soda

H
urtling 1,600 feet downward at a windy 450 feet per minute in an open-mesh steel cage the size of a double garage, I’m risking my life—or, at least, my sanity—to see where the raw ingredient shared by two of the leavening ingredients on the Twinkies label comes from. Leavening makes things go up, but to see it I’m going down—way down.

I’m wearing earplugs, amplifying the machinery’s rumbling and clanging sounds inside my head, along with a blinding miner’s lamp on my hard hat that makes for constantly moving shadows. My knees are a little weak with fright and the big, tough-looking miners standing around me are not reassuring, even if I could hear them through my earplugs and over the roar of the wind and the machinery. I am having trouble connecting this experience with the ubiquitous little yellow box of baking soda that sits in so many kitchen cabinets and refrigerators around the world.

I’m also wearing safety glasses, brand-new cotton gloves, and a wide tool belt with a very heavy battery for my headlamp (“Good for sixteen hours!” my host reassures me), as well as a canteen-size emergency self-rescue carbon monoxide breathing kit in case of fire. I’ve also been given a dust mask (“just in case”) and a course in mine safety for which I am presented with an official U.S. Department of Labor Certificate of Training. All this just to see where an unassuming kitchen staple comes from?

Tim Davis, a Senior Mining Engineer with FMC Corporation and my guide, tells me to avoid looking him or others in the face because the bright miner’s lamp on my helmet will blind them. The word is, never look a miner in the eye. So we all affect a slightly bashful stance as we descend, painting the floor with pools of light as we head down into raw baking soda.

F
INDING
W
YOMING

Green River, Wyoming, a region of brown earth and white alkali flats, sits atop the world’s largest and purest trona deposit, which is not very impressive to most people because they have never heard of it. Trona was discovered in 1938, almost by accident when Mountain Fuel Supply, a company then based in Ohio (and now part of the much larger Questar natural gas company), drilled a wildcat exploratory oil well in this mineral-rich area along the Oregon Trail. Instead of oil, they found soft, brown, layered stone. A sample was sent to the U.S. Geological Survey office in Washington, D.C., where it sat, ignored, for more than a year.

When the agency finally got around to analyzing it, the geologists found that it was a sedimentary rock made largely of pure sodium sesquicarbonate, which is easily cooked into sodium carbonate, commonly known as soda ash. Soda ash is the basic chemical ingredient in glass and soap, its most common and ancient uses (about half of the soda ash produced goes into glass); it is also widely used in hundreds of essential chemical products including detergents and water softeners. And it is where the “sodium” in sodium bicarbonate—baking soda—comes from, as well as the sodium in the other baking powder ingredient, sodium acid pyrophosphate. (It is a common source of sodium for sodium stearoyl lactylate, too, an unrelated Twinkies additive.) So soda ash finds its way, indirectly, into much of what we eat, which is pretty alarming, considering it is also the primary component of glass and soap.

FMC Corporation, one of the world’s larger chemical companies, opened the world’s first and now largest trona mine and processing complex here in 1952. Other companies, such as Church & Dwight (makers of Arm & Hammer
^®
Baking Soda), also access the thousand-square-mile ore patch, thanks in part to antitrust laws that force them to share. Underground, their mines come as close as within one hundred feet of each other. Today, even though companies in Ohio and New York also make bicarb (often for “store” brands), almost all American soda ash, the main ingredient in sodium bicarbonate, comes from here.

This area is vast, flat, and photogenic, dotted with sagebrush and shrubs. Buttes and ridges puncture the horizon, while antelope roam alongside the highway. FMC’s No. 8 Shaft is a group of several two-story, plain brown and tan corrugated steel office buildings with a modest three-story tower behind them. It stands in the center of nothing, but also not far from Route 80 and its New Jersey–like traffic. Outside, there is a little feeder for the wild rabbits of the area. It is an oasis in the desert, an island in the ocean.

The entry to the mine is not much more than a locker room and a big freight elevator (called a hoist here), complete with an airlock, bright, full-size traffic lights, and warning signs that look like they belong over a highway exit. The trophy case is full of awards for mine rescue team operations rather than bowling league trophies or displays of clients’ products, giving a visitor pause.

After getting in the hoist cage, it’s a free fall for what feels like an eternity. It is not like the subway or a skyscraper express elevator at all, unless, perhaps, in combination. Imagine an express subway train on a vertical track with excruciatingly long pauses between stations. (Even the eighty-floor express elevator to New York City’s Empire State Building observation deck takes only fifty seconds. This so-called elevator takes five minutes and travels more than twice as far.)

Arriving at the bottom, we enter a three-story-high vault full of mining equipment, and my guide commandeers one of the several old, doorless, windowless, white diesel CJ7 Jeeps. Sixteen hundred feet below the surface of the earth, we drive through miles of old tunnels at a good fifteen miles per hour for half an hour in order to reach the active mining face. We cross paths with no one, despite crossing other tunnels every 125 feet. This place contains a city’s worth of roadway (literally more than four thousand miles, four times more than San Francisco’s streets) in tunnels fifteen feet wide and nine feet high—the thickness of the seam of ore that they are mining—and it covers an area almost forty miles square. This grid of activity has been constructed since 1952, under the quiet desert plain above. And while it is sobering to realize that these endless roadways belong solely to FMC, only one of four mining companies in this patch, or seam or bed, of ore, it is even more amazing to realize that where we are driving was once filled with solid rock, a mineral that has since been dug out, removed, and used to make glass and chemicals and thousands of other different products.

This stuff may be used to make food, but it just looks like rock to me. To say that it does not suggest Twinkies—or any other food product—in the least is the biggest understatement one could make.

Driving through dark tunnels in an open Jeep is so unnerving that as we hurtle along I have to force myself to relax my white-knuckled grip. My right hand is wrapped around a five-foot-long steel crowbar that Tim tells me later is used to pry any pieces of trona that are left dangling from the ceiling; my left hand is tight around a sturdy canvas strap that I realize, once we stop, is no safety handle—it is only my camera bag.

At the mining face, a giant, ten-foot-diameter, three-layered claw of a cutting wheel with dozens of sharp points carves out trona at the rather astounding rate of 1,200 tons per hour, stopping only for periodic maintenance. It is mounted on heavy machinery the size of a tank, all of which was brought into the mine disassembled and reconstructed on the spot. It fills the space, and would be totally at home in a special-effects movie.

A long, solid steel conveyor spans the few hundred feet of the floor from the cutting machine to the entrance. No belt here—the broken rock drops onto the steel and is pushed along by arms that move continuously on the shiny steel track. Occasionally, the miners whack some oversize chunks with a shovel or a sledgehammer, the ore being soft enough to respond. The gale of ventilating air flaps my heavy canvas safety equipment belt vigorously. The dust is nontoxic, but as an added bonus, the miners needn’t worry about acid indigestion. This is medicine as well as food.