Twinkie, Deconstructed (7 page)

Blend recipes are posted on computer screens and on the walls of the dump station. A typical recipe might make a five-thousand-pound batch; while a thousand pounds of one vitamin might be dumped in the hopper, only seventy-three pounds of another might be called for (the industrial equivalent of a pinch of salt). Samples are constantly sent to their high-tech quality control lab, where the mix is examined with extraordinarily sensitive tools such as atomic absorption detectors. Plain, finely powdered, white wheat starch is mixed as a neutral filler, and the blend is conveyed to a robotic packing machine that spits out neat boxes that are sent off to the flour mills for blending into Twinkie flour, bread flour, cracker flour, and cereal—wherever enriched flour is used.

H
OUSE
B
LEND

Over at the still-unidentifiable flour mill, down near the high, open bays where the trucks are loaded, Alexander and I meet up with the chlorinated flour and the vitamin mix from Kansas City in the mill’s rather compact blending room. A relatively quiet space housing a forest of 1.5-inch hoses emanating from two dozen small, stainless steel boxes, it looks more like a specialty coffee shop than a factory. Each box, with its precise metering equipment and specialized valves, hums gently, and each contains a different enrichment blend for a different kind of flour. I’m fixated, of course, on the one for cake flour, watching intently as the tubes suck the concentrated yellow-orange blend up and blow it onto the flour as it is conveyed through the hoses.

The hoses feed into a screw conveyor that mixes and blends the flour and the new additives to order. Then, the freshly enriched flour drops into pouches aligned on a bucket conveyor leading out to the loading area. The doses are on such a minute level, as befits potent micronutrients, that accuracy is paramount. Samples are constantly tested for the proper enrichment blend in a nearby lab. A few feet away, six-inch-thick, black hoses dangle like tentacles from the ceilings of three-story-high truck and train bays, blasting properly blended flour into the empty trucks and train cars that are pulling in, loading up for the bakeries.

The law requires only twenty-four milligrams of niacin per pound of flour, and that’s the biggest dose in the enrichment mix. Ferrous sulfate weighs in next at twenty milligrams per pound, and the others follow in microdoses of 2.9 milligrams of thiamine, 1.8 milligrams of riboflavin, and only 0.7 milligram of folic acid. This all adds up to 49.4 milligrams of enrichment blend per pound of flour, or one ten-thousandth of a pound of enrichment per pound of flour. Obviously, the amount of added micronutrients in Twinkies is substantially less. At the level of parts per million, it is hardly even a “dash.”

After all this effort, only one added item, the mineral ferrous sulfate, affects the Twinkies nutrition label, and is listed as only 2 percent of your daily requirement, at that. The mysterious, complex, international effort made to create this mix of such highly processed, technical supplements stands in stark contrast not only to the natural alternative—whole wheat—but to its unprocessed neighbor in the ingredient list, sugar.

To get sugar, all you do is refine a vegetable. Sort of.

CHAPTER 5

Sugar

F
lour may be the first ingredient on the Twinkie label, but a Twinkie would not be a Twinkie were it not just about half sugar.

Sugar is the second ingredient listed on Twinkies’ label, but it could easily be the first. In fact, sugar is the first and most prominent ingredient listed on some Twinkie knock-offs, like Mrs. Freshley’s
^®
Creme Cakes. And though Twinkies are certainly sweet—many a fan will admit eating them for the sugar fix alone—it isn’t there just for sweetness, not by a long shot.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the third and fifth ingredients (the fourth is innocent water) are sugars, too: the corn sweeteners corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup, and some others that contribute to the nineteen grams (four and three-quarters teaspoons; the amount and the recipe change periodically) of sugars in each Twinkie.
5

Sugar is so ever-present in our overall diet, that in the United States, we use 7 to 10 million tons of sucrose (table sugar) each year; Twinkies alone consume four thousand tons annually. That’s pure sugar crystals we’re talking about here—sugar from live plants, not processing plants—not corn syrup sweeteners, which are a whole other chapter. The reason the Twinkie contains so much sugar? It makes the whole cake work.

N
OT
J
UST
S
WEETNESS

Ironically, providing sweetness is only a minor job for sugar. Especially in high-ratio cakes like Twinkies, where there is as much or more sugar than flour, sugar is a regular workhorse. It carries flavor, provides color, fosters tenderness, creates an even crumb, and retains some moisture in order to improve shelf life, the holy grail of nearly every packaged food. Other so-called sweeteners just don’t share sugar’s versatility or importance in baked goods. Without a lot of sugar, cake would be bread.

Sugar starts working its magic way before the batter makes it to the oven. It brings air into the shortening, making for a lighter cake, and does so thanks to the physical shape of its crystals, not through chemistry. When shortening and sugar are mixed during the “creaming” stage of any dessert recipe (especially pie crusts and cakes), the irregular surfaces of sugar crystals trap air in small pockets. These pockets expand during baking when the carbon dioxide formed by the leavening inflates them. That’s why it is so important to take your time with the creaming step when baking at home. (If you’ve ever tried to take a shortcut with creaming, you’ve probably regretted it in the form of a flatter, denser cake.) Good cakes need bubbles.

The same sugar crystals that are essential for cake are shunned for filling. To get a smooth texture, bakers blend either extra-finely ground sugar, such as Domino
^®
Superfine, or liquid sugar, with the oil and shortening to create a more satisfying mouthfeel while avoiding the grittiness that would come with the use of regular sugar.

In the mixing stage, sugar tenderizes the cake by combining with all the protein it can and absorbing water that would otherwise help build protein and its elasticity. That makes cakes the polar opposite of pizza. Imagine the stretching, pounding, and, of course, tossing and spinning to which pizza dough is subjected. It can withstand all that rough handling because it’s loaded with protein and won’t easily crumble or break down. Twinkies, on the other hand, use cake flour (which is low in protein) and lots of sugar (to suppress even that protein), and start as a liquid batter. There’s no tossing that.

Sugar also stabilizes beaten egg foam, though there is hardly any egg foam found in Twinkies (unlike a true sponge cake, which is made with lots of it). What little there is mixes with the sugar, helping to hold it together until it is baked into its final, familiar, fingerlike form. And yes, that’s right, urban legend be damned: Twinkies
are
baked, for a good nine to twelve minutes, at about 350°F, just as you would bake small cakes at home.

Water gets absorbed during baking, too. When the starches heat up, they absorb liquid and swell (called gelatinization by the pros) and eventually solidify, “setting” the cake. As in the mixing stage, sugar competes with starch for the liquid, slowing down its solidification. This also delays the point at which the batter turns into cake, so that the leavening has more time to create gas. Talk about essential teamwork: this is where the fine, uniform grain of a soft, smooth cake crumb is born.

As if that weren’t enough, it’s at this point in the baking process that sugar helps turn the exposed surface of the cake brown by caramelizing when it reaches over 300°F, giving off more of a welcome flavor and that familiar sweet, baked aroma.

Browned surfaces not only taste good, smell good, and look appetizing, they retain a bit more moisture than the crumb because of their relative denseness. Because Twinkies lack the thick crust of, say, a peasant bread (luckily), every little bit helps to extend their shelf life. Finally, sugar steals water from bacterial cells, further preventing spoilage, which is why sugar is such a well-known preservative. Just think of jams, jellies, all kinds of “preserves” made with sugar, or of containers of honey that last for years. Sugar helps preserve Twinkies, especially the creme filling, in the same way it preserves blueberries.

Multitalented sugar tenderizes and improves the appearance of canned fruit, delays discoloration on the surface of frozen fruits, and enhances flavors in all kinds of desserts, especially ice cream. Even milk can be smoothed and preserved a bit with sugar, as in Eagle Brand
^®
Sweetened Condensed Milk. Sugar balances sour, bitter, and hot flavors in spicy dishes; balances acidic foods like tomatoes and vinegar or sour, bitter tastes in rubs and brines; enhances mouthfeel in drinks and sauces; and strengthens fiber in fruits and vegetables during cooking. Sugar makes dry baked goods like cookies crisp. Of course, let’s not forget that sugar’s sweet taste is ultimately what drives its popularity. Making foods palatable is what it does in nature as well as in Twinkies. We’re hardwired to like sweet foods.

Besides all of these impressive functions, sugar and its derivatives also have some surprising industrial uses: as a flame retardant and plasticizer in polyurethane foam, as a water-based ink for printing on plastic bags, for curing tobacco (spread on leaves to help them dry evenly), and, my personal favorite, for cleaning out cement mixers. Third world medics often use sugar to soak up moisture in wounds that might otherwise grow bacteria. Sugar burns, and can be substituted for charcoal in gunpowder mixtures or mixed with saltpeter to make a cheap smoke bomb. Sugar even helps fortify cement by hanging on to moisture that would otherwise migrate to the surface and evaporate, a process that delays setting and makes the cement stronger—which may also explain some pretty bad cakes I’ve had.

S
UGAR
P
LANTS

Thinking about where sugar comes from conjures up images of hot, lush, tropical lands for most of us—it is grown in about eighty tropical and subtropical countries around the world, mostly where people like to vacation—but about one-half of refined sugar consumed in the United States (depending on the year) is made from sugar beets grown in northern climes. Any green plant can create sucrose from sunlight, air, and water, but sugarcane and sugar beets do it best. It’s all sucrose, pure and simple. More than 99 percent pure, it so happens.

Hello, Columbus

For most Americans, sugar means Florida. But that’s not the whole story. Sugarcane is a tropical or subtropical grass that grows as much as twenty feet high; and it’s true that our domestic cane—70 percent of our supply—is grown mostly in Florida, in the semiartificial, heavily irrigated and engineered, million-acre Everglades Agricultural Area just south of Lake Okeechobee and north of the Everglades proper. Some is also grown in Texas and Louisiana. Since we embargoed Communist Cuba, we import the most from the Dominican Republic. Worldwide, Brazil is the biggest producer, followed closely by India.

Caribbean and South American countries have been sending sugar to Europe for centuries, which is one reason that the French, Spanish, and British fought over them so often. There may have been more than three thousand sugar mills in the New World prior to 1550, an astounding development that created demand for the equipment that some say triggered the industrial revolution of the 1600s and spurred colonization of our hemisphere. But these mills were not the first. Sugarcane was grown in the South Pacific as many as eight thousand years ago, and it was first refined in India as long ago as 500
BC
(“sugar” is derived from Sanskrit for gravel,
sharkara
). Ironically, cane is not even native to the islands. It was introduced to the Caribbean by none other than Christopher Columbus, in 1493, and it has flourished there, dramatically, ever since.

Cane harvesting remains fairly traditional and labor-intensive in the tropics, and people still wade into the thick fields to cut stalks with machetes (after a controlled burn to remove the dried lower leaves). On a sunny vacation beach in Jamaica, a visitor might be shocked to see a billowing cloud of smoke rising across the bay. “No problem, mon—they just burning off the leaves and scaring away the snakes,” is the casual and common explanation for what looks like a raging forest fire. Cane’s tough, and moist stalks easily survive the fires with no problem, as they say. But since 1992, all sugarcane in Florida is harvested mechanically by large combines, the annual use of guest workers having proved politically difficult. (The big companies still bring in a couple thousand workers each season. And despite all the modernization, they still burn the fields first, taking only fifteen to twenty minutes to burn a forty-acre field).

The harvest unfolds from mid-October to early April because of the immense volume; during this time, cane is cut by specially designed combines that can work in the wet, “muck soil” without sinking. Each combine—smaller but no less expensive and computer-laden than the combines made for harvesting corn and soybeans—replaces sixty hand-cutters, working in large, perfectly rectangular, flat tracts of cane ruled off by a network of straight canals and irrigation ditches and bordered by paved roads. Florida Crystals Corporation of Palm Beach, which harvests about 40 percent of the Florida crop—6 billion pounds a year—processes most of the cane into raw sugar at its largest mill, in Okeelanta, Florida, in the center of cane country, just south of Lake Okeechobee and just west of Palm Beach.