Twinkie, Deconstructed (23 page)

In the older part of the plant, an upper loft floor is filled with solid cast-iron steel machines, many of which are painted a comforting forest green. Some are from the 1940s. With their gentle curves, they are much more pleasing to the eye than the brand-spanking-new, sleek but squared-off stainless steel ones nearby. This is the famous “round can department,” where they make every part of the familiar blue cylinders found in grocery stores and kitchens—the cardboard tops, the little patented metal spouts, and so on—from scratch. Blank aluminum and cardboard coils are stacked on one side of the room, new containers on the other.

Downstairs, at the end of the production line, conveyors dump different varieties of salt (some with different-size crystals to meet customer specs; some with minuscule, trace amounts of additives such as iodine, dextrose to stabilize the iodine, or the anticaking agent sodium ferrocyanide, better known as yellow prussiate of soda) into hoppers that fill the fifty- or eighty-pound bags, or the two-thousand-pound supersacks, four-foot soft cubes on pallets, or load some directly into rail cars, or tank trucks—after a last trip through a metal detector—for shipment to the big bakeries and other food processors. The stream of salt pouring into a tank car is a foot wide.

Packing machines pull open the bags before a white whoosh fills them, almost instantly, and they are grabbed by robots that brusquely and hypnotically push and stack them on pallets. Then we dash off to the truck bays to watch forklifts load the pallets of bags and also cartons of the familiar blue canister into the waiting tractor-trailer trucks.

Sitting near a truck bay is an open, damaged carton; a blue can with the familiar little girl and her umbrella catches my eye. It is presented to me as a gift. It is still slightly warm. Its contents may very well have been underground this morning. Fresh salt.

But enough about simple, monolithic minerals that hardly need any processing. Now it’s time to break up some fat.

CHAPTER 18

Mono and Diglycerides

M
ono and diglycerides always appear as a pair on ingredient lists. What do they do, and why must they do it together? Why are they found in Triscuits
^®
, peanut butter, and ice cream? And what role do they play in Twinkies? They are the old couple that turns up in thousands of processed foods.

O
F
M
ILK AND
M
OLECULES

Think of the best known, most basic, perfectly emulsified blends of fat and water: milk and its derivatives, butter and cheese. Mono and diglycerides are natural milk emulsifiers (the word “emulsion” is derived from the Latin word meaning “to milk out”). When great chefs like Gray Kunz (or you, of course) make a cream sauce, they include mono and diglycerides in their fancy, homemade sauce simply by using butter and cream.

While the name may be daunting, the words are easy to parse. Triglycerides (molecules made of one glycerin molecule and three fatty acids) are found in almost all fats, like butter and olive oil and soybean oil, but not all fats are triglycerides. The obvious example is mono and diglycerides, so named because instead of three fatty acids, the glycerin is attached to either one (“mono”) or two (“di”) fatty acids. They may be fats, but they are unusual fats, in that their job is to tie fat and water together.

Mono and diglycerides (M & D to us) are the most widely used synthetic emulsifiers in the world, having been perfected in the 1920s (lecithin, a natural emulsifier now refined out of soybean oil, comes in second). In baked goods, M & D create an abundance of small, uniform air cells for fine grain and softer, longer-lasting crumb, created in part by the reduction in surface tension between water and fat in the batter. They affect both the cooking and the dough’s starches in ways that butter or oil alone cannot. They also work in minute percentages of a recipe—usually less than half a percent by weight—so they don’t pose any dietary problems. These little things are
good
.

The list of other food applications for mono and diglycerides is impressive, although they are usually achieved while paired up with a similar product called sodium stearoyl lactylate (made in the same plant and described a little later on) and/or an emulsifier such as polysorbate 60—both of which are used in Twinkies, too. Various versions of mono and diglycerides can help improve batter stability (while waiting for oven time in an industrial bakery—they are the most powerful emulsifiers in bread), retard staling and extend shelf life (food companies’ mantra), enhance the fat that’s present so less fat is needed, reduce separation in icing, peanut butter, margarine and butter substitutes like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!
^®
or Lee Iacocca’s Olivio
^®
, stabilize fat in chocolate candy, and prevent clumping in artificial coffee creamer. Many ice creams, like Cold Stone Creamery’s
^®
and Edy’s
^®
Grand Light Rich & Creamy Vanilla incorporate M & D for extra smoothness (reducing the need for egg yolks and especially cream, the natural source of lush texture). Crisco needs them to aid in water solubility and to raise its melting point. They even work in plastic food containers like yogurt cups as an antistatic agent. No wonder they’re on so many ingredient lists. And how nice that they are made from nothing more than vegetable oils.

Encountering Full Hydro

American Ingredients is one of the few specialized manufacturers of mono and diglycerides in the world. Its Grandview, Missouri, plant sits at the edge of the wide-open Kansas prairie, and, on the day I visit, a violent wind is blowing. As we stagger across the parking lot, Troy Boutté, Director of Research and Development, who holds a Ph.D. in food science, helps me get some basic and helpful facts down. “Mono and diglycerides are fats,” he shouts. Simple enough. At the loading dock, my eyes are drawn to piles of what look like layers of puddled white wax around a big hose base, as if it were the base of a giant candlestick at the end of a long dinner. A big dipper ladle is nearby, also encrusted in white. I break some off, surprised to find that it is hard, more like plastic than wax, though a bit slippery. This is “full hydro,” fully hydrogenated soybean oil, totally full of fat, which is why it is solid at room temperature. It’s hard not to wonder if this is what the insides of your arteries would look like if you ate nothing but saturated fat.

It is not anatomy, though, that we are examining—only a loading dock in the windy Midwest prairie where big tank trucks hook up fat, braided, stainless steel hoses to their bellies and unload vegetable oils (mostly soybean—fully, partially, and nonhydrogenated) and also sunflower, palm, cottonseed, canola, or corn oil. There are two sets of pumps, hoses, and holding tanks for the oil—a separate set used to be reserved for kosher materials, but in the twenty-first century, most everything is kosher thanks to consumer demand, so that pump is out of service. American Ingredients could use any fat to make mono and diglycerides, even a solid beef or pork fat like it used to, but to keep kosher it uses mostly soybean oil. For a manufacturer, and American is one of the major ones, all that matters is that the source is made of triglycerides. For a manufacturer, fat is fat.

From Soap to Cake

Glycerin is part of all fats, whether animal or vegetable. In 1783, the Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was the first to extract glycerin from a natural source, olive oil. Today, one of the biggest glycerin producers in the world is Procter & Gamble, which is no surprise because glycerin is a big by-product of soap-making, one of P & G’s best-known businesses.

Soap is usually made from natural oil sources such as soybean as well as coconut, palm, palm kernel, canola, cottonseed, or olive oil, among others, including beef and pork fat. At one point in the soap-making process the fat is refined, or fractionated, which means the fat molecules are literally split up. It is an intriguing and surprisingly quick process that takes place in a three-foot-wide, eighty-foot-tall tower called a hydrolyzer. Superheated (500°F), superpressurized water is pumped into the top, while hot oil is pumped into the bottom. The reaction splits the fat into fatty acids and glycerin; the fatty acids are then drawn off the top and processed into soap or stearic acid (another Twinkie subingredient), among other things, while the glycerin is pumped out the bottom for use as a food additive, but also in cosmetics (especially moisturizers), pharmaceuticals, and numerous industrial products. One of its more intriguing industrial uses is in nitroglycerin; put a little of
that
into your cake and it will
really
rise. (Note: glycerin by itself is not explosive.)

Another intriguing coproduct (as Procter & Gamble likes to say) is making methyl esters (instead of fatty acids) when splitting off the glycerin. Methyl esters are used to make diesel fuel. Technically an alcohol, glycerin (also called glycerol, also spelled “glycerine,” and obviously the root of the “-gylceride” suffix) is a clear, sweet, thick oil, like a heavy mineral oil or corn syrup, and is delivered to the mono and diglycerides plant by tank truck, pumped into tanks at the windy loading dock.

On its own, glycerin is a very useful food additive. Among other things, it works as a solvent for coloring, as a moistening agent for baked goods, and as a texturizer in syrup (its viscosity lends a desirable body). It prevents sugar from crystallizing in icings and candies, and, best of all, improves the texture and allows for the use of less sugar in lower-calorie ice cream.

Most of the glycerin used in the United States is made abroad in places as diverse as Mexico and Malaysia (from palm and palm kernel oil). Dow Chemical makes glycerin synthetically, from propylene gas, a petroleum product, at refineries in Freeport, Texas, and in Germany, but its process is, naturally, a trade secret. Food clients these days almost always want kosher glycerin, and yes, petroleum-sourced food is generally kosher. Why not? No matter which source, the pure glycerin is the same. And a bunch of it ends up in American Ingredients’ Missouri plant, destined for greatness in cakes.

C
OOKING AND
C
OOLING
O
IL

Reacting the oil and glycerin is pretty simple and quick. Once mixed at about a 3:1 ratio, the only requirements are high heat, an unnamed catalyst (reputed to be an alkali of some sort), and about half an hour in a two-story-high stainless steel tank. The plant is virtually automatic, somewhat dark, and filled with dozens of pipes going in and out of the various thirty-foot-tall stainless vats. Save for a couple of guys loading boxes at the end, almost no humans are on the floors and ladders. Meanwhile, the violent prairie winds play a symphony with the steel walls, giving life to an otherwise still scene.

In the next building, the hot, liquid M & D are cooled down and treated in various ways in order to create a variety of products with different forms, consistencies, and functions to suit bakeries’ mixing needs. Powders are popular, but so are beads and “milk shakes” that turn into pastes or semisolids. And some are distilled in a vacuum molecular still, a five-story-high tank with three-foot-diameter vacuum pipes poking out of it. Boutté describes it in uncharacteristically vague terms as “kinda like making whiskey.” The inspection porthole at the bottom is two feet across and securely shut with two dozen hefty and thoroughly intimidating bolts.

The most intriguing cooling method (reserved here for the distilled monoglycerides) uses the spray chiller, a round, room-size chamber with a conical roof fitted with what looks like a big vent fan and a conical bottom with a hole in the middle as well. It is not in use right now, so we climb up a few steep steel staircases to take a careful peek inside. Our voices echo ominously. With a smooth funnel of a bottom, it looks like something out of a
Star Wars
escape sequence. As the hot oil is atomized out of the opening at the top, it turns into solid, tiny beads as soon as it hits the cool air and is funneled right out the bottom.

The more common cooling method uses a flaker, a cool, rotating drum onto which the hot oil is sprayed and cooled to a solid within seconds. As the drum rotates against a blade on one side, kind of like a giant lathe, the sheet of wax is scraped off and crumbles into flakes that are conveyed to a nearby grinder and shaker that dumps it directly into a line of plastic bag/boxes on a snaking conveyor. Hydrated slightly to become a moist powder, it is perfectly suited to being mixed into cake batter; a sample of small, white granules cling to my fingertips, feel like sticky wax, taste like nothing, and leave a cloying aftertaste on the roof of the mouth, much like the feeling you get if you add too much artificial creamer to your coffee, or if you eat a whole spoonful of premade frosting from a can. All that emulsifying comes at a price.

The whole process, remarkably, takes less than two hours. This smooth, inseparable couple just glides on out to the bakeries, ready to mix. Most likely, they’ll dance first along with one of their more intriguing partners, polysorbate 60.

CHAPTER 19

Polysorbate 60

W
hen my daughter asked, “Where does polysorbate 60 come from?” I became, as you now know, determined to find out. Chemical-sounding and mysterious (what does the 60 stand for?), this ingredient was both a tease—and a challenge.

The two basic questions—where does it come from, and what does it do?—aren’t easy to answer, partly due to modern business reality, partly due to complex science (it doesn’t sound “chemical” for nothing). It’s actually hard to suss out who makes it because so many large companies have merged, divested, then reacquired divisions, formed joint ventures, or outsourced manufacturing. Almost everyone I spoke with talked about background only, often because of impending or recent corporate musical chairs. One manufacturer’s product information operator replied, in response to a request, “We’re kind of in limbo as to who would handle product information right now.” A technical support guy whose job description is to explain how PS 60 is manufactured ended an interview with the sketchy, CIA-like disclaimer, “I’m not sure if we even sell it any more.” That’s like Kraft neither confirming nor denying that it sells cheese.