Twinkie, Deconstructed (25 page)

Pressure Cooking

In an undisclosed location, perhaps in an industrial park near Chicago, maybe in rural, central Pennsylvania, possibly in riparian Delaware, in a plant full of tanks, railroad sidings, and a maze of pipes and catwalks, big, stainless steel vats are filled with fresh, hot, luscious, liquefied sorbitan monostearate. Along with the pressurized and liquefied ethylene oxide, it is carefully pumped under high heat and pressure into closed, cylindrical, stainless steel reaction vessels called autoclaves. These high-tech tanks, which can range in size from one thousand to four thousand gallons and stand up to forty feet tall, are designed not only to handle heat and pressure, but to control any possible explosive tendencies expressed by the ever-ready-to-react ethylene oxide. All air is excluded by creating a vacuum in the vessel first. When I remark to a laconic chemical engineer at one of the manufacturers that this seems particularly dangerous, he says, “So are most other chemical reactions.” Still, this is probably the most dangerous of the reactions that contribute directly to the Twinkie ingredient list.

After some deodorizing and purification, out pours a greasy, tan goo: polysorbate 60, ready to be mixed with oil and water. I’m warned not to taste a sample. It is so bitter, and the aftertaste on the back of your tongue so cloying, that an engineer sternly cautions me, saying “You won’t be able to taste your dinner for a week.” Could polysorbate 60 in the filling be the reason why Twinkies’ taste seems to linger long after you’ve eaten one?

P
ARSING THE
N
AME

With the manufacturing figured out, it is finally possible to understand where this ingredient’s intimidating name comes from: “poly” means it is a polymer, or something with a long, and in this case, synthetic, molecule; “sorb” obviously comes from “sorbitol”; “ate” means that oxygen is now tacked on to the molecule; and “60” differentiates this product from polysorbate 20 or polysorbate 80, which, being made from different vegetable oils, are each cooked up a bit differently and are suited for different uses. PS 80 and PS 20 boast similar attributes—PS 80 smooths out cake mixes, icing, such as Betty Crocker
^®
Whipped Vanilla Frosting, and ice cream, like Eskimo Pie
^®
Ice Cream Bars, which are lacking in eggs and cream; PS 20 emulsifies soaps, shampoos, and skin care products like Neutrogena
^®
Oil-Free Acne Wash, but primarily due to its soapy taste is not a food additive. Almost all PS 60 is used in food, but some can be found in lotions like Jean Naté
^®
Hydrating Body Lotion or Olay
^®
Moisturinse™ Shower Body Lotion.

Surprisingly, even most chemical engineers don’t know where the numbers 20, 60, and 80 come from, including the head of technical services for one of the world’s largest polysorbate manufacturers, who shall remain unidentified out of courtesy. Some digging shows that it is pretty simple after all. The first digit, or the “ten” in each name—2, 6, and 8—is the “one” digit in the number of carbon atoms in each source’s oil molecules: coconut oil, which is made into lauric acid, has 12 carbon atoms and is used to make polysorbate 20; olive oil, which yields oleic acid, has 18, and is used to make polysorbate 80. But here’s the glitch, or so it seems: soybean and canola oils, the most common oils in Twinkies’ polysorbate 60, have 18 carbon atoms. The aforementioned head of technical services finds this equally vexing, until we realize that the
original
recipe for polysorbate 60 called for beef or pig fat (tallow or lard), which contain 16 carbon atoms (therefore, polysorbate 60).

And there we have it: polysorbate 60—or polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate—explained and demystified. Seems it
does
grow on trees, after all. I can’t wait to tell my kids. That’ll be easy. What I’ll have a harder time explaining is where artificial vanilla and butter come from.

CHAPTER 20

Natural and Artificial Flavors

I
n order to make flavors, you need raw materials from places as diverse as tropical islands and Chinese or Gulf Coast oil fields. In order to appreciate flavors you need a nose, a tongue, and a brain. In order to fully
understand
flavors, you need a degree in chemistry and access to some sophisticated electronic testing equipment.

Tasting Twinkies is complex. Only our senses of smell and taste can detect chemicals—the others (sight, sound, touch) rely on physical impact—so it makes sense that all flavors, even those that are naturally occurring, are chemical. In fact, Joyce Kiley, a flavorist who runs Flavor Sciences Inc., a flavor supplier in Stamford, Connecticut, confirms what anyone who’s ever had a cold has experienced firsthand. “You taste with your nose,” she says, which can not only detect thousands of different odors but is “99 percent accurate” (although Kiley confesses to supporting her nasal talent with the use of a gas chromatograph that analyzes the molecular makeup of an odor, an option unavailable to most consumers). This observation dovetails somewhat with color experts’ adage that “we eat with our eyes first.” The importance of the eyes and nose in the gustatory experience makes you question how necessary the tongue actually is, given that the tongue can only handle the five basics—sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, or savory—while the more sophisticated olfactory sense goes much further, elevating mere taste to flavor.

Memory is also important to taste and, certainly, satisfaction. When we eat a favorite snack cake, we expect it to taste exactly as we remember it from last time, or from childhood. Marketers of processed foods like Twinkies know this well, and take it to heart. The look, the flavor, the texture of a snack cake must be consistent, even over decades. And if consumers want it to taste “like homemade,” in Twinkies’ case, it better taste buttery. For a buttery taste without real butter and its attendant spoilage and expense, manufacturers use (surprise!) artificial flavors. For a slightly richer or deeper taste, bakers add a dash of natural flavor, as is no doubt done with Twinkies’ vanilla, hence the ingredient listing of “natural and artificial flavors.” Hedging your bets is good business.

Figuring out how to achieve the desired taste, from apple to walnut, in products that entail extreme cost control, automated mixing, extended holding, fast baking, and long shelf life, all of which can destroy flavors, is no small feat. For this, the big bakeries turn to flavorists,
11
or flavor chemists, like Kiley at Flavor Sciences, Nancy McDonald of M&M Consulting and Laboratory of Apopka, Florida, or staffers on the payroll of the many major flavor companies, such as Sensient Technologies, in Indianapolis, Indiana, or McCormick and Company of Sparks, Maryland.

The flavorists I challenged, including Kiley and McDonald, all agree that Twinkies incorporate only two flavors, vanilla and butter, with butter existing primarily in the cake part and vanilla primarily in the filling (as noted in the Note to the Reader, Hostess will neither confirm nor deny). Any other flavors, they deduced, would result from baking. Flavorists rely on their senses to make this kind of statement, and they can make it right after just one taste. If I paid them a lot of money (not likely), the flavor profile and constituents could be analyzed on a gas chromatograph and/or a mass spectrometer and graphed out precisely, which is what consultants and flavor companies do all the time.

Incidentally, according to Hostess, vanilla wasn’t even the principal flavor of the original 1930 Twinkies filling—for the first ten years, banana was. But World War II created such an extreme shortage of bananas that the song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” soared to the top of the charts, and Hostess switched to the more widely available vanilla flavoring. So vanilla—both natural and artificial—and artificial butter are the agreed-upon flavors to investigate.

Thanks to a strong combination of homeland security (mostly inspired by the Bioterrorism Act of 2002—flavors are very concentrated, and thus one of the first things to safeguard) and fierce competitiveness in an arcane, artful science, plant and lab visits are simply out of the question. Not one flavor company would open its doors to me, and some won’t even speak via phone to outsiders. My top contenders—flavor giants Rhodia, McCormick, and International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF)—explicitly declined any participation in research for this book. Luckily, a good number of professionals were eager to talk, on background, about their life’s work. And what they do smells simply terrific, even if how they do it is terrifically complex. Even when it’s all natural.

216 C
HEMICALS AND
I
T’S
S
TILL
N
ATURAL

Flavors are pure chemistry. What you smell when you walk into a shop such as Bath & Body Works that sells candles, soaps, and incense are alcohols, aldehydes, acids, ketones, esters, phenols, furans, lactones, and assorted other hydrocarbons with names unfamiliar to most of us. And those are just
groups
of chemicals, not individual chemicals. They are also exactly what you smell when you sniff a Twinkie prior to devouring it. When you smell ripe or rotten fruit, you are smelling ethyl acetate, which is an ester and, depending on which kind you’re talking about, either grows on trees or is made in oil refineries from natural gas. Alone, it is flammable and moderately toxic; mixed with other chemicals, it is rendered safe and smells like fruit. All of these chemicals are both natural and synthetic, and there’s no escaping the terminology.

The main and most important ingredient in both, vanillin, is the same chemically, but the natural flavor has hundreds of other components as well, perhaps over 250; so many, in fact, that it is not completely understood (vanilla is not unique in this—coffee has more than eight hundred and is no better understood).

At the Rutgers University Center for Advanced Food Technology in New Jersey, scientists using a powerful gas chromatograph and flame ionization detector (and perhaps a Captain Cosmo Decoder Ring) positively identified 216 of natural vanilla’s flavor components, including (of course) more vanillin than anything else, but also an astoundingly complex chemical list that includes literally dozens of organic compounds—maltol, catechol, ethyl vanillin, phenol, heliotropin, diacetyl—all of which are reassuringly part of the artificial vanilla recipe. One study classified, among others, 25 alcohols, 11 aldehydes, 20 acids, 10 ketones, 5 esters, 10 phenols, 10 furans, 2 lactones, and 40 miscellaneous hydrocarbons, including the basic aromatic compounds of natural gas, all found naturally in a lovely tropical orchid, not some contrived industrial product.

Each chemical contributes to what the pros call its bouquet—what we actually smell—even in the most minute of trace amounts. Some touches are so small that they barely register on the most sophisticated of equipment, not to mention in our noses. Only a minority surpass concentrations of 1 part per million. But when they are all mixed together, they help each other to smell and taste uniquely alluring.

Natural vanilla is probably the world’s most labor-intensive agricultural product, and its plant-to-factory route is rather tortuous, considering it’s a naturally occurring substance. Vanilla beans, which are actually not beans at all but the fruit of the only tropical orchid in the world to bear fruit—are famously difficult to grow and process. Vanilla only grows in tropical, equatorial climates, where the flowers are pollinated by hand in hillside gardens, a technique discovered in 1841 in French Madagascar. The delicate act takes place between dawn and noon on the
one
day in its life that the flower opens (the unlucky flowers drop to the ground). The beans first ripen on the vine for nine months before being harvested green and flavorless, when the curing process begins. They are dried for three to six months in special boxes and the open air, and are brought in each night and when it rains. Each pod is turned by hand as needed. Curing is an art but technically a way of inducing natural enzymatic action, or fermentation, to create aroma. The whole process can take five to six years from planting to sale. And this takes place mainly on the other side of the world from Twinkies’ U.S. factories, in Madagascar, which supplies a whopping 60 percent of the world market (Indonesia supplies 30 percent). The rest comes from places like Tahiti, not much closer to Twinkies’ bakeries, either.

Unsurprisingly, prices are in the hundreds of dollars per pound and are dramatically affected by Madagascar’s weather, both meteorological and political (prices went up 500 percent after a recent typhoon reduced the crop by 40 percent). Vanilla is not only a difficult plant to grow and process, it is a difficult business, too. Only about two thousand tons are produced yearly around the world, and that varies with natural disasters and recipe changes in soft drinks (the 1985 introduction of New Coke, which eschewed the natural stuff, nearly broke the Madagascar economy with the attendant drop in demand). It is expensive enough that most food companies avoid using it wherever possible, but they, like Hostess, end up needing a tiny bit of it for an extra depth of taste that the artificial stuff can’t seem to provide.

Vanilla is by far the single most popular flavor in the world, and the United States is by far its principal consumer. (Introduced to the United States via France, it was Thomas Jefferson who brought some back with him in 1789 after his gig as ambassador ended.) Once harvested, the beans don’t go right to the bakeries. The natural vanilla used by the big food companies, as in most home recipes, is vanilla extract in liquid form. In contrast to the growing and curing of the beans, making vanilla extract is simple. The beans are chopped up into half-inch square bits, soaked in alcohol (ethyl alcohol, fermented from corn syrup) that percolates through it for about forty-eight hours, if heat is used, and weeks, if using a cold process. Matt Nielsen, head of Nielsen-Massey Vanillas, a family-owned, artisanal producer with fewer than fifty employees, uses the cold process in a room full of ten-foot-high stainless steel vats in Waukegan, Illinois, in order to make a few hundred gallons of high-quality extract at a time. McCormick, with 8,500 employees, the world’s largest publicly owned flavor company, and other major producers or suppliers to companies like Geneva, Switzerland–based Firmenich Inc., the world’s largest private flavor and fragrance company, with 4,760 employees and fifty locations, are more likely to use heat, along with more and bigger vats. (When asked if the neighbors complain about the smell, the companies claim they love it.)