Twinkie, Deconstructed (17 page)

Whey proteins can also be whipped to create a stable foam, making them an important component in chiffon cakes and whipped toppings as well as mochi ice cream balls. That’s why whey is found in instant soup, and near the top of the ingredient list in fat-free or low-fat, dairy-accented salad dressings like creamy Italian or blue cheese. Whey adds opacity and viscosity to cream soups, without having to use that perishable (and expensive) cream. As the body-building industry discovered in the 1990s, whey is an excellent protein source with highly efficient muscle-building properties. Whey is now found in nutraceuticals, nutrition bars, sports and nutrition drinks, and infant formula. Because it contains the same proteins as human milk, which has a slightly different protein and lactose content than cow’s milk, one of the most exciting possible uses for concentrated whey protein—made by filtering or reacting it on a molecular level—is in developing inexpensive and easily transported protein supplements for starving populations in remote areas of the world. (This could pit Wisconsin against Iowa, the leading soybean producer, on the farm field instead of the football field.) Dairy-based food coating or glaze (like that used on candy) is another promising possible future use—as an alternative to the currently popular shellac (yes, shellac) product.

Whey derivatives also act as bacteriastats and antimicrobial agents in products as diverse as shampoo, acne medicine, toothpaste, cosmetic creams, and chewing gum—possibly even as an oxygen barrier in plastic packaging. But to get here, whey must be processed and concentrated, and that takes big equipment and money.

G
REEN
R
IVER AND
S
TAINLESS
V
INES

Waupun, Wisconsin—simply the intersection of County Road AA and County Road EE—is in the heart of “the nation’s dairy state,” full of rich, dark, soft soil, right near the fascinating and enormous Horicon marsh—the largest freshwater cattail marsh in the United States and a designated Globally Important Bird Area. Local bulletin boards are plastered with posters for polka contests and traditional Swiss concerts featuring yards-long alpenhorns. Even the smallest country lanes are paved, in order to allow the dairy trucks smooth and easy access to the farms and dairies (there are sixteen thousand dairy farms in Wisconsin, 99 percent family-owned).

Gleaming, polished, stainless steel milk haulers circulate among the local dairy farms on those nicely paved roads, picking up raw milk daily. Most comes from Holsteins, one of the oldest and most productive dairy breeds in the world. Their drivers develop important long-term relationships with each farmer—no one wants fresh milk to sit around, so timing is critical. The modern Alto Dairy Cooperative sees about eighty tankers a day, each carrying an average of fifty thousand pounds of milk. That’s 4 million pounds of milk a day moving through here.

Each cheese-making vat holds about a tanker-load of milk. A starter culture, which contains bacteria that turn the milk sour, is mixed in for fifteen to ninety minutes. Then an enzyme is added to thicken it and encourage coagulation into (solid) curds and (watery) whey, also known as milk serum—the same light yellow-green stuff that sits on top of yogurt that hasn’t been stirred in a while. The enzyme, which is the modern replacement of rennet (traditionally scraped off of calves’ stomachs), is derived from genetically engineered microbes (bacteria), made by “culture houses,” and are the same enzymes that are used for making corn syrups and for brewing lactic acid, two other Twinkie ingredients.

After about two hours, the curds, which look just like white Cheez Doodles
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or Styrofoam packing “peanuts,” are full of casein and fat, pressed into cheese or sold (fresh only) at the factory store as local, smooth-tasting, fat-laden snacks that squeak as you bite them. (Little Miss Muffet was definitely on to something, I thought, as I ate the delicious curds sitting in my rented Chevy, eschewing a tuffet.) The whey is then siphoned off the top and pumped into the adjoining building.

It takes ten pounds of milk, a bit more than one gallon, to make a pound of cheese, and in those nine leftover pounds are whey solids and a lot of water—94 percent, in fact—so drying it takes some work. The goal is to remove the water and isolate the protein, lactose, and minerals in a usable form. They don’t feed any weeds here anymore.

The whey plant is a five-story-high precast concrete box (some of the rooms are actually labeled as tornado shelters) and full of surprises, ranging from small to overwhelming. The first is the sticky doormat just inside the door. Thinking I have stepped in some spoiled spilled milk, I stare dumbly at my gooey feet. My guides, two athletic-looking women, get a good laugh: the mat I’ve stepped on is designed to remove dirt from shoes. Inside another door, I gingerly step into an unavoidable mound of white foam, thinking once again that I did something bad. The women laugh once more: the foam is disinfectant, sprayed continually on the floor. Cleanliness is clearly paramount here.

The inside of the whey plant can only be likened to an absurd, industrial disco, complete with a hall of long, round mirrors. Filled from floor to ceiling and wall to wall with brilliantly polished two-and four-inch-diameter stainless steel pipes, and shining, humansize conical centrifuges (which spin off butterfat for butter), the area seems paneled in stainless steel. Some of the steel pipes carry whey in and out of various processors, some bring sanitizing products in and out (for constant cleaning of the web), and some simply carry cooling water. The floors are spotless and there is no smell; it is all brilliantly lit so that the place gleams.

The two women hand me off to Joel Denk, Whey Division Manager, who gives me both a physical and academic tour of the plant, where I see that the rest of the whey is first pasteurized and then boiled in a series of forty-foot-tall heat exchangers called effects (the same as those used for sugar and several other Twinkies ingredients), then sent through ten sixty-foot-tall, ten-foot-wide vacuum evaporators that reduce its water content by about half. The watery discharge is boiled at a lower pressure and a lower temperature in each successive evaporator—at one point, the pressure is so low, it boils at only 62°F. It is recirculated as much as a dozen times until it reaches a thick milk-shake consistency, and is then passed through a chilled vat called a crystallizer that resembles an ice cream maker. Here, lactose crystals form so they can easily be removed.

The remaining milk shake is finally sprayed at such high pressure that it is atomized as it shoots into the top of a twenty-five-foot-wide, 60-foot-high, 400°F dryer, one of the largest in the world. It processes twelve thousand pounds of dry whey per hour, twenty-two hours a day. The duct feeding the hot air to the dryer is the size of a hallway, and the blower is a twelve-foot-diameter fan. At the top of the building, it is especially hot, akin to standing right next to a pizza oven. After a few seconds of free-fall, the whey, now an off-white, slightly sticky powder, lands on a conveyor belt, ready for packing and shipping. The daily 4 million pounds of liquid whey has been reduced to about 264,000 pounds, now that the water is gone.

Whey has come a long way from when it was pumped out of cheese plants as so much wasted, watery stuff.

As even better uses for whey are discovered, it’s conceivable to imagine that milk output might have to increase to meet the demand, resulting in an excess of milk or cheese. Denk implies that that’s why the dairy industry would also love to simply increase the protein in the milk to start with, something that might be done through genetic engineering of cows.

Ultimately, whey’s story is wonderfully instructive and, like most food additives, very much a part of the times. A totally natural part of food, it became a separate product by chance thousands of years ago, when cheese-making began with the simple salting and drying of curds. The ancients (Hippocrates, along with Miss Muffet of the sixteenth century—yes, she really existed) enthusiastically drank their whey, and as recently as the nineteenth century, Swiss spa-goers considered it a health booster, after which whey fell out of favor as a food. It is only within the last few generations that whey has been considered valuable enough to be worth processing. And only most recently did we develop the technology to benefit from whey across the spectrum of food products, from Twinkies to health bars. While it could be argued that it might be simpler to just drink milk and eat yogurt to ingest whey protein, it’s hard to argue with progress.

In fact, Twinkies (and most other cakes, too) owe their modern lightness to some ingenious inventors and businessmen who embraced progress in the name of the search for chemical leavening.

CHAPTER 14

Leavenings

R
ocks make cakes light and airy.

Believe it or not, the sources of the three chemical leavening ingredients on the Twinkies’ label are rocks: phosphate rock, a sodium-rich rock called trona, and calcium-rich limestone. Together, they comprise a strange and active trio. Pure phosphorus bursts into flames when it comes into contact with air. Lime just kind of disappears into thin air if it’s not stored properly. And almost all sodium bicarbonate, also known as baking soda, is water-soluble and comes from deep mines out in Wyoming.

It’s not easy to make the mental adjustment to baking with rocks. It’s a pretty big leap to mentally link the humble Twinkie to a mountain-size mine, as well as to accept the rather incongruous fact that leavening for feather-light cakes comes from heavy, dirty, hard substances. So this set of ingredients required a little extra investigation.

Leavening is what makes baked goods rise. You can get it from microbes (yeast), elbow grease (whipping your egg-laden batter full of air), or rocks (chemical baking powder). Without leavening, bread would simply be matzos: no bagels, no buns, no Twinkies. And while Twinkies are labeled “sponge cake,” and sponge cakes are generally leavened by eggs, Twinkies, in order to extend shelf life and reduce expense, contain no fresh eggs, and so require chemical leavening. They also use fat (oil/shortening), making them more of a génoise, in fact, but we won’t go there.

Chemical leavening has been sold to the consumer as baking powder in the same basic formula since around 1885, under the familiar brand names and in the familiar small cans of Clabber Girl
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, Davis
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, and Calumet
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. Baking powder is made from sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and two acid salts, usually monocalcium phosphate and sodium acid pyrophosphate, both of which are found in Twinkies; or sodium aluminum sulfate, found in some brands of baking powder. Add water, and this combination of base and acid fizzes quickly, creating little gas bubbles that get trapped in the batter as it is mixed, which causes the batter to rise. The heat of baking agitates the chemicals once more, causing them to make more gas, hence the term, “double-acting.” The theory is simple—combine an acid and a base, get a reaction—but the way to harvest and release gas predictably eluded discovery for ages.

R
ISING
I
SSUES

One tends to think of leavening as a common consumer item, but for millennia, leavening was limited to natural, wild yeast. Anyone could leave a primal soup of water, grain, and maybe a little sugar somewhere warm and wait for yeast cells to fall from the air into the fecund mixture. This is how beer-brewing, which predates bread-baking, got started in ancient Sumeria and led to the start of farming and civilization as we know it. Later, cooks learned to keep a “starter” of this type of yeast on the back of a stove for continual use for bread-making, with often delicious but usually inconsistent results. Besides, it was inconvenient. It is hard to keep starter properly, and yeast-raised breads took (and still take) hours to prepare.

Twinkies are a product of the drive to create a modern chemical leavening, part of the modern cultural desire for commercial baked goods. Modern baking experts claim that as far back as when people started eating bread, cooks have been on the lookout for faster, more convenient, and more predictable leavening. This modern drive is based, of course, on the huge consumer and industrial demand that came along with the urbanization and industrialization of society in the 1800s and 1900s, but the impetus dates back even further. While there’s evidence that even Renaissance cooks experimented with a tasty powder made of horns, hooves, and leather, it was early American cooks who led the way to find simple leavening.

Colonists first discovered (or learned from the Native Americans, it’s not clear) that pearlash—a crude potassium bicarbonate made from wood ashes and normally used for soap and glass-making—could be added to bread dough to counter the natural sourness of sourdough. (Historians can only guess that this was discovered by accident when some kitchen fire ashes fell into some dough.) Pearlash soon became prized for another effect: the quick rising it produced. By the 1760s it was quite popular among cooks—even then, people wanted things done faster. A revolutionary development in pre-Revolutionary times, the advent of so-called quick breads, like muffins or pancakes or biscuits—so called because without yeast, they do not require any rising time—marked the first use of chemical leavening. (Recipes calling for pearlash appeared in the first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s
American Cookery
, in 1796.) But using potassium bicarbonate alone didn’t work well. Gas tended to be released during mixing (the “bench” phase), before baking, and control was often lost, leading to hit-or-miss results.

The U.S. Patent Office granted only three patents in 1790, its first year of existence. Two of the three related directly to Twinkies (but no, not for Twinkies themselves, as all-American as they might be). One concerned the manufacture of pearlash, the precursor of baking powder, and the other was for automated flour-milling machinery, which led to fine, white flour. Both are evidence of the importance of our cultural drive for improved cake-baking.