Twinkie, Deconstructed (9 page)

D
IVIDE AND
S
WEETEN

The path that brought us to this modern biorefinery, to the cutting edge of biology and chemistry and food science, to cheap and versatile sweeteners for modern soft drinks and Twinkies, began centuries ago. Reports of converting Japanese arrowroot starch to sugar date to
AD
800, but the current process really began in czarist Russia. In 1811, a chemist by the name of G. S. C. Kirchoff discovered that acid hydrolysis, the process of breaking things down with acid, could be used to produce viscous, sweet syrup by heating potato starch with sulfuric acid. (Legend has it he was chasing Napoleon’s offer of a 100,000-franc prize, worth at least about $500,000 today, to anyone who could locate a native sugar source, since France was blockaded and could no longer get West Indian sugarcane—plus, he wanted to create an alternative to British sugar companies. European sugar beets are still a major, and majorly subsidized, crop, and the sugar-producing tropics remain poor, thanks to Napoleon.)

Later, World War I and World War II both caused sugar shortages and thus inspired the North American corn sweetener industry to try harder to find alternatives to cane and beet sugar. Enter corn.

Corn sweeteners are naturally present in cornstarch, despite the fact that it is a thick liquid that’s not at all sweet. The key is to separate the sweeteners out. When your body digests a carbohydrate, it breaks it down and absorbs the glucose (also known as blood sugar) for energy. Both your body and the corn sweetener companies do this with enzymes and hydrochloric acid—the same kinds, actually. But while your glands and organs regulate the process in your body, out in Nebraska or Illinois or Iowa, the guys in the control room are in charge.

Put a piece of bread or a cracker on your tongue for a moment and feel it dissolve. Now substitute a seven-story-high steel vat for your mouth and thirteen computer monitors complete with colorized schematics for your glands, and you have a corn syrup plant. We are all miniature Cargills and ADMs, pulling sugar out of potatoes and corn and wheat, which is why white bread is prohibited by the South Beach Diet.

Sucking on bread is not the kind of process one normally associates with high-tech plants, as it seems so, well, natural a process. But, in fact, Americans have been making corn syrup with enzymes instead of acid since the post–Civil War development boom (Union Sugar Company started making corn syrup in New York in 1865). The first refined version was made in 1866. Since 1967, we’ve been using enzymes to great effect, as they are very, very accurate and controllable, a big improvement over acid hydrolysis, which often generates unpredictable colors and flavors and is difficult to control.

B
REAKING
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P
I
S
…E
ASY TO
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O

People in the sweetener industry are totally consumed with the concept of breaking down starch into sugars. When the nice lady at the 800 number of a megacompany that makes corn sweeteners is asked what they do there, she jumps into a long and enthusiastic riff about how starch molecules are very, very long and their job is to cut them up for use in various products, including corn syrups that can be found in Twinkies and soft drinks. Johnson, the manager of the Cargill plant, had likewise welcomed me earlier by saying, “Starch molecules are very, very long, and we break them up here.” Later, as we hustle up and down steel ladders surrounding the dozens of huge tanks, he hollers over the industrial hum, “Starch molecules are very, very long, while dextrose molecules are very short, about one-thousandth as long. Enzymes break up those long chains by eating them.”

In the nearby quality control lab, a room filled with hundreds of sample bottles and very expensive-looking microscopes and computer equipment, scientists from an enzyme company start with the now-familiar line, “Starch molecules are very, very long…” but offer to take the explanation one step further with a great metaphor: starch molecules make up a long train; the enzymes uncouple the cars. Different enzymes and different timing uncouple different quantities of cars, forming different syrups. Break up only a few long sections of the train with the enzyme alpha amylase (the same as in your saliva) and you get just plain corn syrup, thick with its big molecules. Break up more of the train with glucose amylase, de-linking most of the molecules down to the smallest (glucose), and you get dextrose, also called glucose. Rearrange the dextrose train cars via a third enzyme, glucose isomerase, and, bingo, you get high fructose corn syrup.

Enzymes are bred or genetically modified to be so effective that, just as in nature, they can be specifically selected to engineer foods with different mouthfeels or tastes (think cheese). These enzymes trace their genes to a natural microorganism harvested from soil or, in some cases, beef liver. High-tech companies breed them, harvesting them from fungi or bacteria fed by corn and soybean processing by-products. The scientists hand over a bottled sample to me, but it is just muddy water to my untrained eye.

Enzymes are a popular ingredient in detergents (where they break down food stains), gentle drain openers, pulp and paper-making, and, of course, beer-brewing and cheese-making. They are helpful in textiles, too, having replaced pumice stone for “stonewashing” blue jeans, among other “finishing” tasks. And they are essential for making Twinkies, used to extract four different sweeteners from cornstarch: plain corn syrup, dextrose crystals, glucose syrup, and, above all, high fructose corn syrup.

And none of this bears any resemblance to your home cooking.

CHAPTER 7

Corn Syrup, Dextrose, Glucose, and High Fructose Corn Syrup

T
he corn syrup plants remind me of a good restaurant buffet, complete with dishes that would be satisfying on their own, but create a banquet when assembled as a meal. The wet milling industry offers a whole range of finished products, each of which stands on its own, but taken together make for great cakes.

C
ORN
C
ANDY AND
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ORE

The first Twinkie ingredient made from cornstarch is simple corn syrup, the same as that clear, Karo
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Light corn syrup you probably have on your pantry shelf. It’s the only corn syrup product in Twinkies for which there is a home version.

The big plants make it in a couple different ways. Either the liquid starch is put into a vat the size of a small house along with hydrochloric acid (for the acid hydrolysis process), or else the starch gets mixed with the enzyme alpha amylase and maybe a little lime or caustic soda (to adjust the pH), after which it’s heated just a bit and left for a few hours to convert into 25 percent dextrose, which is then ready for processing into other syrups and dextrin. Another pH adjustment stops the enzyme activity, and voilà, corn syrup.

Corn syrup’s viscosity, a product of the remaining long molecules that were not “chopped up” by the enzymes or acid, makes it useful as, well, a thickener. It is often used somewhat like dry cornstarch. In fact, maltodextrin, a stronger thickener that is usually dried and powdered, but which works more like the starches described in the next chapter, is created at this point by cooking the cornstarch solution just a bit less than needed to make corn syrup. Like any thickener, maltodextrin can be used as a fat replacer; the ingredient label on Smucker’s
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Reduced Fat Natural Style Peanut Butter even says specifically, “(replaces fat).”

Corn syrup is only about a third as sweet as table sugar, so it is only partly used as a sweetener (and is often paired with another in desserts). Industrial bakers rely on it for its ability to stabilize and soak up moisture in a way that allows them to keep water to a minimum while baking a moist cake, thus preventing spoilage, and it does this without adding intense sweetness in the way that sugar or honey does. Corn syrup helps with the browning, too (substitute some corn syrup for sugar in your cookies if you want them browner). Not only does corn syrup not crystallize like cane sugar, it actually prevents crystallization, which is why it’s so popular in candy (it’s usually the main ingredient in the cheap stuff ), ice cream, and frozen desserts. It’s the main ingredient in Marshmallow Fluff
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and lasts six to twelve months without refrigeration. These days, you can hardly find a sweet food that doesn’t contain corn syrup—even home recipes call for it.

Most corn syrup that doesn’t find its way into baked goods goes into dessert foods such as fruit fillings, frostings, cookies, as well as vitamins (as a filler, often in the form of glucose), and into beer as a yeast food for fermentation. It even helps suspend the mix of ingredients in salad dressings (it’s the second ingredient, right after water, in Kraft
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Free French Style Fat-Free Dressing), condiments, and that old favorite dessert food, hot dogs.

D
EXTROSE
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N
OT
A
LWAYS
D
EXTROSE

While corn syrup is familiar to home cooks, dextrose is certainly not. A second enzyme reaction in another room-size vat goes on for as many as seventy-two hours, concentrating the starch into what is called a pure dextrose solution, about 98 percent dextrose. There’s a small, three-way fork in the stream at this point, when some of this dextrose is pumped to another part of the plant to be made into high fructose corn syrup, some is pumped out of the plant to serve as a feedstock for its neighbors making industrial products, and some becomes the dextrose and glucose found in Twinkies.

This dextrose solution is popular stuff. One of the neighbors on the Blair campus ferments it into lactic acid for sodium stearoyl lactylate, also a key emulsifying ingredient in Twinkies. Some of the others there and at other wet milling plants ferment the dextrose into alcohol (especially ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, for fuel, alcoholic beverages, or industrial use), amino acids (including glutamate, for making monosodium glutamate [MSG]), citric acid, xanthan gum (a thickener), or even plastic. Dextrose is the fermentation base for vitamin C, as well as penicillin and other antibiotics. Some goes on to be hydrogenated into sorbitol and made into the popular emulsifier polysorbate 60. Simply calling corn syrups “sweeteners” seems to be doing them an injustice.

The crystallized dextrose listed on Twinkies’ labels is a bulking agent—an ingredient that adds fewer calories than the ingredient it replaces—that is also beloved, along with its other corn sweetener cousins, for its ability to cause browning through the Maillard reactions (when sugars and proteins react under heat). This quickly adds some brown color and smooth texture to Twinkies’ crusts when they are baked, which may be why it also shows up in Doritos Nacho Cheese
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. Dextrose crystals provide a cool feel and a desirable sheen to a filling like that in Twinkies without adding too much sweetness (corn-derived dextrose is only about 60 to 70 percent as sweet as table sugar), similar to what it does in ice cream and frozen desserts. It is completely fermentable (whereas cane sugar is not) so it serves as a successful yeast food in bread and beer. It preserves as well as cane sugar but doesn’t obliterate the taste of fruit in candies, jams, jellies, carbonated beverages, and even preserved meats. Dextrose is second only to sugar in marshmallows, and is the first ingredient in Kraft
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Sure-Jell Premium Fruit Pectin for Homemade Jams & Jellies, offering “25% less sugar than regular pectin.” High-stress athletes know dextrose can be taken directly to boost their blood sugar levels quickly—but that also means it is used in pharmaceuticals and other products for which delivering energy to the bloodstream quickly is paramount.

You can buy European dextrose in grocery stores, either a granular or an ultrafine white powder, confusingly labeled as glucose (the traditional name for it). And if that weren’t confusing enough, actual glucose only makes things more complicated.

S
YRUP AND
S
HOE
P
OLISH

One of the more curious aspects of this highly organized, science-based industry is that the pros—at major companies’ tech support call centers, on their various Web sites, in their various catalogs, or in response to various inquiries—do not agree on the meaning of the term “glucose” as listed on Twinkies’ labels. I’ve deduced that Hostess probably puts two names for the same thing on the ingredient list because the FDA requires the listing of “the most commonly used name” for each ingredient, regardless of technical duplication (same molecule, different form—kind of like ice and water). Essentially, regardless of what they’re called, these sugars do basically the same thing.

In Twinkies’ crumb and filling, glucose syrup, like dextrose powder, is used to add bulk and sweetness and to help in browning, but its main job is retaining moisture so the cakes don’t dry out. Glucose syrup rounds out the texture and flavor of cough syrups and lozenges and also helps enhance the flavor of prepared meats.

Glucose does basically the same thing—acts as a terrific humectant—in a lot of nonfood products, too: it adds smoothness, flavor, and shelf life to tobacco; brings glossiness and pliability to shoe leather; stabilizes adhesives; prolongs the setting of concrete; moisturizes air fresheners; and controls evaporation of perfumes. It helps hand lotion stay moist on your shelf for years—essentially acting as a moisturizer for a moisturizer.