The Anatomy of a Twinkie

"Twinkies' buttery flavor provides the richness we expect from cake and likely also helps to mask their oiliness. Since due to cost and rancidity issues there's no room in a packaged cake like Twinkies for fresh butter, artificial butter is the answer. ... The most surprising thing about it is that it really stinks." In fact, we learn, many flavor chemicals smell "positively awful." Even natural flavors like vanilla have so many different flavor elements that some of them have unappealing notes, at least to some people.

"Memory is also important to taste.... When we eat a favorite snack cake, we expect it to taste exactly as we remember from last time, or from childhood." And we expect it to feel the same. In Twinkie Deconstructed, author Steve Ettlinger provides an ingredient-by-ingredient analysis of just how Twinkies are put together: the flavors of sugar, vanilla, and butter; the texture of filling and cake; and the way the cake stays dry and the filling stays creamy. I sort of reacted to this when I took a bite of the Twinkie, but I could also detect some of the chemical notes in its composition.

In all Ettlinger counted 39 ingredients listed on the package of Twinkies a few years ago. He points out that the recipe subtly changes over time -- my Twinkie box was indeed just a bit different, but of course sugary-buttery cake and creamy vanilla filling predominate. Two of the three main flavors, vanilla and butter, are present only in artificial form, and another expected component, eggs, is mainly there as artificial stabilizers, with maybe 1/500 of a real egg in each Twinkie.

I decided to buy a copy of Twinkie Deconstructed when I celebrated Twinkie Day last week, with my first Twinkie purchase in many years. I found the book quite fascinating. I liked the description of each ingredient's function in creating taste or texture in the baking process, the history of the product or the story of its invention, and the descriptions of how each one is made.

In his quest to deconstruct the Twinkie, the author visited the manufacturing plants where most of them are milled, refined, mined (yes, chemical leavening comes from mines), assembled or derived (mostly from petroleum), and often secretly manufactured (as in the case of vitamins). His sense of panic when deep down in a soda mine was especially memorable. His text lists of other processed foods that use each of the components, especially the artificial ones. Even flour, the least processed ingredient, is a pretty highly processed substance. Did you know that some of the fat in Twinkies is from beef? Me neither. Wow!

Above all, I was very intrigued with a relationship between what Ettlinger found and the article by Harold McGee that I mentioned this morning in my post Why some people hate cilantro. The complexity of flavors Ettlinger describes, such as vanilla or butter, means that they often include flavor elements that may be disgusting to some people, but they are very complex with dozens of elements that are perceived all together. In McGee's article a parallel example is cilantro. Its complex flavors often seem too much like soap or bugs to Americans who are unfamiliar with the herb. Butter is similarly complex, in that it has some very unpleasant elements. People unused to dairy products may focus on this stink rather than on the creamy dairy taste that we learned to love as children -- just as some non-cilantro eaters react to the bad elements of that flavor combination. Lifelong eaters simply don't notice the bad parts -- the undeniable stinkiness of artificial butter is due to the unnatural concentration of some of these elements and the absence of others, and it's used in such small quantities that it doesn't matter.

(Quotes: p. 210, 200; also see News For Curious Cooks: Curious Cook in the New York Times: Cilantro flavor, loved and hated)