Compass Point 3:

Additive-Free Additives II:
The Sponge and Its Modifiers

The hugely complex interactions in baking chemistry are beyond the scope of this weblog, and anyway who wants to be bored crosseyed?

The point about additives is that they modify the “normal” quantities and interactions of wheat gluten, egg albumin, fats, sugars, leavening, and water when making a sponge cake; the extraordinary expansion from batter to finished Twinkie, evidently at least double what home bakers can achieve from scratch, is testament to that.

As mentioned previously, our Golden Sponge Cake is not really a “sponge” except for marketing purposes. A classic sponge would be a specie of the Foam Cake genera that contains fats only from egg yolk, whereas the Genoise and Chiffon cakes also contain added fats. I’ve made both genoise and chiffon cakes, and while the results are yummy and spongy, they have several complex and fussy production steps.

Genoise batters mix whole eggs and sugar, warmed over a hot-water bath to partially denature the egg proteins, then add salted flour, and then butter. They are leavened solely by air whipped into the batter just so.
 
Chiffon cakes start by whipping egg yolks, then slowly drizzling in liquid oil to create a mayonnaise-like emulsion. Water and flavorings are added next, then sifted sugar-flour-leavening. A sweetened egg white meringue is whipped separately, to be combined gently with the yolk batter to make a very airy, light batter.

These classic cake ingredient weight ratios run approximately:

Genoise:  sugar 1.0 : flour 0.75 : fat 0.33 : egg 1.5 : total water 1.0
Chiffon:   sugar 1.0 : flour 1.00 : fat 0.33 : egg 1.0 : total water 1.2

Excluding the filling, which by semi-informed guesswork and estimation has about half the fat and sugar, our favorite Golden Sponge Cake formula probably could run about:

Twinkies:  sugar 1.0 : flour 0.7 : fat 0.25 : egg 0.6 : total water Etc. ~2 to 4?

So we see that the Twinkies ratios are pretty much in line with classic recipes, with the exceptions of being rather lower in fat and egg and much higher in “water Etc.” Etc. is short for et cetera, Latin for “and so on”. It is the last-but-not-least And So On that comprises the additives that make Twinkies what only they can be.

From Home Kitchen to Factory Reality

For genoise and chiffon cakes, the baker must quickly pipe the batter into cake pans and bung them into the oven before the naturally-aerated batter goes flat. Even letting filled pans sit for 10-15 minutes can have a profound effect on the result.

In the factory where 100,000 Twinkies are cranked out per shift, and batters must necessarily be rapidly and simply mixed, pumped, piped, and extruded, what is the likelihood that human-scale genoise or chiffon formulas or fussy methods could be followed? Just about zero.

Consider: Twinkies’ extreme batter:cake expansion ratio suggests that the batter has almost zero entrained air, and automated manufacturing demands batter stability over a production run. These together would right off the bat eliminate traditional genoise and chiffon mixing protocols and, by implication, traditional batter formulas.

With no other method of puffing up the batter, this necessarily leads us to some rather aggressive leavening of an unusual batter, and a suitable baking method to make it all come together.

The Enablers: Additives to Achieve Targets

We can conclude that, all else equal, batter additives enable these changes in comparative compositions from classic cake to Twinkies, based on a constant weight of sugars:

Flour reduction: 7%-30%
Fat reduction: 24%
Egg reduction: 40%-60%
Water increase: 200%-300% (?)

Shelf life is extended by adding the extra water and keeping it there (humectants), and by modifying the crumb chemistry so the starches do not crystallize and become stiff, as happens in natural breads. Reduction in fat, wheat, and egg content is enabled by  synergistic emulsifiers and mono-diglycerides, soy lecithin, and proteins in soy , whey, and caseinates.

Also, while not an “additive” per se, bleaching the flour degrades the wheat gluten, making it softer and less likely to toughen under extended mixing. A common baker’s quick fix in switching to, say, unbleached flour, is to substitute some flour percentage with native and/or modified corn starch—both of which are on the Twinkies label.

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The other major function of the additives is to allow simple mixing methods to generate reliably good results. Recall that cake mixes on your grocer’s shelves have been designed for any untrained person with an electric mixer: “Dump the mix and other ingredients into a bowl and mix like hell for X minutes.” Except for the “hell” part, ahem.

For boxed cake mixes, simple mixing is enabled by the Same Old Crowd of additives, plus some New Faces not historically associated with Twinkies: bleached flour, propylene glycol mono- and diesters of fats, mono-and diglycerides, polyglycerol esters of fatty acids, DATEM (diacetyl tartaric acid ester of mono- and diglycerides), cellulose gum, xanthan gum, modified cornstarch.

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The research and development department of Browne Crowe Bakes (my kitchen) has already identified some promising unmodified protein, fat, and hydrocolloid fractions of flax, sunflower, and oat that might step in and do well enough.

The criteria for consideration include not only eliminating frankly synthetic additives, but also finding viable alternatives to soy (3 Twinkies ingredients) and corn (5 Twinkies ingredients) derivatives.

Coming up:
Interjection: Transition to a Higher Content of Food As We Know It.

Beekeeping for Poets

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