—Interlude—

Twinkies Hows and Wherefores:
Scrounging for Evidence

It occurred to me in my search for “Additive-Free Additives” that the case had not really been made for their assumed continued use in NOT-winkies. A little supporting evidence and basic logic are needed.

A peek at the Hostess Twinkies production line

 
Hostess did not exactly open their doors wide to casual observers, especially not with still or video cameras. One exception, at a time when Twinkies were less vilified, and documentary journalism was more brash and bushy-tailed, was in 1990 when a journalist from Seattle’s KING5 News paid a wee-hours visit to the Hostess factory here in downtown Seattle. Some shots below are stills from that old report; others were harvested from a business news site.

Prep and filling of 36-cuptray (1990)

Here you see the Twinkies baking trays being filled. Each aluminum tray has three dozen cups in a 2x18 array. If you look closely you can see that each cup seems to have been prepped with a release coating, probably a lecithinated shortening or some such. The batter flow is pretty smooth in this 1990 production run.

Another shot of the tray filling (2010+)

This is a more-recent shot. The ripples in the batter puddle would seem likely to persist for a time after the tray moves on. This batter seems much thicker.

Filled tray cup just in oven (1990)

Again from the 1990 run, note the relatively shallow batter puddle in the cup. Notice the fish-belly pallidity of the batter—no Golden at this stage of production.

Cakes just out of oven (1990)

See how each cake just reaches the top of its cup, and shows a centerline suggesting the pattern of batter cooking and expansion.

Cooled cakes ready for filling (2010+)

One might conclude that over two decades the formula was adjusted to create a more uniform surface of the cake “bottom” (the top exposed to hot oven air).

Cakes being stuffed with Luscious Creamed Filling

The filling machine plunges downward in less than a third of a second, stabbing each of 36 cakes with three hollow spikes, which pipe in the filling from a little round reservoir that is refilled between tray cycles.
 

An arm smartly flips each pan upside-down

The cakes are depanned, three dozen at a time, by flipping and dropping the pan—whack!—upside-down onto a conveyor belt.


So, some points to consider:

• The batter starts out pale white.
• The batter is unusually thick and with a ropy, syrupy character.
• The cake expands to about 3-4x the initial batter volume.
• The cake pan cups are (probably) prepared with a release coating.
• The cooled cakes have to be depanned with a smart rap on the conveyor surface.
• The “bottoms” of the finished cakes—formerly arranged facing outward in the cellophane package, in later years placed face-down on coated card stock—have after baking turned medium-brown. The sponge has assumed the familiar Golden color throughout.

From these we observe and can conjecture the following:

• Quite remarkable in the 2010+ production snapshot is the remarkably viscid, gluey consistency of the batter, somewhere between Elmer’s Glue-All® white PVA household glue and bathtub caulk. See how, due to its ropy nature, the batter tapers to a string that drapes over the trays as they move along the production line.
   
• The Golden-yellow color of the cake sponge seems to appear during baking, probably aided or hue-adjusted by the artificial colors. It probably results from reactions between whey proteins and sugars in the heated high-moisture batter. This is in contrast to the well-browned flat side which bakes darker due to the Maillard reaction.
   
• The volume expansion of the cake is highly atypical. Most home cake batters are formulated to fill the pan about halfway for a 200% final volume; this formula, by contrast, expands to maybe 300%-400% the  batter volume.
   
• To accommodate filling injection without bursting the cake, the cake’s internal crumb density must be quite low, particularly in the central-upper volume of the cake, possibly with a slight concavity after cooling. It is likely the sponge needs to cling to the cup sides baking expansion, contracting slightly only near the baking-phase end and during cooling.
   
• Despite the promotional name “Golden Sponge”, this does not seem to be a sponge cake in the traditional sense, but rather a hybrid batter cake with the chemistry after a chiffon or Madeline-type cake (see prior posts this weblog), which latter also is depanned by the pan-drop method.
   
• Hostess would not have put in almost 3x more additives (“2% or less”, and therefore hypothetically adding up about 70% of the cake dry weight) than food ingredients, unless they were necessary to producing exactly what comes off the production line.

So dispensing with additives is no way to end up with a Twinkie or NOT-winkie.

Coming up (really next time):
Compass Point 3: Additive-Free Additives II: The Sponge

Beekeeping for Poets

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