9781422280430

Types of Additives

▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼▼

What’s Really in a Twinkie

faded its bright yellow color and caused its outer shell to flake. The cake was less than spongy. Still, the Twinkie was mostly intact—although, to be fair, probably indigestible (no one ate it to find out). The story of the world’s oldest Twinkie is the story of additives and synthetic ingredients that food makers add to the things we eat and drink. Natural ingredients such as milk, butter, and eggs spoil rather quickly. Yet when combined with an assortment of chemicals, food gets a new lease on life. It stays fresh longer and seldom loses its color or shape. Some additives even make food taste better. According to Ettlinger, there are no eggs in Twinkies to stabilize the cake batter or to make it last longer on the store shelf. Instead, bakers infuse the cake with monoglycerides and diglycerides (both fatty acids). They also use polysorbate 60 (made from sugar alcohol and ethylene oxide, which comes from crude oil). The compound does a variety of jobs, including helping the cake retain water. That’s partly why Twinkies are so moist and their filling is so creamy. There is no butter in a Twinkie. Instead, the cake gets its buttery flavor from diacetyl, an organic, yellow-green compound used in microwave popcorn. Believe it or not, there’s only one true preservative in the snack—sorbic acid, a natural organic compound. ▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲▲ The author Steve Ettlinger spent an enormous amount of time researching what was really inside the Twinkie. In his book Twinkie, Deconstructed , Ettlinger says the main ingredients, besides flour, are several types of added sugar—specifically high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, and glucose. In addition to making the cake taste sweet, sugar provides color and retains moisture that improves the snack’s shelf life.

11