Doodles ® . Used wet, it helps both candy and salad dressings set, extends Cheerios ® crispiness in milk, and binds moisture in processed meats like Oscar Mayer ® Turkey Bologna.
At home, you can make classic white sauce with it ( just cook gently with milk and butter), and make a passable cake flour from all-purpose flour by adding a little cornstarch to it. Mixed with baking soda and water, it makes some fun modeling clay; a little dumped into a tub of warm bathwater soothes irritated skin (a lot dumped in makes for a major plumbing problem).
But because cornstarch tends to form a gel after it is heated, it’s a great thickener and texturizer (imparting “body”) for moist things that you cook: soups, sauces, gravies, custard, fruit pie fillings, and puddings (cornstarch essentially is the pudding in simple recipes, along with sugar, milk, and egg yolks or margarine). Heat some liquefied cornstarch in a bowl by itself and it forms a chunk of gel that stays moist on the inside for days.
Starch helps keep Twinkies’ sponge cake springy and prevents crumbling, thus extending its shelf life. And along with modified cornstarch and dextrins, it provides texture (firmness, creaminess, and aeration) as well as moisture control to Twinkies’ creamy filling.
A P OCKLE N OW
As anyone who has struggled to make gravy knows, regular cornstarch has to be heated and stirred just so in order to avoid congealing. Since it also doesn’t last long—it simply swells and then disintegrates—the big bakeries demand something a little more forgiving, something that doesn’t require the loving care and attention of a home cook.
Just after World War II, scientists successfully made starches dramatically more useful, and especially so since 1960, with the cultural push for convenience foods. As a result, the big food processors can order something called a pre-gel, or pregelatinized starch, which has been chemically altered to thicken at various temperatures, including cold ones, and then stay swollen, providing a huge time and handling advantage to industrial bakers. (Unfortunately, no consumer version exists.)
To get starch to do this, though, there’s a trade-off. It’s put through a chemical bath that one chemical engineer prefaces as “the part you’re not going to like.” He is right. In the most common process (there are many), regular cornstarch is mixed in reactor vessels that can hold up to sixty thousand gallons (the size of a dozen tank trucks), along with propylene oxide (a petroleum product made from natural gas, chlorine, and lye or hydrochloric acid) and a watery, volatile, pungent liquid called phosphorus oxychloride that is so reactive it is handled as a hazardous material. Made from phosphorus, oxygen, and chlorine (P-O-C), which give it the rather cute nickname of “pockle,” it reacts violently with water to make hydrochloric and phosphoric acid and modifies and chlorinates the target molecules. Besides making Twinkie ingredients, pockle makes an unlikely group of products that includes pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and dyestuffs—but, as industry members say, has been used safely in food for fifty years. That may be because it is used here in a strength of less than one-tenth of 1 percent.
Sometimes the starch is bleached or treated with sulfuric or hydrochloric acid specifically to make such things as pie fillings. It takes only a few hours in the reactor vessel, agitated by a spinning propeller, to make this miracle food. The strong chemicals, bleach, and acids are easily washed out before the starch is dried and ready for making dessert.
The resulting liquid is sprayed into giant hot-air tanks, flash-dried to form a white powder that not only helps Twinkies seem denser, but above all, moister. Modified cornstarch is all about texture through moisture control, the home equivalent of expensive and hard-to-handle eggs and cream, which is why it saves food companies big bucks.
While the process may not
At home, you can make classic white sauce with it ( just cook gently with milk and butter), and make a passable cake flour from all-purpose flour by adding a little cornstarch to it. Mixed with baking soda and water, it makes some fun modeling clay; a little dumped into a tub of warm bathwater soothes irritated skin (a lot dumped in makes for a major plumbing problem).
But because cornstarch tends to form a gel after it is heated, it’s a great thickener and texturizer (imparting “body”) for moist things that you cook: soups, sauces, gravies, custard, fruit pie fillings, and puddings (cornstarch essentially is the pudding in simple recipes, along with sugar, milk, and egg yolks or margarine). Heat some liquefied cornstarch in a bowl by itself and it forms a chunk of gel that stays moist on the inside for days.
Starch helps keep Twinkies’ sponge cake springy and prevents crumbling, thus extending its shelf life. And along with modified cornstarch and dextrins, it provides texture (firmness, creaminess, and aeration) as well as moisture control to Twinkies’ creamy filling.
A P OCKLE N OW
As anyone who has struggled to make gravy knows, regular cornstarch has to be heated and stirred just so in order to avoid congealing. Since it also doesn’t last long—it simply swells and then disintegrates—the big bakeries demand something a little more forgiving, something that doesn’t require the loving care and attention of a home cook.
Just after World War II, scientists successfully made starches dramatically more useful, and especially so since 1960, with the cultural push for convenience foods. As a result, the big food processors can order something called a pre-gel, or pregelatinized starch, which has been chemically altered to thicken at various temperatures, including cold ones, and then stay swollen, providing a huge time and handling advantage to industrial bakers. (Unfortunately, no consumer version exists.)
To get starch to do this, though, there’s a trade-off. It’s put through a chemical bath that one chemical engineer prefaces as “the part you’re not going to like.” He is right. In the most common process (there are many), regular cornstarch is mixed in reactor vessels that can hold up to sixty thousand gallons (the size of a dozen tank trucks), along with propylene oxide (a petroleum product made from natural gas, chlorine, and lye or hydrochloric acid) and a watery, volatile, pungent liquid called phosphorus oxychloride that is so reactive it is handled as a hazardous material. Made from phosphorus, oxygen, and chlorine (P-O-C), which give it the rather cute nickname of “pockle,” it reacts violently with water to make hydrochloric and phosphoric acid and modifies and chlorinates the target molecules. Besides making Twinkie ingredients, pockle makes an unlikely group of products that includes pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and dyestuffs—but, as industry members say, has been used safely in food for fifty years. That may be because it is used here in a strength of less than one-tenth of 1 percent.
Sometimes the starch is bleached or treated with sulfuric or hydrochloric acid specifically to make such things as pie fillings. It takes only a few hours in the reactor vessel, agitated by a spinning propeller, to make this miracle food. The strong chemicals, bleach, and acids are easily washed out before the starch is dried and ready for making dessert.
The resulting liquid is sprayed into giant hot-air tanks, flash-dried to form a white powder that not only helps Twinkies seem denser, but above all, moister. Modified cornstarch is all about texture through moisture control, the home equivalent of expensive and hard-to-handle eggs and cream, which is why it saves food companies big bucks.
While the process may not
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