be, modified starch is easy to swallow and makes drinks extra-smooth, and so finds its way into nutritional beverages for the elderly and the infirm; it provides the all-important gelling ability in instant puddings and Kraft ® Jet-Puffed ® Marshmallows. It improves the freeze-thaw behavior in microwave meals. And it mimics, with few or no calories, that smooth mouthfeel and tongue-coating that used to be the exclusive domain of fat in low-fat desserts and salad dressings, frustrating dieters who are trying to avoid all processed carbohydrates while eating low-fat foods. It is the primary ingredient in Knorr ® instant Hollandaise Sauce Mix, which contains no eggs. That’s why it also plays an essential role in forming Twinkies’ creamy filling, and it doesn’t need any cooking. It locks in water, keeping it from “weeping” into the cake while on the shelf. In short, modified cornstarch helps us cheat, but cheat well.
This unique property is what allows Dave Krishock, baking instructor at the Kansas State University Department of Grain Science and Industry, to describe the stabilized creme filling in this way: “You pump it in and it stays forever.”
D RINKING AND F IREFIGHTING D ON’T M IX
The thick liquid cornstarch flowing from the wet mill gets hit with a double whammy of heat and acid when it is made into dextrins, also called thinned starches, which despite the name tend to be very concentrated. The dextrinizer, which holds ten to twenty thousand pounds of starch powder, heats and mixes the starch with a touch of hydrochloric acid, causing a chemical breakdown that turns it dark, sweet, and, most important, sticky. Later, the starch is dried to a white or yellowish powder, depending on what the mix master wants to make (more often cardboard than cake). Food is a sideshow, here.
Among its many uses, dextrins are responsible for the glossy sheen on printing paper, the glue on postage stamps and envelopes (due to its marvelous ability to remain inert when dry but turn adhesive when wet, and—let us not forget—to not poison us). Much of it is used to provide the glue in paper bags and corrugated cardboard boxes. Still, despite these rather unappetizing uses, it is still a regular food product, just not a good-tasting one.
Using cornstarch as glue was accidentally discovered, the legend goes, in Dublin in 1821, during the celebration of a visit by King George IV. A fire broke out in a textile factory that used potato starch for finishing cloth. Six workers, drunk on whiskey, fell into the starch water tank while trying to man the fire pump. When they finally got out, they were stuck together, and a new use was found for starch (as well as a new image for teamwork). The official version is far less dramatic, noting only that a worker observed after a fire that this roasted, brown stuff made a thick, adhesive paste when dissolved in water. No matter where the truth lies, in a slap to Irish separatists, it became known as British gums.
W HISKEY AND T WINKIES
Corn flour is the odd man out here. First of all, it is not a thickener like the starches, though it almost works like one. And unlike cornstarches and corn syrups, which are wet-milled, corn flour is dry milled, an older and simpler process with its roots in a popular product quite unlike Twinkies. ADM’s giant, Peoria, Illinois, dry-milling plant, which dominates much of the city’s Illinois River waterfront, is itself dominated not by its twenty-story grain elevators, web of train-size conveyor belts, or ten-story-high processing towers, but by massive and handsome antique brick buildings that were built during its previous life as a Hiram Walker whiskey distillery. Unfortunately for me, no whiskey odors remain.
Despite its incessant drive to use the latest and greatest technology, and despite calling the process dry milling, industrial corporate dry millers use a technique to soften the outer shells of corn kernels that was developed by Native
This unique property is what allows Dave Krishock, baking instructor at the Kansas State University Department of Grain Science and Industry, to describe the stabilized creme filling in this way: “You pump it in and it stays forever.”
D RINKING AND F IREFIGHTING D ON’T M IX
The thick liquid cornstarch flowing from the wet mill gets hit with a double whammy of heat and acid when it is made into dextrins, also called thinned starches, which despite the name tend to be very concentrated. The dextrinizer, which holds ten to twenty thousand pounds of starch powder, heats and mixes the starch with a touch of hydrochloric acid, causing a chemical breakdown that turns it dark, sweet, and, most important, sticky. Later, the starch is dried to a white or yellowish powder, depending on what the mix master wants to make (more often cardboard than cake). Food is a sideshow, here.
Among its many uses, dextrins are responsible for the glossy sheen on printing paper, the glue on postage stamps and envelopes (due to its marvelous ability to remain inert when dry but turn adhesive when wet, and—let us not forget—to not poison us). Much of it is used to provide the glue in paper bags and corrugated cardboard boxes. Still, despite these rather unappetizing uses, it is still a regular food product, just not a good-tasting one.
Using cornstarch as glue was accidentally discovered, the legend goes, in Dublin in 1821, during the celebration of a visit by King George IV. A fire broke out in a textile factory that used potato starch for finishing cloth. Six workers, drunk on whiskey, fell into the starch water tank while trying to man the fire pump. When they finally got out, they were stuck together, and a new use was found for starch (as well as a new image for teamwork). The official version is far less dramatic, noting only that a worker observed after a fire that this roasted, brown stuff made a thick, adhesive paste when dissolved in water. No matter where the truth lies, in a slap to Irish separatists, it became known as British gums.
W HISKEY AND T WINKIES
Corn flour is the odd man out here. First of all, it is not a thickener like the starches, though it almost works like one. And unlike cornstarches and corn syrups, which are wet-milled, corn flour is dry milled, an older and simpler process with its roots in a popular product quite unlike Twinkies. ADM’s giant, Peoria, Illinois, dry-milling plant, which dominates much of the city’s Illinois River waterfront, is itself dominated not by its twenty-story grain elevators, web of train-size conveyor belts, or ten-story-high processing towers, but by massive and handsome antique brick buildings that were built during its previous life as a Hiram Walker whiskey distillery. Unfortunately for me, no whiskey odors remain.
Despite its incessant drive to use the latest and greatest technology, and despite calling the process dry milling, industrial corporate dry millers use a technique to soften the outer shells of corn kernels that was developed by Native
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