Transcripts

Steve Etlinger:
A man named Jimmy Dewar decided that he needed to find a use for some empty baking pans that were used only seasonally to make strawberry shortcake.

Steve Etlinger, author of the book Twinkie, Deconstructed…

He came up with the idea of a banana cream filled little cake that he named Twinkies after a billboard he saw advertising Twinkle Toe shoes - and this was in the Depression around 1930.

Today, the shelf life of a Twinkie is about twenty-five days but originally it was only a few days.

So, over the years they tinkered with the recipe trying to get to where they would last longer. Salvation came during and after World War II when all kinds of chemicals came on the market to replace dairy products, primarily. Once you replace egg yolk especially, you really need to add chemicals; sodium stearol lactylate, polysorbate 60, sodium and calcium casinate, mono and digylcerides - some of those are naturally present in the dairy products that were eliminated by the Twinkie recipe.

Interestingly eggs are listed as an ingredient in Twinkies.

But, it's hard to say why. I've asked a lot of food scientists because if you follow Twinkies website or Hostess website they say they sell five hundred million Twinkies a year and they use one million eggs. So, I'm figuring one five hundredth of an egg in each Twinkie - food scientists say, "Yeah, that seems right," but I can't imagine what good it would do."

You can link to Steve's website from ours: somethingyoushouldknow.net - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.