Twinkies Gone Wild: Claire Saffitz Decodes Cheetos, Hot Pockets, Gushers and Oreos
Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio
In this nostalgic episode of Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio, host Claire Saffitz revisits her viral Bon Appétit series 'Gourmet Makes,' where she reverse-engineers iconic snacks like Cheetos, Oreos, Hot Pockets, and Gushers. The
Key takeaways
- Recreating mass-produced snacks requires deep understanding of industrial processes like drying in cornstarch and precise temperature control for candy textures.
- The act of reverse-engineering snacks teaches valuable culinary techniques applicable to professional cooking, such as tempering chocolate and mastering dough structure.
Main topics
- Reverse engineering of popular snacks (Cheetos, Oreos, Hot Pockets, Gushers)
- Food science and industrial production techniques
Notable quotes
"One of our mottos is the Pucker Puff Pepper Company is where hot sauce heroes come to die, you know. And people literally come in all day long and say, hurt me, you know, and I can hurt them."
Conclusion
This episode celebrates the hidden science, creativity, and curiosity behi
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey, this is Christopher Kimball. Next May, we're taking a culinary tour of northeastern Spain, and we'd like you to come along. You'll eat just like the locals, which means lobster stew at a folding table by the sea, and sausages and vermouth in a neighborhood taverna. You'll also make fideas a la cazola and sip cava at a small winery. Forage with a botanist and transform your wild harvest into an elegant dinner. And eat barbecue a la Catalonia in a field at the foot of the Pyrenees. Please join us. Head to culinarybackstreets.com slash milkstreet to learn more. That's culinarybackstreets.com slash milkstreet. Hey, this is Christopher Kimball. For this week's bonus, we're pulling an episode from 2020. It features one of my favorites, Claire Saffitz, back when she was decoding Cheetos, Oreos, and Twinkies. Plus, we talked to Ed Curry, the creator of one of the world's very hottest peppers, the Carolina Reaper. It's a great show, so please take a listen now, and we'll be back later this week with a brand new episode. This is Mostly Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Today we're learning about the hottest chili pepper in the world, the Carolina Reaper. Smokin' Ed Curry, creator of the Reaper, explains the addiction to eating insanely hot food. Some people actually find extreme pleasure in extreme pain. Speaker 3 (1:26) One of our mottos is the Pucker Puff Pepper Company is where hot sauce heroes come to die, you know. And people literally come in all day long and say, hurt me, you know, and I can hurt them. Speaker 2 (1:40) Also coming up, Alex, I News brews beer at home using only ingredients found in the supermarket. And we transform chickpeas using a bright Greek recipe. But first, we're chatting with Claire Saffitz. She's a pastry chef and also host of Bon Appetit's YouTube series, Gourmet Makes. Claire, welcome to Milk Street. Thanks for having me. This is kind of a confessional, but I really like watching your stuff on YouTube. And I don't watch YouTube, hardly ever. There's something, you're kind of a serious person. I mean, you're almost there against your will. There's a silliness to it, but you've accepted the challenge and are actually trying to figure it out. It's not all fun and games. I mean, maybe that's just my take, but there is something noble about your pursuit, I think. Speaker 1 (2:29) Thank you. And I'm glad that you picked up on that seriousness because there are moments where the entire thing feels extremely silly and I do question everything about my life and what brought me to another episode of Gourmet Makes. It is a very lighthearted show, but there is real cooking and technique involved and that's what kind of keeps me anchored. Speaker 1 (2:50) I didn't always see a great justification for spending three days of my time making any one particular snack food. But over time, I started to really understand the process and how, regardless of how much time I spent or how absurd it feels, I've always learned something about cooking or pastry or candy technique, whatever it is. So that's what keeps me going. Speaker 2 (3:11) Give us two or three things you've learned, actually learned about cooking doing the show. Speaker 1 (3:16) Yeah, I've learned a lot about the category of chewy, gummy, sugary candies, which there's a reason why you don't find a lot of recipes for those kinds of candies. They're extremely hard to make. But I recently learned on an episode making jelly beans that there is a drying process involved. I'm familiar with cooking sugar and corn syrup into candy at different temperatures, at different stages. always struggled through many episodes of Gourmet Makes from Twizzlers to Sour Patch Kids to get something really chewy. And I realized it was because they're drying in heated rooms in large factories in cornstarch, which is drying out moisture. So whether it's real pastry technique, like I get better at tempering chocolate, or it's about some kind of candy-making technique or really trying to master nougat, they're all lessons that I can take back with me into my normal job as recipe developer. Speaker 1 (4:08) That's the part of Gourmet Makes that I really enjoy and that makes sense to me, you know, because otherwise, why would you spend three days making a Twinkie? There's truly no point. Speaker 2 (4:17) It's an excellent question, which may be an existential one. So what is the formula there or is there no formula that makes this kind of show so successful now? Speaker 1 (4:31) I think overall for Bon Appetit, the approach has been really just to shoot. the editors in their environment in the test kitchen doing what they do. And I think as food editors, we didn't necessarily, you know, we weren't aware of optics from the outside of what we did, but people find it interesting. And I think with Gourmet Makes, the formula is really about, I mean, part of it is about me going a little crazy every episode. But it really is this kind of reverse engineering process that I think is really interesting that does tap into the regular recipe development process that we go through. So it's a lot of tweaking and tasting and saying, well, this batch, you know, I wish this batch were firmer or this batch could be chewier. And then just testing it and trying to see if you can get closer to the goal. Speaker 2 (5:19) Let's take one of the. I mean, Cheetos has always seemed to me like one of those things that only a factory could produce. I mean, I can't imagine how one does that. Speaker 1 (5:28) Yeah, it's true. Speaker 2 (5:29) Only in a factory. Only in a factory. And you did it. So could you just take us, just as an example, take us through that process, please? Speaker 1 (5:37) Yeah. The Cheeto episode is an older one. And I just recall making... basically like a cornmeal slurry and frying it. And I remember using the air fryer a lot. But the thing about Cheetos, what usually happens in an episode of Gourmet Makes is I can either get really close to the right texture or to the right looks. It either looks really good or it tastes really good. And it's hard to achieve both of those in one episode. And I think with Cheetos, it looked more like a Cheeto than it. really tasted like a Cheeto. Certainly with a lot of those fried crispy snacks, the coating, the powdered coating on the outside is a huge part of it. I felt actually that on the Doritos episode that I was, I think I was more impressed than anyone that tasted the Doritos, just how close it got to the original. I sort of wish people were more impressed with my final result. But yeah, the crispy ones. I would say that's like a mid-level Cormier makes, crispy snacks. That's generally achievable. Speaker 2 (6:38) Of all the ones you've done, which one was your most successful? The one you really felt best about your ability to solve a problem. Speaker 1 (6:48) Let's see. I did enjoy Oreos. I felt like Oreo was a good combination of an episode where I could really draw upon actual pastry knowledge and use things like black cocoa and I made my own molds. I always like when there's a little crafty component to the episode. I like to sort of... do that little, you know, some fashioning, creative problem solving, using the tools in the test kitchen. And I went out and bought food grade silicone putty that you can make into your own molds. So that was a fun episode. And I do think that the final product was a really, really great replication of an Oreo. Speaker 2 (7:24) Other than the Oreos, which I guess were a slam dunk, anything else that was really, you know, a home run for you? Speaker 1 (7:31) Recently, I did Hot Pockets. So that was a really fun one because I got to use really fun technique. I did like a little laminated pastry to make kind of a flaky dough and it was yeasted. So, you know, it sort of souffled a little bit. And so there was kind of this hybrid, almost croissant-like bread, flaky pastry texture or consistency to the dough. And then just used really good quality ingredients for the filling. Speaker 2 (7:56) So are Hot Pockets just meat pies, essentially? Hot Speaker 1 (8:01) Pockets are like inside out pizza, which is how I look at it. Although there is many different fillings and flavors, but that was that's essentially how I look at a Hot Pocket. It's kind of like a calzone, although they technically call them sandwiches. They're not great. They're not my favorite food that we've ever had on Gourmet Makes. But a homemade version is incredibly delicious. And I had a lot of fun blending. and like working it into the butter block for the pastry. So that was one where I could really be creative. And I was pretty confident about the process. So it was mostly just fun. Speaker 2 (8:32) I don't know what Gushers are. Is that something that was invented after 1969 when I stopped eating supermarket candy? What are Gushers? Speaker 1 (8:41) Yeah, I think so. Gushers to me, as a child of the 90s, Gushers are very nostalgic. It was a very common lunch box. gummy snack. It's like a little fruit snack filled with this kind of weird, thick, syrupy liquid. They're not particularly good. That was the episode, I think, where I really started to grapple with what I got myself into with Gourmet Makes because that one was really kind of, that one felt out of control even by Gourmet Makes standards. How Speaker 2 (9:11) did you solve the problem of filling something with that stuff? I mean, how did you get around that problem? Speaker 1 (9:18) So I used heavily reduced fruit juices. I think I did a pomegranate and a mango, maybe a cherry. So I had heavily reduced, lightly sweetened, like a fruit concentrate basically. And I ended up pouring the kind of gelatin mixture into tiny hexagonal molds, letting them set. And then I took... Two halves of the hexagonal molds hollowed out a little tiny circle in each, then stuck them together with more gelatin, and then took a tiny syringe and filled them with the sweetened fruit concentrate. So I made them one by one. I think I made like eight gushers after four days, like they're tiny little bite-sized snacks. And it was, that was an episode that made me kind of have an out-of-potty experience, like this is my life. I can't, you know, I can't believe this is happening. Speaker 2 (10:08) When the world ends, there will be Claire filling Gushers with a syringe, right? Speaker 1 (10:15) Right, right. I think it did become one of the kind of classic Gourmet Makes episodes. Twinkies was kind of like the pilot, and Gushers was when the format was really established. This is like we go there in Gourmet Makes, basically. Speaker 2 (10:28) I don't think you go any farther. Claire, thank you so much for being on Milk Street. It's been a pleasure. Speaker 1 (10:33) Thank you, Chris. It was great. Speaker 2 (10:39) That was Claire Saffitz, pastry chef and host of Bon Appetit's YouTube series, Gourmet Mix. Right now, Sarah Moulton and I are ready to solve your culinary mysteries. Sarah is, of course, the star of Sarah's Weeknight Meals on public television, also author of Home Cooking 101. Sarah, glad to see you. Thank you, Chris. So let's open up the phone lines. Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling? Speaker 5 (11:04) Stephanie from Orleans down on Cape Cod. Speaker 2 (11:06) Lovely spot. I'm jealous already. Speaker 5 (11:09) Come on down. We're always open. Watch out for Speaker 2 (11:11) those sharks, though. The Speaker 5 (11:12) sharks' mouths are always open, I should say. Oh, Speaker 2 (11:14) great. That's really terrific. How can we help you? Speaker 5 (11:18) Well, I'm feeling very inadequate. I know people have been baking bread for millions of years, and I'm trying to do it with an electric range and measuring cups and the best ingredients, and yet I'm failing miserably. Speaker 2 (11:32) What's going on? It's Speaker 5 (11:33) just a simple white bread, single loaf recipe with two rises, and everything seems to go fine. On the first rise, it gets way up there, but I'm careful not to let it get too high. But when I put it in for the second rise, it just doesn't get high enough, and it takes a long time, and I finally just give up and cook it. And it's edible, but it's not really good. Okay, Speaker 2 (11:59) well, it's time for the Sherlock Holmes segment here. So let me ask you some questions. How are you kneading the dough? Speaker 5 (12:05) I'm using a standing mixer with a dough hook. Speaker 2 (12:09) And how long are you kneading it? Speaker 5 (12:11) Whatever the recipe is telling me until it, you know, it seems to be sticking or coming away from the bowl. And it seems to be okay when I put it in for that first ride. Speaker 2 (12:22) And you knead it by hand for a minute just when you're finished with that, I assume? Speaker 5 (12:26) feel it and, you know, to make sure it's not too sticky. So it's Speaker 2 (12:30) satiny and