Pastry Chef Attempts To Make a Gourmet Twinkie | Bon Appetit - Summary

Summary

The narrator attempts to recreate a Twinkie at home by analyzing the ingredients and texture of a store-bought Twinkie. They start by making a classic yellow cake, but it doesn't turn out as expected. They then try a different recipe, a genoise cake, and later a Swiss meringue buttercream filling. However, the filling doesn't hold up well over time. They then switch to a Swiss meringue buttercream with a butter base, which works better. The narrator also experiments with different filling techniques, eventually settling on a method that involves hollowing out the cake and filling it with the buttercream. Finally, they achieve a successful recreation of a Twinkie using a chiffon cake recipe with oil instead of butter, and a Swiss meringue buttercream filling. The narrator provides the recipes for the cake and frosting at the end of the video.

Facts

Here are the key facts extracted from the text:

1. A Twinkie is a snack cake filled with cream.
2. Twinkies are baked at a temperature that creates a specific chemical reaction.
3. The crumb of a Twinkie is even and tight with no large holes.
4. The cake must be dry to prevent it from falling apart when the cream is added.
5. The cream is injected into the center of the cake in three different places.
6. The ingredients in a Twinkie include leached enriched wheat flour, sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, animal and vegetable shortening, and disodium phosphate.
7. The cream in a Twinkie has a stretchy texture, similar to a marshmallow.
8. The original Twinkie has a metallic taste, possibly due to the disodium phosphate ingredient.
9. The test kitchen used a classic yellow cake recipe as a starting point for replicating Twinkies.
10. The 7-minute frosting used in the test kitchen is an egg white-based meringue.
11. The meringue frosting was replaced with a Swiss meringue buttercream to eliminate temperature differentials.
12. A chiffon cake was used as an alternative to the yellow cake recipe, as it uses oil instead of butter.
13. The ingredients for the cake recipe used in the test kitchen include cake flour, sugar, baking powder, kosher salt, unsalted butter, buttermilk, vegetable oil, egg yolks, egg whites, and vanilla extract.
14. The ingredients for the frosting recipe used in the test kitchen include egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar, unsalted butter, and vanilla extract.