Pastry Chef Attempts To Make a Gourmet Twinkie | Bon Appetit

[Music] before we can make our own Twinkie we have to know what a Twinkie really is in essence a Twinkie is a snack cake that is filled with cream it's baked at a temperature where you get that my yard reaction and if I break into it the crumb looks very even and pretty tight so there's not large holes in it it has to be pretty dry cake so that it doesn't fall apart once you add the cream and it looks like the cream has been injected into the center of this cake in three different places so that's good to know oh so it has this a little bit of a stretch to it but I do like that sort of like a marshmallow II I know I'm gonna try and not replicate that smell yeah yeah I'm gonna go in here like all the rest of them will you eat one with me in solidarity okay so like the first few seconds I think are pretty good I mean I think needs to be bad for you other than that I mean fair game man it's really metallic and perhaps it's the disodium phosphate ingredient wise we have leached enriched wheat flour sugar corn syrup high fructose corn syrup animal and vegetable shortening tallow hydrogenated tallow cottonseed oil mono and diglycerides polysorbate 60 dextrose calcium carbonate himself agar eggs that's good water disodium phosphate that's bean ghana fied corn starch corn syrup solid left at the podium at the end of class a sort of natural and artificial flavors enzymes yellow 5 red 40 the end a lot of the things in here I recognize the stabilizers immediately we eliminate a lot of these ingredients right time to get baking one place to start is to separate tests one is to take a classic yellow cake this is really inside the Test Kitchen then I might also try another style of spun called gen woz here we go taste on all my pastry detective work I think that's step number one we need we go corn starch oh you're a broken egg oh my god I don't I didn't preheat my oven to terrible that really should have been step number one oh this cake doesn't have any chemical leavener so no baking powder no baking soda all of the lifts that it gets comes from the air that I already worked into the eggs okay okay so I overcooked the sponge and they shrunk a lot which was not something I was anticipating they look like pork chops I think it needs a little more time and I overfilled them Hey okay this is harder than I thought it was gonna be but honestly in terms of overall shape and color and texture could be worse now I'm just getting together the ingredients for the 7-minute frosting it's a very stiff meringue so it's egg white based I just switch to lecture mixer otherwise I'll be here for the next 45 minutes oh you guys so it has that little bit of stretch that I felt like the cream inside the Twinkie had which is very good I think the sign to stop squeezing is when it starts to kind of flow out and I'm hoping that the cream is getting in there okay hear me we had a little problem here way away under-filled like not enough cream at all because I think what was important about the original Twinkie is that those pockets of cream kind of ran together I know now for next time I have a yellow cake recipe and I want to see how it compares to the Jen waz from yesterday I think it'll be maybe a little more tender have a little more richness from added butter also one slight difference is that it uses a little bit of oil in the cake so that actually to me is like something that feels more Twinkie like oh thank you yeah those look good nice and golden give it a tap bigger tap okay oh all right there we go not so bad I am feeling like these look really good really nice even color like little beautiful gold bars Brett what do you think pretty good right classic yellow cake this is Jen was that's standard yellow cake they look way better right way better yeah when you fill them and then they hang out inevitably some hydrating is going on yeah inside well we have a test right here these are Twinkies that I hydrated overnight and let them sit out at room temperature to see what happens oh my god the cream like disappeared oh my god the creams in the Twinkie is gone maybe it can't be meringue coz meringue is mostly air and like is it just gonna deflate and absorb into nothing over time apparently yes fed of a seven minute frosting I'm going to use a Swiss meringue buttercream for basically creating a cold emulsion jordu trying to eliminate the temperature differential between the outside air the eggs and the butter it's looking really good really really smooth very glossy and I feel like I'm getting a lot in there but I don't know I want to see oh my god no pathetic okay I'm gonna try an alternate technique for filling them or I basically hollow out a piece fill it and then stick the bottom back on another idea to get that same like three dot pattern with the cream is to try even another filling technique where I bore out in three different places so I think we should cut open the three different styles and see what worked best this was just piping with the nozzle and need to insert the nozzle further into the cake but not that this is the one where we cut out the bottom guess what's not great about this one is the bottom kind of wants to come off this is the one where we board with the apple core it's pretty even it's pretty centered overall really not bad pretty excited to try it it was really good what do you think it needs like you want it to be chewy yeah I want yours to be junior cake if it really supposed to be chewy Oh Brad just told me I should not make a good yellow cake I should make a bad yellow cake spongier how do you get a sponge here oh my god a chiffon cake that's a good idea cuz that's an oil-based cake yeah oh my god this is really throwing a wrench into the oh that's such a good idea Judy oh thanks a lot Brad today I'm back to try one more type of cake and that is a chiffon cake still a sponge but it has oil instead of butter it might work well for a Twinkie because as we know from reading the ingredient list there is no butter in a Twinkie so I need vegetable oil like a neutral oil because I don't actually flavor the cake [Music] there's a weird-shaped going on I think like you see kind of where the bubbles were in the egg I don't feel that good about it on the oh looks as good as the yellowcake oh my god it's like so sad looking great what are you gonna go back to no I think that just a yellow cake a happy mixture of both is that doable like Frankenstein them yeah Twinkies are Frankenstein in my opinion the only thing I can think of is like that I could try doing is taking the yellow cake recipe and making it just like this by separating out the whites from the whole eggs and whipping them and folding them in at the end maybe it's not a bad idea [Music] feeling this one there's some moistness like you kind of get a little bit of like a buttery residue on your hands very happy about that I'm gonna break it open and see inside voila it looks really good the base of it is butter rather than meringue so it didn't just like kazaaam into air they're really really delicious well cookies are not making him again so I'm glad that I went the chiffon route cause I don't think I would have added in beaten egg white something about the texture like clued me into that final step I mean I think this is how I would want but we need to taste like if someone just described to me what it was supposed to be this is how I would imagine it to be well thanks I feel like we yeah I think we accomplished what we set out to do [Music] here's what you'll need if you want to make the Twinkies at home for the cake 3 and 1/3 cups cake flour 2 cups sugar 1 tablespoon baking powder 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1/2 a tsp baking soda 2 sticks unsalted butter at room temperature 1 cup buttermilk at room temperature 2 tablespoons vegetable oil by large egg yolks plus 3 large egg whites and 1 tablespoon vanilla extract so whisk together all of your dry ingredients in the bowl of an electric mixer add the butter buttermilk and oil and beat on medium speed until it's smooth add your egg yolks and vanilla and beat again until smooth and light with your egg whites to stiff peaks and fold into the batter you've got piping bag to fill the molds about two-thirds of the way and then bake in the oven until they're risen and golden brown around the edges about 20 minutes so for the frosting you'll need two large egg whites a half a cup of sugar a quarter of a teaspoon cream of tartar two sticks unsalted butter that are very room temperature and one tablespoon vanilla extract combine the egg whites and the 1/2 cup sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer beat over a double boiler until the mixture is thick and white and it registers 160 on an instant-read thermometer with the egg white mixture until the sides of the bowl are room temperature a tablespoon at a time add your butter feeding on high until the mixture is super thick and light then add your vanilla transfer the butter cream to a piping bag that has an injector tip fitted on the end flip the Twinkies over and insert to tip at the injector about a half inch down into the cake and squeeze evenly until you can see the size of the Twinkie expand and enjoy alright there's only one thing left to do oh by Twinkie

Channel: Bon Appétit

Views: 6,990,983

Rating: 4.7553806 out of 5

Keywords: cake, cream, frosting, hostess, ingredients, pastry, twinkies, twinkie, claire saffitz, genoise cake, sponge cake, yellow cake, 7 minute frosting, chiffon cake, twinkies recipe, twinkies ingredients, homemade twinkies, how to make twinkies, make your own twinkies, snack cake, twinkies cream, twinkies filling, what is in twinkies, twinkie recipe, brad, brad leone, it's alive, food, bon appetit

Id: lD2OOTx2G9k

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/newforaday]

Surprised at the other responses because I really liked this. I thought this was pretty endearing in the way she was getting frustrated, but at the same time having fun trying to figure out the best way to go about this.

Didn't find her voice annoying either, and I'm a stickler for that.

[u/rpilek]

That was really interesting, very cool. Thanks for posting.

[u/Poepopdestoep]

I know it's normal in the US, but the Imperial system of measuring still annoys me. Other than that, two sticks of butter are almost as non descript as you can get

[u/daklaw]

I mean, I get that twinkies are not the healthiest by a long stretch but why buy so much and then throw them away? couldn't they have given those to hungry homeless people? why waste?

[u/julian0024]

I'm not a fan of throwing food away.

[u/ReadySetGonads]

I was just thinking about this like yesterday

[u/b42thomas]

i feel this would make a good snl skit