WTF is shortening?

what even is shortening kind of a tricky question to answer because the contents of this canister are radically different right now than they were just a few years ago but in short get it short shortening is a vegetable oil that has been chemically modified to the semi solid at room temperature to understand why someone might want to do that let's take a field trip to the birthplace of shortening right here actually there are a few towns that can legitimately claim to be the birthplace of shortening but Macon Georgia where I live is definitely one of them this is where a young industrialist named Wallace macaw was living when in 1905 he trademarked a substitute for lard composed mainly of cottonseed oil this is a Georgia cotton field a place it should be said eternally haunted by the ghosts of slavery growing inside those Audrey - looking pods is of course the fluffy white fiber that most of your clothes are probably made out of there's also seeds billions upon billions of oily little seeds that had little to no commercial value that is until macaw and other inventors who were working on parallel paths around the same time figured out how to make imitation lard with otherwise useless oils also soap soap is made from fat but you knew that because you've seen Fight Club to make soap first we render fat this is the mansion that Wallis macaw built for himself here in Macon local lore has it that the off-white bricks were made to look like blocks of shortening I think that's probably not true but let's just go with it this industrial process of turning liquid oil into solid fat was called hydrogenation around 1909 Procter & Gamble hired McCaw and bought up his patents they similarly acquired the work of other guys who were tinkering on the same stuff at the time and in 1911 Crisco hit the market Crisco is short for crystallized cottonseed oil why did people want this stuff well it's way cheaper and more neutral in flavor than lard and it basically never goes rancid and it was particularly popular here in the American South for the same reason that lard had been popular down here it's less likely to melt in the heat prior to the advent of air conditioning butter could melt down here at room temperature much of the year now why did they call it shortening well shortening was already in the lexicon to describe any fat used in dough in sufficient quantity to make that dough soft and crumbly a lot of sources trace that etymology to gluten strands those long proteins that make a dough stretchy the more fat in the dough the shorter those strands are the Oxford English Dictionary has a much more amusing theory though use of the word short to describe a crumbly pastry goes back as far as 1430 and it was also used to describe all kinds of crumbly materials including metals and the OED theorizes that this use of the word short was originally meant to describe not gluten strands but manure as we can read in a student's book on soils and manures by Sir Edward John Russell Cambridge University Press 1915 short manure is dung that has decomposed to the point where the undigested straw that the cow ate has broken apart into short little strands thus giving the manure a crumbly unreinforced character mm-hmm so getting back to baked goods every Christmas Lauren makes her grandmother's recipe for peanut blossom cookies look it says right on there make every year we have no choice a grandma Shoreham calls for shortening as her main fat source so last night as an experiment we made a half batch with shortening and a half batch with softened butter you creamed the fats with the sugar mix in the other ingredients and then roll the dough into little sugar-coated balls shortening balls are on their right barbells are on the left right when they come out of the oven you press in your Hershey's Kisses yes this recipe is in the description shortening cookies are on the right and let's taste them it's not necessary that they're like better or worse it's interesting as the butter ones are kind of gooey whereas the shortening ones are more kind of like cakey and crumbly the butter cookies were more gooey last night and today they're more chewy different fats react differently for all kinds of chemistry reasons way over my head but one explanation for this difference might be that butter contains about 15% water left over from the milk and that water might be reacting with the wheat proteins to make this dough a little bit more chewy also because the melting point of shortening is higher the shortening cookies spread a bit less in the oven so their texture is a little bit more cakey which one is better texture wise I think they're just different it depends what you're into but flavor-wise the butter one is definitely better you can buy butter-flavored shortening to compensate for this which is what Lauren usually uses real good stuff but I think the real magic is when you combine shortening and butter these cookies I made by mixing up our two left overdose they have some gooey chewiness from the butter and some crumbly cakiness from the shortening my favorite southern style biscuit recipe is use butter and shortening together for this very reason but what everybody wants to know is is the shortening going to kill you in the past yeah maybe it really would have the process of partially hydrogenating oil results in trans unsaturated fatty acids or trans fats research indicating these fats might make your heart explode right out of your chest started mounting in the 1990s and in 2006 a meta-analysis of studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded quote on a per calorie basis trans fats appear to increase the risk of coronary heart disease more than any other macronutrient conferring a substantially increased risk at low levels of consumption 1 to 3% of total energy intake yikes this was infuriating because the scientific and medical establishment had previously touted margarine as a more healthy alternative to butter and margarine was at the time basically just flavored and diluted shortening health authorities around the world have been moving to restrict artificial trans fats including right here in the United States where an outright ban on partially hydrogenated oils went into effect last year trans fats actually do occur naturally in very small quantities in meat and dairy but this ban is on artificial trans fats created by partial hydrogenation the Food and Drug Administration did extend that deadline for certain products to give industry more time to figure out reformulations this extension covered things like pan release agents and other things containing very small amounts of partially hydrogenated oil you might not even know about it from the label because foods in the US don't have to list lots of things on their labels if they have less than half a gram of it per serving this is one of many reasons why the official serving size of things tends to be comically small anyway that extension just ended a couple of months ago as of this recording there certainly still are Foods hanging out on store shelves everywhere that have partially hydrogenated oils on them but all of those have to be gone by New Year's Day 2021 so now we're right back where we started if the stuff in here isn't partially hydrogenated vegetable oil what is it well let's look on the label we've got fully hydrogenated palm oil that's really different from partially hydrogenated oil fully hydrogenated oil doesn't have any trans fat in it so it's better for you but it's really hard and waxy so the folks at Crisco would seem to be mixing it with other things like soybean oil and palm oil palm oil is very popular with processed food makers it's one of the few fats you can get from a plant that naturally contains a lot of saturated fat you should know that there are particular environmental concerns about palm oil oil palm plantations in places like Indonesia and Malaysia are displacing rainforests and other important tropical habitats and here's another thing you should know if the oils in here haven't been partially hydrogenated they probably have been interests terrified interesterification it's the new hydrogenation probably because US food laws don't explicitly require labels to mention interesterification food companies in general tend to be as vague as legally possible on their labels in part to protect their trade secrets i invited the makers of Crisco to discuss the contents of their product with me and my queries to the Schmucker company which owns Crisco went unanswered but don't focus all your IR on them interests terrified fats are apparently now everywhere and processed food what our interests terrified fats and should we be worried about them in our diet well that just happens to be the title of a terrific Journal article out of the UK it's linked in the description along with all of my other sources but here's one of the authors dr. Sarah berry of King's College London this is something that I've been actively researching at King's College for the last 18 years as dr. berry explains it fats have triglycerides in them triglycerides are made up of a backbone here that's the glycerol and it is esterified to fatty acids in the process of interesterification what happens is is the fatty acids reshuffled along those positions and you increase the amount of saturated fat yes it's in the middle position so that it behaves more like an animal fats not just let's say large right oh yeah I don't really know what that means either but our interest terrified fats better for you than trans fats dr. berry says we don't really know she's working on it but she does have little kids like I do and I asked her would you feed them to your children yes based on the research that we've done at Kings the research today would suggest that they have no negative health effects obviously we're still at the early stages of research and I always like to say watch this face because things might change what have we learned here today well shortening is some kind of liquid vegetable oil that a chemist has figured out how to turn into a semi-solid by one means or another and it makes foods really yummy and delicious and lasts a really long time and is shortening okay to eat in its current incarnation well surprisingly I'm feeling a lot better about that now than I did about a week ago all dietary fats have their downsides you think you can invent a better one then maybe you can build yourself a mansion made of your own fat colored bricks again I'm pretty sure that story isn't true but let's just go with it as dr. berry explains it fats are made up of triglyceride hi Freddy

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,180,800

Rating: 4.9112549 out of 5

Keywords: shortening (ingredient), vegetable shortening, substitutes for vegetable shortening, what is shortening, shortening recipe, vegetable shortening recipe, vegetable shortening cookies, peanut blossom cookies, peanut butter blossoms, crisco shortening, crisco pie crust, crisco biscuits, trans fats explained, interesterified fat, interesterification of fats and oils, interesterification, interesterified pronunciation, interesterification of oils, wallace mccaw, crisco

Id: n4IH8-io6Dw

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Lurker_Since_Forever]

The animation at 9 minutes is backwards. Saturated refers to things with no double bonds. So if the center acid was being saturated, then the center one would be all single bonds, with some double bonds on the outsides.

[u/missesnezbitthecat]

Alton Brown would be proud.

[u/TheCheesy]

Nothing makes a video a meal time video like Manure! 2:52

[u/[deleted]]

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[u/noseqpo]

NEEDS A BIGGER FLAG

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[u/hahaEli]

I just watch the whole thing and it was not that bad I learned a lot

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