Snacks

A Deep Analysis of How to Eat Oreos

A bucket full of Oreos.

File this under information and analysis you didn’t know you needed, via Yahoo and The Independent:

Crystal Owens, a PhD candidate in MIT’s mechanical engineering department, spoke about her and her team’s study, in which they examine the fan-favourite snack, during a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal. In their work, which was published in the Physics of Fluids journal last year, these scientists studied the equal distribution of an Oreo’s creme, in which it ends up on both side of the wafer when the cookie is broken apart.

Speaking to WSJ, Owens went on to explain her team’s method: putting the cookie between two counter-rotating plates, through a device called a rheometer. She said also said that when they glued different Oreo flavours to the rheometer, it would twist the cookie open at different speeds.

However, after placing over 1,000 Oreos on to that device, these MIT scientists still found that nearly 80 per cent of the creme stuck to only one side of the wafer. Owens went on to note that regardless of how fast or slow the rheometers opened the Oreo, the results didn’t change.

“We also tested the cookies by hand—twisting, peeling, pressing, sliding and doing other basic motions to get an Oreo apart,” she said. “There was no combination of anything that we could do by hand or in the rheometer that changed anything in our result.”

The Independent

And at the very bottom of the cited article is a great YouTube video demonstrating an amazing Oreo hack. Take some milk from a straw and ‘blow’ it into the creme filling of your Oreo and doing that creates a ‘creme infused filling’ in your cookie! Wow!! Must try this next time!!

h/t: Dave Pell and Next Draft

The Half Life of A Twinkie

All the stories and legends about the half-life of Twinkies are a lie. The perception has always been that when global warming renders the world into a barren wasteland, or when a massive asteroid hits the earth like in the movie Armageddon, the one food product that would survive would be the Twinkie. With the level of chemicals and artificial sweeteners and flavors contained within the iconic snack, why would you think otherwise? Back in 2012, the Twinkies brand was on life support as Hostess was going bankrupt and people were starting to hoard the snack for posterity and to ensure their supply did not run out, as one does. And that is what Colin Purrington did, unaware that a real life pandemic would take hold of the world and drive him to search his basement eight years later for that old box of Twinkies. They’re Twinkies. They will last forever.

Like many people, Purrington believed Twinkies are basically immortal, although the official shelf life is 45 days. He removed a Twinkie from the box, unwrapped it — it looked fine — and took a bite. Then he retched.

“It tasted like old sock,” Purrington says. “Not that I’ve ever eaten old sock.”

That’s when he examined the other Twinkies. Two looked weird. One had a dark-colored blemish the size of a quarter. The other Twinkie was completely transformed — it was gray, shrunken and wrinkly, like a dried morel mushroom.

Enter some scientists from West Virginia University who did a full on scientific study of the 8 year old Twinkies and the fascinating dichotomy between some of the specimens, who on the outside looked as fresh as if you would have bought them today at your local 7-11, and others who had been completely ravaged by a fungus that had transformed the Twinkie into a shriveled mess, while sucking the air out of the packaging.

They noticed that the wrapping on the mummified Twinkie seemed to be sucked inward, suggesting that the fungus got in before the package was sealed and, while the fungus was consuming the Twinkie, it was using up more air or oxygen than it was putting out.

“You end up with a vacuum,” Lovett says. “And very well that vacuum may have halted the fungus’s ability to continue to grow. We just have the snapshot of what we were sent, but who knows if this process occurred five years ago and he just only noticed it now.”

Lovett had expected a horrific smell to hit them when they opened the snack cakes. “I though the smell would possibly kill one of us, but because of the mummification there really was no smell at all,” he says, “which was really a pleasant surprise.”

Moral of the story. Your snacks won’t last forever, even those as artificial as Twinkies. Eat them when they are fresh.

I’ll Have Fries With That

A definitive ranking of french fries from a wide variety of fast food franchises (national and regional) from the Los Angeles Times. I am in staunch agreement with the top ranking that they gave to Five Guys french fries. They are just the best.

Not only is Five Guys No. 1, but it’s also so far ahead of everyone else it’s almost unfair. You get a generous heap of hot, properly salted, natural-cut spuds, with a good balance between crispy fries and the odd one that’s pleasingly soft. Five Guys fries in peanut oil, which imparts a milder taste than more industrial oils that mask potato flavor. These were the fries that tasted most strongly of tuber.

Lucas Kwan Peterson – LA Times

While the list is comprehensive and very well researched, there are a few items and omissions that need to be called out.

  • Chick Fil-A’s Waffle Fries were ranked very low (#14) and I have to respectfully disagree with that assessment (and, we’ll ignore CFA’s polarizing political stances) as, well, they are waffle fries! When they are a little well done, there are few choices better.
  • It is a crime that they did not include Nathan’s Hot Dogs Crinkle Cut Fries. The Nathan’s fries have substance, they are crunchy on the outside with all sorts of potato goodness on the inside. They are big, thick fries and they are such a great complement to a pair of Nathan’s hot dogs.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go get some dinner at Five Guys.

Photo Credit: Los Angeles Times