Popping the Perfect Pop-Tart® A dry, brittle crust and exactly one sixteenth-of-an-inch of filling are the keys to replicating the supermarket favorite. by Josh Mandel
My grandmother had a saying: "Shit!" which she would follow with a delighted cackle as if, in using the word, she had just gotten away with something nasty and fun. It applied to just about any serious inconvenience, but she might easily have been talking about one of my favorite childhood breakfast foods, Kellogg's™ Pop-Tarts®. Grandma never made them for me, as she believed I thrived best on a diet of ginger ale and crispy chicken skins, or "grebbenes." But Mom let me have Pop-Tarts® all the time, usually accompanied by a glass of milk, fresh from the bottle delivered from nearby Albert's Dairy.   Eating a Pop-Tart® was a sensual delight to an 8-year-old. In those days, they arrived in foil-lined paper wrappers with a string down the side to aid in the unsealing process. As I pulled the string to slit the side of the envelope, I'd be greeted with a rare, heavenly puff of brown-sugar-cinnamon-laden factory air.   If I couldn't wait, I'd eat them "rare," but more often they went into the toaster, where the sugary outer coating and filling would become hot as lava and twice as flavorful. I never minded scorching my tongue on them, since I had already developed a breakfast machismo by having my hard and soft palates scoured raw by Cap'n Crunch®.   When I started to develop the Master Recipe for Pop-Tarts®, I first needed to define the ideal. I bought boxes of the real thing, pried the layers of pastry apart, scraped the filling together, and did a number of tastings (thanks to my patient dog Tuppy for helping with the leftovers!). My dog was wonderful about  eating all the rejects!	After much analysis, I decided that the store-bought Pop-Tarts® were close to ideal, but not quite as insipid as they could be. The pastry, I felt, should be neither flaky nor moist, either of which would keep it from getting sufficiently crispy-cardboardy in the toaster. Nor should it have buttery or dairy notes, which would be a waste of butter or dairy.   The fillings, I determined, should be sweet and bland, without too much real-fruit flavor that might belie the processed taste. It should be thin enough to see through, but thick enough to look good in photographs if you squeeze the pastry layers together to make the filling goosh out..   I decided to attack the pastry first. Any good standard pastry recipe would do as a start, so I chose the one from the back of an old Bisquik® box, giving it an extra-long knead to develop as much gluten as possible. This, I hoped, would keep it from turning out tender or flaky, or having a delicate crumb. Alas, despite the expired Bisquik®, the pastry still came out with a pleasant texture. I tried increasing the baking powder, decreasing the baking powder, increasing the flour, decreasing the flour, increasing the shortening, decreasing the shortening, increasing the baking powder and the flour but not the shortening, decreasing the baking powder and the flour but not the shortening, increasing the shortening and baking powder but not the flour, decreasing the shortening and baking powder but not the flour, increasing the flour and the shortening but not the baking powder, decreasing the baking powder, shortening, and the flour, and then I repeated all of the above variations with warm water, cold water, more water, less water, butter instead of shortening, lard instead of butter, oil instead of lard, different kinds of oil, light margarine, dark margarine, mineral oil, mineral water, heavy water, brackish water, and shredded egg cartons instead of flour.   This last finally gave me the flavor I was looking for, but it steadfastly refused to brown in the toaster. I tried replacing 1 cup of the shredded egg cartons with the same amount of corn starch, and I got the browning effect I was looking for. But, for some inexplicable reason, the pastry had acquired a strange corny, starch-like overtone and a corn-like, starchy mouthfeel. So I contacted Harold McGoo, professor of food biology at Hamburger University, and he explained why.	What was happening, McGoo demonstrated, was that the molecules of corn starch, which are "sticky", had picked up molecules of pure corn goodness from molecules of sunshine, water, and soil. He suggested that a similar starch with a milder flavor, such as modified food starch created in the laboratory and thus having no flavor or natural origin of its own, would give me the same browning effect as the corn starch only without the corny notes.   His instructions ringing in my ears like my grandmother's slaps, I went back to the kitchen to try again, stopping first at the local chemical supply store for modified food starch. While I was there, I picked up some BHA and BHT to give my homemade Pop-Tarts as much shelf-stability as possible; I also bought some dioctyl-sodium-sulfosuccinate and partially hydrogenated cottonseed and/or palm kernel oil.. Sure enough, these proved to be excellent substitutions for the beef tallow I'd been using to glue together the layers of "pastry."   The filling was another big hassle. A streusel-like mixture of brown sugar, cinnamon, flour, and butter, tortured to pea-sized crumbs with a pasty cutter, wasn't nearly gummy enough to simulate the real item. I tried adding some softened gelatin, but it combined with the butter in a strange way: it created a black, sludgey mess that stank of ammonia. It nearly ruined the ancient lead-lined mixing bowl I was using, but those bowls can take a lot of pitting before they wear out completely.   Then I remembered that big canister of Guar Gum my Grandmother used to drag out whenever she made puddings and pies. While not easy to find in your local supermarket, you can order guar gum from the Do You Have King Arthur in a Canister Flour & Tobacco Company.   The guar gum succeeded in giving my filling a feeling of gummy grit. Dark brown sugar gave a body and complexity to the flavor that I found inappropriate, so I replaced the brown sugar with Grade B white granulated sugar and caramel color. The flavor of the cinnamon was pleasant, but I replaced it with cinnamonium, an artificial substitute which is much cheaper and the flavor of which is only somewhat inferior to real cinammon's. Ask your local druggist for this; any reasonably corrupt pharmacist should be willing to let you have some for next to nothing. (CLICK HERE TO MOVE ON TO PAGE 2!)