The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [102]
Meanwhile, I prepared two versions of the miraculous, to be perfectly frank, piecrust dough from last November’s Vogue (see this page), one made with Crisco and the other with a hydrogenated form of Olestra manufactured some time ago in the laboratory and stashed away by Marilyn for a moment just like this. Marilyn peeled ten pounds of apples with only the mildest complaint, and our talented helper Cindy Young rolled out my dough and constructed two handsome pies—which only she could tell apart. And somewhere along the way, Marilyn made her favorite fatless Olestra brownies, southern biscuits, and deep-fried chunks of chicken breast in a Cajun-style recipe.
I was shown many types of Olestra during my visit, including the Crisco-like version and the beef-tallow version for making French fries. This is where mankind truly needs Olestra—as a completely satisfactory replacement for those dietary fats that really do cause us harm, the fully saturated or hydrogenated fats people should avoid but that make many traditional foods so delicious. I was especially keen to lay my hands on some Olestra butter, but I could find none in the entire Cincinnati metropolitan area. I know they’ve made some. There could be a Nobel Prize in store for someone.
We three cooks were never alone. Every few seconds some P & G executive or scientist or engineer wandered in to have a snack, generously share their cooking advice, answer my probing scientific questions, or talk about New York restaurants. These people have been nibbling on Olestra every day for five years. None, apparently, has suffered any ill effects—or lived to tell about it.
And now for the gastronomic verdict: The Olestra apple pie was universally judged to be superior to the Crisco version—it was considerably flakier and just as tender. Marilyn’s Olestra biscuits seemed flakier than her Crisco biscuits, though also greasier. Pooris made from Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe puffed just as well in Olestra as in peanut oil, and the taste was similar. Marilyn’s fat-free brownies were fine, but I much prefer the chocolate-and-egg taste of real brownies.
There was, in taste and texture, little to distinguish the foods deep-fried in Olestra from the foods fried in peanut oil as long as they were eaten very warm. If anything, the Olestra versions seemed crispier and their flavor more neutral, which allowed the taste of the underlying foods to come through, often in unexpected ways.
But as they cooled down, many Olestra-fried delicacies left the roof of my mouth repulsively greasy, especially when we had failed to blot the food with meticulous care. The reason is that the current version of Olestra has been manufactured to stay quite thick at room temperature—it looks something like Vaseline until it is heated—which is why P & G always demonstrates Olestra melted.
Why did they formulate Olestra this way? Because the early, more liquid versions caused gastrointestinal problems. One of these—“anal seepage,” or, in my preference, “passive oil loss”—occurs when fully liquid Olestra separates from the food with which it was cooked and slips along the inner walls of people’s intestines, bypassing everything else in its way. Drops of Olestra show up on their underwear or floating in their toilets. (The FDA actually abbreviates this as OIT, “oil in toilet.”)
Procter & Gamble discovered that passive oil loss and some—but not all—of the other gastrointestinal effects (cramps and diarrhea, for example) could nearly be eliminated by making Olestra about as thick as mayonnaise at room temperature, which prevents it from separating from food in the intestines. This is the only form of Olestra the FDA has approved. But potato chips with a greasy coating the consistency of mayonnaise are not going