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 be 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 McCaw was living when, in 1905, he trademarked a "substitute for lard composed
mainly of cotton-seed oil."
This is a Georgia cotton field. A place, it should be said, eternally haunted by the ghost
of slavery. Growing inside those Audrey II-looking pods is, of course, the fluffy white fiber
that most of your clothes are probably made out of. But there's also seeds — billions
upon billions of oily little seeds that had little to no commercial value. That is until
McCaw, and other inventors who were working on parallel paths around the 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 Wallace McCaw 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. Cisco 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.
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.
Mmmm, mmm. 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!
Grandma Sjorstrom calls for shortening as the 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
cream the fats with the sugar, mix in the other ingredients and then roll the dough
into little, sugar-coated balls.
"Shortening balls are on the right. Butter balls are on the left."
"Dear god."
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 necessarily that they're, like, better or worse. It's interesting, it's just
the butter ones are kind of gooey, whereas the shortening ones kind of like cakey and
crumbly."
"Mmm hmm."
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 percent water
leftover 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 with butter. These cookies I made
by mixing up our two leftover doughs. They have some gooey chewiness from the butter,
and some crumbly cakiness from the shortening.
My favorite Southern-style biscuit recipes 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,
"On a per-calorie basis, trans fats appear to increase the risk of [Corenary 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
margarin as a more healthy alternative to butter. Margarin 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 very small amounts of partially hydrogenated
oil. You might not even know about it from the label, because foods in the U.S. 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 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 Years 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 rainforest and
other important tropical habitat.
And here's another thing you should know: If the oils in here haven't been partially-hydrogenated,
they probably have been interesterified. Interesterification: it's the new hydrogenation.
I say "probably" because U.S. 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 Smucker Company, which owns Crisco, went unanswered. But don't focus all
your ire on them. Intresterified fats are apparently now everywhere in processed foods.
What are interesterified 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 U.K., 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 are re-shuffled
along those positions, and you increase the amount of saturated fatty acids in the middle
position, so that it behaves more like an animal fat, such as, let's say, lard or butter."
Yeah, I don't really know what that means either. But are interesterified 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 King's, the research to date would suggest
that they have no negative health effects. Obviously, we're at the early stages of research,
and I always like say, watch this space, 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 last a really long time. And is shortening
OK 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. And 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 triglycerides — hi, Freddie.