Cheese Doodle Day

What the day is

Cheese Doodle Day is observed on March 5. The puffed corn snack exists because somebody was paying attention to a machine doing the wrong thing.

Origin and background

In the 1930s a Wisconsin company was grinding corn into animal feed, and moist corn entering a hot grinder emerged as puffed ribbons rather than meal. A worker took some home, seasoned it, and the result became one of the first commercial puffed corn snacks. The cheese-coated version associated with New York is generally credited to Morrie Yohai, whose family firm produced it after the war.

The physics is the same trick, industrialized. Cornmeal is forced through an extruder under high pressure and temperature, which keeps the water in it liquid well above its normal boiling point. The instant the mixture exits the die into ordinary air, that pressure vanishes and the superheated water flashes to steam, blowing the starch into a foam that sets almost immediately. It is the same steam expansion that lifts a souffle, compressed into a fraction of a second.

The cheese cannot survive that, so it is applied afterward as a powder in an oil slurry, tumbled on in a rotating drum. The orange is added colorant, and the residue on fingers is pigment carried in that oil.

The one genuinely interesting thing about eating them concerns why a bag disappears. Food scientists use the phrase vanishing caloric density for foods that dissolve rapidly in the mouth. The brain appears to use the persistence of food as a cue to how much has been consumed, so something that melts almost instantly fails to register as substantial, and the hand keeps going back. The texture is doing as much work as the flavoring.

How to take part

• Notice how fast one dissolves, which is the design rather than an accident.
• Decant a portion into a bowl instead of eating from the bag.
• Try the baked and fried versions side by side. The texture differs considerably.
• Look up extrusion footage, which is genuinely satisfying to watch.
• Accept the orange fingers as the cost of doing business.