Hostess Sea Salt Caramel Cupcakes: The Secret Ingredient is Beef Fat

Riding the Sea-Salt Bubble
Sea salt seems to be everywhere these days: on potato chips, on chocolate-covered caramels, in bagged popcorn; in fact, it's listed prominently on the package of any food item that contains salt and needs a little extra cache. And you know that the bubble is nowhere near popped when it even finds itself sprinkled on top of Hostess cupcakes.  Fans of salty-sweet sensations everywhere will be glad to know that those salt crystals do great work here in perhaps the best new item that Hostess has ever introduced.

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All Salt is Sea Salt
Before we talk about these cupcakes' scrumptious taste, and about some real concerns for committed vegetarians, let's dispense with a little nonsense surrounding sea salt.  Salt is manufactured through one of two methods: either we pool sea water in shallow beds until the water evaporates and leaves the salt behind (and this we know as sea salt) or we mine it from underground deposits.  But those underground deposits are themselves just the remnants of massive evaporated pools of sea water, which is why mined salt deposits tend to ring dried-out lake beds, inland seas, and bays in drier parts of the world.  There's a reason, after all, that there is a great salt trade along the Sahara.  But the activation of our romantic imagination is a very real component of how we enjoy foods, which perhaps explains the enduring appeal of salt water taffy.  And if you want to close your eyes while eating these and imagine the circling gulls, the rush of the surf, and the salty spray in the breeze coming off the water, I'm not about to stop you.

I Defy You to Distinguish These Salt Crystals from Morton's Kosher in a Blind Taste Test, but the Heart Wants What the Heart Wants

Reality is Logistics and Beef Fat
These cupcakes are actually amazingly good.  On the first bite, you notice deep butter and burnt sugar notes, a burnished and mature butterscotch flavor that carries throughout the cake, thanks to a caramel creme filling and a rich salty-sweet-fatty current that permeates the cake itself.  The chewy fondant icing, which can seem a little strange on a yellow or chocolate cupcake where we're used to creamy icing, is perfectly appropriate in a caramel cupcake where we can easily imagine that what tops the cake is actually a thin sheet of caramel.  And yes, those salt crystals are always waking up the taste, pinging brightly on the tongue at regular intervals.

A Chewy Caramel Covering Studded with Bursts of Salt, a Caramel-Flavored Filling, and a Moist Crumb Makes for Industrial Cupcake Perfection.  But Vegetarians Beware, the Moisture Comes from Beef Fat

What's a little more shocking is that all this great taste is in some ways a side effect of more efficient business practices.  Before entering bankruptcy, Hostess was burdened by contractual obligations that forced all product to be delivered direct from the factory to retail stores.  The post-bankruptcy Hostess sends the product in bulk to warehouses where retailers actually pick it up as needed.  This makes it easier for Hostess to introduce special temporary items because a retailer doesn't have to arrange for special delivery of the item in advance, but rather can decide to take them on an impromptu basis without having to constantly change delivery arrangements.  But this warehousing approach required that the product have a longer shelf life, and I think this is the reason that these cupcakes (VEGETARIAN ALERT!) are made with beef fat.  I don't know for a fact that Hostess didn't use beef fat (aka beef tallow) prior to this, but the earliest mention of it I can find dates to 2014, one year after the company's re-emergence.

Beef fat makes sense as a shortening because it's one of the most shelf-stable shortenings there is and it has a neutral flavor.  If you wanted to extend the shelf life of your product, this would be an excellent choice.  Remember that the whole purpose of shortening is to add a source of moisture that, unlike water, doesn't evaporate.  This is probably the reason why these cakes are extremely moist, more so than I can ever recall a Hostess cupcake being.  And because the retailer-to-warehouse model has been operating more efficiently than expected, you're probably not getting an older product than you did before, merely a product that's engineered for more moisture in the first place.

Conclusions
In the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt asserted that the country needed "bold, persistent, experimentation" to lift it out of the doldrums.  If we may appropriate his concept and cause the slight rotation of his remains, we can say that Hostess has done the same, reorganizing and improving their business practices and trying risky and interesting new products.  Apparently Ghostbusters Green Slime Twinkies are on the horizon.  Their excellent Sea Salt Caramel Cupcake is a natural outgrowth of this new approach.  However, they probably should make more of an effort to educate the public as to the hidden animal products in their recipe.  Perhaps a discreet "contains animal products" or "not a vegetarian food" message would be appropriate.