Apple Pie Oreos: In Praise of the Fake

Our Chemical Romance
Mark Twain quipped that "a 'classic' is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read" and so it is today with the cult of the all-natural.  We all claim to desire all-natural foods, but when General Mills replaced the artificial food dyes in Trix with the drab natural hues of strawberries, turmeric, and beet juice, customers revolted and the joyous artificial rainbow was restored.  Keeping a convenience food all-natural is relatively easy when all you're doing is producing a canned, dried, or frozen rendition of an actual dish; it's easy to put real cheese on a frozen pizza and real beef in Hormel chili.  What are canned peaches in essence but, well, canned peaches?  But if you want peach-flavored bubble gum or grape lollipops or kiwi-mango gummi bears, you've got to break out the chemicals.  Intuitively we understand this and the reasonable among us don't object when our pack of Starbursts discreetly allows that it contains "natural and artificial flavors."  Those mysterious flavor compounds that imbue taffy with the essence of banana are uncannily effective.

Honestly, which would you pick?  The technicolor tribute to industrial engineering that is Trix Original or the East German all-natural version?

Synthetics: As American as Apple Pie
Nabisco has been applying, and continues to apply, this lesson in their dozen-plus-per-annum excursions into new and novel flavors, and their proudly artificial Apple Pie Oreos are a vindication of that approach.  Would it have been technically possible to dry out real apples, puree them, and fold that puree into the creme filling that's sandwiched between two graham-flour wafers?  Indeed, it would have been, but the creamy texture would have been disrupted and the apple flavor would have been quite faint.  One problem with natural flavors is that they're not very concentrated.  A wedge of apple requires all of its substantial bulk to transmit a potent punch of apple flavor.  It's too busy being an apple to taste of an apple in a pungent way.  That's why a real apple pie has to be about 85% apple by weight in order to taste strongly of apples.  With Apple Pie Oreos, Nabisco needed a creme filling that constitutes about 33% of the cookies weight to supply a blast of apple that would suffuse the entire cookie, and for that they needed to break out a full battery of ersatz compounds.

The package art neatly demonstrates the challenge that Nabisco faced: compressing the taste of layer upon layer of apple slices into a thin sliver of sweetened shortening.  Science knows the chemical components that make up the apple flavor profile.  One bite of this punchy little cookie and you'll f***ing love science.

The Canny Choice to Emulate Pie

Oreos' choice of novelty flavors haven't always been the wisest.  Root Beer Float and Banana Split may have been the most egregious follies, for they both attempted to emulate items known for being cool and refreshing with a cookie that is, by it's nature, room temperature and crumbly.  Aiming to simulate pie is genius because of the tight relationship between the original and the copy.  Pie crust is made of flour and shortening.  Oreos are dry, sweetened flour wafers filled with sweetened flavored shortening.  The use of graham flour in the wafers also makes a lot of sense, for it makes the cookie looser, more crumbly and granular, so that when the sweet apple-flavored shortening mixes with the coarse graham crumble, it's like tasting the melted butter that bastes the layers of flaky pie crust.  With all these elements attended to, the only x-factor was how convincing the artificial baked apple flavor would be.  I'm happy to report that the rich apple creme tastes extremely realistic.  No, there are no juicy chunks of apple, but when you've been chewing on a real bite of apple pie, those chunks collapse into a undifferentiated mash within your mouth fairly quickly anyway.  These cookies don't taste like a bite of fresh apple pie -- they taste like a bite of fresh apple pie 10 seconds later.  A lovely image, I know, you're welcome.

Redolent of golden, oozing baked apple coated in caramel-like sauce, nestled in rich, buttery, brown-sugary crust, Apple Pie Oreos reminded me of another junk-food favorite: Taco Bell's Apple Empanada which, while delicious, also has hardly any real apple in it.  What's their excuse?

Conclusions, But No Consensus

My enthusiasm notwithstanding, these don't seem to be for everybody.  These cookies attracted much attention within the Food Kingdom offices, with Maureen F., James N., and Brian S. all having a go.  Maureen, hopefully by mere coincidence, is out of the office today, but James and Brian both keyed in on what they perceived to be excess sweetness.  Said Brian, "it does have a hint of apple taste but it's way too sweet for me.  It doesn't taste at all like an Oreo, which is not a good thing.  Agreed James, "[it] tasted a lot more like apple pie than I expected, but it was also overpoweringly sweet.  I'll stick with the classic Oreos" showing that for some, making a pie out of Oreos is more successful than making Oreos out of a pie.  Dear reader, you shall have to sort this out for yourself, which you may do for what is apparently a limited time.

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