On a serious note, they start getting stale after about a month or two, a surprisingly short period of time. I haven’t bought any for about a year or so. I used to get the banana-cream flavored ones, but they stopped making them and switched to making the horrendous chocolate-cream ones. I got lucky (or so I thought) and found a single box of banana-creams way in back. I neglected to check the date, and bought it, only to find out they were stale. They got somewhat harder, drier, and much less appealing.
Enjoy what you can get now. I just hope someone else steps in and makes an equivalent in banana-cream flavor.
They already don’t taste the same. Not knowing anything of Hostess’ labor problems, I bought a box of Twinkies, and they just seemed oily and not anywhere near as good as I remembered.
After a suitable absence, they will re-appear on the market, with a new taste, to be called “New Twinkies”. A massive backlash of old-school twinkists will arise, clamoring for the old flavor. The new company will re-introduce the original formula, under the brand name “Twinkies Classic”, at twice the price.
And of course, Twinkies are made [more or less exactly the same] under license in other countries. Importantly for Americans, they are made in Canada and won’t be disappearing with the cessation of the U.S.-based production lines.
Now I’m envisioning Twinkie-legging, a la Prohibition-era Canadian entrepreneurs…
They ought to put some Twinkys in “time capsules” I don’t think they could decay-they are loaded with chemicals. When you opened a pack, you got a blast of chemical smelling gas-enough to scare me.
I do hope that “ring dings” will still be produced -they are awesome!
It’s an urban myth that Twinkies have some extraordinary shelf life. They last relatively long for a delicate baked/filled cake - most bakeries toss such things at the end of each day, as they are inedibly hard or gooey by the next day - but if you look the expiry date on a package, it’s only about ten days out. Poundstone covered this in Big Secrets.
Of course they are loaded with chemicals; even water is a chemical. Here is an article that includes pictures of most of the ingredients used; some have chemical names and are inorganic but are ingredients found in many other foods (like iron, or calcium sulfate aka gypsum); the only truly artificial chemicals are the colors (they may also use partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in place of animal fat as shown, more likely than not, since it is probably cheaper).
Myself, I haven’t eaten a Twinkie in like 10 years, but not necessarily because of any particular ingredient they contain; they are junk food.
Probably not the same factories, or the same workers. And that might be a good thing.
Hostess says that they’ve tried to find someone to buy them out, but nobody was interested because Hostess’ bakeries are all old and crappy. What’ll probably happen is, some other company will buy the rights to the name Twinkies, and make then at their own bakeries.
Heard on the radio today that the bankruptcy judge is forcing Labor and Management into arbitration, and that there is indeed another company that wants to buy not just the name, but the actual business. They feel that they can get a deal on the purchase, invest in the infrastructure and turn it into a profit making enterprise again.
I assume firing the bigwigs that keep giving themselves multimillion dollar raises while asking the plebs actual working on the factory lines to take cuts is the first step in their business plan.
Are they leavened with yeast? Are they kosher for Passover?
In other news… I saw today (11/20/2012) that the arbitration that the judge ordered fell through, and with that, it’s all over. (Don’t have a cite handy, but I trust that by the time you read this post, it will be all over the news sites.)