On a muggy Friday a couple of weeks ago, Dave Arnold was covered in a fine coating of chickpea dust. He had spent the day shooting foods like buckwheat, corn, pasta, rice, and lentils out of a puffing gun—a large, steel contraption that weighs as much as a car. In the course of experimenting with a range of temperatures, from three hundred and fifty to four hundred degrees, and pressures ranging from a hundred and fifty and a hundred and eighty pounds per square inch, the chickpeas had been a casualty of too much heat and pressure; they poofed into a cloud, rather than puffing into something snackable.
The puffing gun, produced by Puritan Manufacturing, of Omaha, Nebraska, is the centerpiece of the forthcoming first exhibit of the Museum of Food and Drink. MOFAD, as it is known, is the brainchild of Arnold, formerly the director of the culinary-technology program at the French Culinary Institute; Peter Kim, the museum’s executive director; and Emma Boast, its research coördinator. Used to produce puffed cereal—think Golden Crisp—the Puritan puffing gun is a mid-century relic that embodies, in profound ways, the industrialization and commercialization of American food. It will be on display on August 17th, in Manhattan’s Foley Square.
Although the list of thoroughly American culinary innovations is crowded with items of dubious taste—of late, the ramen burger—we do have a penchant for creating things that can be consumed quickly, as Hot Pockets, Easy Mac, and foldable pizza slices attest. The cocktail, a nineteenth-century creation, is no doubt the gustatory pinnacle of our near-instant consumables. But a close second is ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, which roughly ninety-seven per cent of American families with children keep in stock.
Cereal was invented by a pair of doctors who ran sanitariums—health spas, not hospitals—in the mid- to late nineteenth century, men whose beliefs about nutrition and health were molded by Seventh Day Adventist views of diet and wellness, in particular the religion’s advocacy of vegetarianism and whole grains. One of the men, James Caleb Jackson, the inventor of Granula, the first manufactured, dry breakfast cereal, was the proprietor of the Our Home on the Hillside, in Dansville, New York. The cereal, first made in 1863, was composed of whole-wheat graham flour baked into a cake and broken apart. It had to be soaked for hours to be edible; the pieces resembled modern-day Grape-Nuts, but with even less taste. Decades later, in 1894, John Harvey Kellogg, in charge of Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, and a believer in the value of a bland diet, invented cornflakes with his brother Will. In 1895, Kellogg filed a patent for “flaked cereal and the process of creating the same,” which involved passing soaked, cooked grain “through cold rollers, from which it is removed by carefully-adjusted scrapers.” Will began to sell cereal on his own, in part because he wanted to add sugar to the flakes, initiating both the Kellogg Company as we know it and the process that transformed cereal into a whole-grain delivery mechanism for vast quantities of sugar. Over time, dozens of competing cereal companies sprang up in Battle Creek.
In 1901, while attempting to determine the moisture content in a granule of starch, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden, Alexander P. Anderson, filled hermetically sealed test tubes with cornstarch and wheat flour, and toasted the contents in a five-hundred-degree oven. Hit with a hammer, the still-hot tubes, which became pressurized as the temperature rose, exploded. The cornstarch, he found, had ballooned into a “porous puffed mass, white as snow” and nearly ten times its original volume, according to one account. Essentially, the water in the starch, unable to boil because of the hermetic seal, immediately vaporizes when the seal is released and the pressure drops; the steam expands outward and puffs the starch.
Anderson began experimenting with other starches and seeds, resulting in a patent he filed in 1902 for an “art of treating starch material,” in which he described “a dry method of swelling starch materials of all kinds to render them porous, thereby enhancing their nutritive value and rendering them more readily and completely digested.” Two years later, at the 1904 World’s Fair, Anderson débuted puffed rice, shot out of eight bronze tubes into a giant cage. Quaker Oats sold Anderson’s puffed rice, and later puffed wheat, as ready-to-eat breakfast cereals. By 1912, it boasted in an ad that “folks now enjoy a million dishes daily of Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice.”
Methods and patents for puffing grains, which defined much of American cereal manufacturing, proliferated over the following decades. Puritan’s gun, based on a Kellogg patent, Arnold said, works according to the same fundamental principles: a batch of grains is loaded into a sealed chamber, which is heated—and spun continuously, so none of the grains are scorched—until it reaches the appropriate pressure. Then a lever is hit, unsealing the chamber: the grains are puffed instantly and explode outward into a collection bin. It’s not a terribly efficient process.
It is little surprise, then, that after the Second World War, the inefficient puffing gun’s doom was sealed, Arnold said, first by the advent of continuous puffing machines, which produce a steady stream of puffed goods—grains are pre-cooked, fed into a steam-pressurized chamber, and then moved into an expansion chamber. Then, in the nineteen-seventies, cereal began to be produced by extremely efficient twin-screw extruding machines, which force the grains through an extruder barrel, mixing, cooking, and molding it along the way; most cereal today is produced with some kind of extrusion technology.
Puritan’s puffing gun has remained in production, exactly as it was in the mid-twentieth century, because it continues to be used abroad in a handful of countries, like Mexico and Peru. According to Arnold, just two employees at Puritan still know how to make the device, which costs thirty-two thousand dollars and, in MOFAD’s case, took roughly three months to arrive in New York from Omaha. “When Gary and Chris at Puritan are gone,” Arnold said, “I believe the puffing gun is gone as well.”