Today in Tedium: They change the color of our skin. They get stuck in our teeth. But for some reason, we can’t stop eating cheese curls, the puffiest snack food ever created. But these corn-and-powder snacks didn’t just fall like manna from the sky into our bowls, always there for us ahead of our Bojack Horseman marathon. The story of the cheese curl is one of the more unusual creation stories in snack-food history. Let’s talk about it. It’s weirder than you’d think. — Ernie @ Tedium

(via Etsy)

Who invented the cheese curl? One story involves a piece of agricultural equipment

Wisconsin, the agricultural hub that it is, has given us a lot of food innovations over the years. (Three words: fried cheese curds.)

But some of those innovations, like the process that gave us the modern cheese curl, were complete accidents.

But the accident proved fruitful for Flakall Corporation, a Beloit, Wisconsin animal feed manufacturer whose owners later switched gears to producing snack foods, all thanks to the way the company cleaned its machines. The company’s approach to producing animal feed was to put the material through a grinder, effectively flaking out the corn so more of it could be used to get as much usable material as possible from the grain, as well as to ensure cows weren’t chewing any sharp kernels.

A feed grinder. (patent filing)

“This flaking of the feed is of advantage because it avoids loss of a good percentage of material which otherwise is thrown off as dust, and gives a material which keeps better in storage by reason of the voids left between the flakes, such that there can be proper aeration, not to mention the important fact that flaked feed is more palatable and easily digested by the animal,” the firm stated in a 1932 patent filing.

The grinder did its job, but it wasn’t perfect, and periodically required cleaning to ensure it wouldn’t clog. One strategy that Flakall workers used was to put moistened corn into the grinder. During this process, however, something unusual happened: the moist corn ran directly into the heat of the machine, and when it exited the grinder, it didn’t flake out anymore—it puffed up, like popcorn, except without the annoying kernels.

By complete accident, Flakall had invented the world’s first corn snack extruder.

Edward Wilson, an observant Flakall employee, saw these puffs come out of the machine, and decided to take those puffs home, season them up, and turn them into an edible snack for humans—a snack he called Korn Kurls.

Another way to put this is that when you’re eating a cheese curl, you’re noshing on repurposed animal feed.

How a cheese curl is made. (patent filing)

This state of affairs led to the second patent in Flakall’s history, a 1939 filing titled “Process for preparing food products.” A key line from the patent:

The device preferably is designed so as to be self-heated by friction between the particles of the material and between the particles and the surfaces of contacting metal and to progressively build up pressure during the heating period. Thus the uncooked raw material, having a predetermined moisture content is processed into a somewhat viscous liquid having a temperature high enough to cook the mass and heat the water particles to a temperature high enough for evaporation at atmospheric pressure but being under sufficient pressure to prevent it.

If that’s a little complicated to understand, a 2012 clip from BBC’s Food Factory does the trick.

In the video, host Stefan Gates takes an extruder and connects it to a tractor, making the extruder move so fast that it puffs the corn out in an extremely fast, extremely dramatic way.

Clearly, Flakall had something big. The firm eventually changed its name to Adams Corporation, which helped take some attention off the fact that it was selling a food product to humans that was originally intended for cows.