Creating a tongue-scorching taste sensation like Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is an art. Every ingredient plays a specific role in sculpting the experience. It’s kind of like a neon Monet (except you can eat it). Up close, the dots and dabs are meticulously placed. When you step back, those brushstrokes merge and you get the beautiful impression of a lily pad. Or in this case, a spicy, cheese-flavored explosion. The food artistes over at Frito-Lay apply just the right textures, tastes, colors, and aromas to keep you coming back for more. And more. Put down the bag and step away.

Enriched Cornmeal

Wheat can taste bitter, and rice runs a bit sweet, but corn is pretty bland—the perfect foundation for cheese-flavored snacks like Cheetos. To make cornmeal, industrial producers put corn into a mill, which breaks the kernel, and remove the reproductive part of the seed, the germ, to prevent spoiling. The germ can be whisked away to make corn oil, and the remaining corn is ground into meal. But stripping each kernel means you strip a lot of its nutritional value, so nutrients—ferrous sulfate, niacin, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid—are added to “enrich” the meal.

To make a crunchy puff, food producers like Frito-Lay pour a cornmeal mush into an extruder, a machine that can reach more than 350 degrees Fahrenheit. A metal screw twists the cornmeal into dough and pushes it toward a tiny opening. The dough cooks in the extruder, and as it’s forced through the exit, moisture escapes in a flash of steam and the stuff expands into a puff.

Maltodextrin

The ghost of the food world, maltodextrin is a tasteless white powder found in most dry flavored snacks. And in artificial sweeteners. You can’t get away from it. Commonly made from corn, maltodextrin is used in the seasoning mix to dilute and evenly distribute flavors and colors. It’s water-­soluble, so it dissolves as soon as it hits your tongue, releasing the seasoning molecules and ensuring a flavor bomb in each bite.

Cheddar Cheese

The taste foundation for Cheetos. During the cheese-aging process, milk fats and proteins break down into smaller fatty- and amino-acid fragments. The fatty acids lend a cheesy flavor, and the amino acids provide a brothy, savory sensation. For snacks—and boxed mac and cheese—a slurry of cheese, milk solids, and salt is dried into a powder that screams “Cheddar!”

Monosodium Glutamate

Snack makers prize this legendary taste enhancer because of its almost supernatural ability to boost the savory flavor sensation, or umami, on your tongue. But MSG has quite a nasty reputation—you would too if you were said to cause headaches, fatigue, and even cancer. Scientists have found that MSG can temporarily impact some people if they eat a lot of it on an empty stomach. For most of us, it’s completely harmless. Glutamate is one of the most abundant amino acids in nature. Meat, dairy, veggies, and even your body contain a ton of glutamate, or glutamic acid. Adding an atom of sodium turns it into this salt, which you can sprinkle on food or which Frito-Lay can add to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to stoke the flavor fire. Without MSG and other savory flavor enhancers (yeast extract, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate) the cheese flavor would be flat and bland—not the profile of an addictive junk food.

Natural Flavor

Federal law allows companies to cloak ingredients as “natural flavors” so rivals don’t rip off their recipes. A natural flavor must be a concentrate of an edible, naturally occurring substance, and manufacturers typically use only a teensy bit in their products—as low as 0.1 percent by volume. So it packs a devastating punch. Here, the flavor is likely a powder concentrate of chili pepper, because none of the other ingredients—even the one called Flamin’ Hot Seasoning—contains anything spicy. It’s fortunate that maltodextrin is here for even distribution: If you were to ingest a dense nugget of pure hot “natural flavor,” your mouth would never forgive you.

Sodium Diacetate and Citric Acid

The chemical result of combining acetic acid with sodium carbonate, sodium diacetate adds a salty, vinegary note. The citric acid probably brings out the sour flavors in the cheese. Scientists discovered that citric acid could be made using certain molds in 1893. By the 1920s, US and European researchers had primed Aspergillus niger to produce citric acid on an industrial scale. Scientists feed the mold carbohydrates like sucrose-rich molasses and then let it go to work. After fermentation and crystallization, the final product is a white powder that food scientists drool over.

Red 40 Lake and Yellow 6 Lake

Without red and yellow dyes, these Cheetos would probably resemble whitish worms—not a look that signals hot and cheesy to your brain. Normal Red 40 and Yellow 6 dyes are water-­soluble. By adding aluminum hydroxide—commonly used as an antacid—they become oil-­dispersible and get the denotation “Lake.” These dyes are mixed with the other powdered ingredients and combined with vegetable oil, which makes the coating stick to the Cheetos—and then to your fingers and everything you touch.