It arrives at the table with a golden hue of familiar nostalgia, but the scent suggests something entirely new. The pillowy silhouette with rounded edges is unmistakable, but the first bite surprises with a rich tomato filling and smoked feta. Much more than a playful subversion of a Twinkie, this evolution of a classic from vegetable visionary Chef Amanda Cohen was featured as a centerpiece of Dirt Candy’s special menu for Climate Week NYC. And to bring the vision to life, the kitchen staff turned to Savor butter.
As the first autumn chill wrapped itself around the city, Chef Amanda and her team were deep in menu prep for the fast-approaching annual showcase of climate solutions. Over a nearly two-decade run, Dirt Candy’s focus on elevating the fine dining potential of vegetables has both solidified the Lower East Side restaurant as a leader in sustainability and earned it a Michelin star for its boundary-breaking culinary approach. So, as outlandish as it may seem to some, a taste bud-bending Twinkie remake with agriculture-free butter comes as no surprise.
The finalized Climate Week menu was a natural extension of many of the restaurant’s most beloved dishes. With the tomato twinkie, Chef Amanda was intent to push the envelope further by debuting the restaurant’s newest sustainability-focused ingredient partner. Savor Butter provided the structural backbone of the dish, creating a velvety mouthfeel and crumb strong enough to hold the mini cake’s iconic shape.
“The butter added a lush, rich taste and really smooth texture to the dish,” remarked Chef Amanda, echoing the sentiment of other chefs who are using Savor butter as a more sustainable swap for dairy butter or a better performing alternative to plant-based butters.
Dirt Candy’s partnership with Savor represents a shared belief that transformative food system change will require continuous improvement both in how ingredients are produced and how they’re used to create the most delicious food possible. Dirt Candy’s Climate Week menu gave diners a first taste of what’s possible when innovative ingredients and world-class technique blend to create a paradigm shift in the way we enjoy food.
Knowing we can count on an ingredient to show up and make our job easier allows us to push our creativity even more.
Chef Amanda has spent her career proving the culinary potential of vegetables knows no bounds. She leads with a persistent curiosity and innovative streak that inspire a spectrum of dishes that are case studies in both ambition and precision. In her kitchen, vegetables aren’t treated as sides, but as complex mediums for texture and flavor, where carrots, leeks, and beets perform with the same gravitas as a prime cut of meat.
And while many of Chef Amanda’s most celebrated creations stand out for their singular creative vision, she remains pragmatic in her belief that innovation only matters if it works on the plate.
"We are always looking to create new, standout dishes with vegetables. Finding ingredients that make that journey smoother is such a bonus for us. Knowing we can count on an ingredient to show up and make our job easier allows us to push our creativity even more, said Chef Amanda.
Dirt Candy’s first use of Savor butter in test dishes showed both immediate promise and the need for nuance. The butter performed beautifully. It was smooth, stable, and capable of building structure, but the natural flavor used in the first commercial batch of butter was stronger than expected.
For Savor, that feedback became the spark for a deeper conversation about flavor: Should the butter have a flavor at all? If so, what kind? How do you optimize taste that can support both savory and sweet applications?
Part of the beauty of constructing fats from scratch is that we can tune the product to perfectly fit the needs of our customers.
Chef Amanda’s notes helped validate Savor’s quality control processes and pushed the team to fast-track a new formulation built around a more subtle, butter-forward natural flavor. It was an early example of how chef collaboration would shape the ingredient’s evolution.
Part of the beauty of constructing fats from scratch is that we can tune the product to perfectly fit the needs of our customers. Since we make the building blocks, we also get to design the building," said Senior Food Scientist Jordan Beiden-Charles. "We can dial in the melting properties, the flavor, and the mouthfeel, until we find the combination that makes it difficult to discern our fats from traditional ones.
Continually pushing the boundaries of ingredients and the imagination with which they’re used will pave the way for a food system that promotes more human thriving with significantly less strain on the planet. In this light, the tomato twinkie made with Savor butter serves as an unlikely but poignant flash of this potential for transformation.
While playful in form, its development and execution offer an example of the way forward. It demonstrates that when culinary imagination meets adaptive innovation, the more sustainable path can also be the more delicious and satisfying one. This partnership is a reminder that transformative impact is rarely a sudden leap but more often the result of continuous, collaborative improvement.
