Oreos are sandwich cookies, squeezing a delicious white sugar paste in between two thin biscuits of black chalk. Personally, I prefer the white paste portion of the cookie.

In the United States, people eat Oreos by cracking open the two halves and scraping the white filling off with their bottom teeth. Often we are left with with a garbage can full of black cookie disks.

It seems like a shame to toss all these cookie shells. I wonder why the Nabisco company doesn't just sell a tube of white goo?

Conceptual rendering of Oreo Goo.

How much of the cookie is delicious white cream, and how much is black chalk? On Thursday night, we decided to find out. A 20 oz, (567 g) package retails for about US$5. Each package contains 51 cookies, so they are worth about a dime each.

Stacy, Mark and I carefully opened them up to extract the precious insides. We followed the advice in Martha Stewart Silver Compendium of Culinary Technique, twisting open the halves and removing the white mass with an exquisite set of Laurel Burch spreading-knifes.

Many foods must undergo a similar separation process before they are edible: Fish must be deboned, pistachios must be shelled, peaches must be shaven and strawberries must have the seeds removed.

Most modern families buy a fancy machine to twist them apart, but I enjoy nothing better than sitting around the fireplace with old friends, twisting Oreos and singing old radio jingles.

We kept track of the white filling in a measuring cup.

Mark doesn't mind the taste of the black cookies, but he prefers them with a bit more filling inside.

We scraped all of the cookies clean and stacked them up. There were 17 inches of black cookies and almost a cup of cream filling.

Our 30 minutes of work paid off. We had successfully reduced the package of cookies to the essential element, 6 ounces (177 grams) of confectionary perfection.

To my surprise, neither Mark nor Stacy wanted to eat any. They said it was "too rich", "too decadent", and "a gross ball of sugar-lard".