Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e03 Episode Script

Hi, I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and welcome to "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" Our favorite snacks come in a lot of shapes and sizes, but there's one that works for just about anything breakfast, lunch, dinner, or dessert, and everything in between.
You just can't beat it, so let's roll.
Whether it's a handy way to wrap up our lunch, a quirky take on a savory snack, or a classic bite that just rolls onto the tongue, we can't seem to get enough.
Tortillas.
Mmm, pretty much everything from beans to barbecue is better when it's rolled up in a soft, delicious tortilla.
But not all tortillas are created equally.
In the 1970s, restaurateur Marcelino Solis had a tough time finding quality tortillas like the ones he grew up with.
The satisfaction is when you touch it and you smell it.
It tastes fresh like your mother would make it in her kitchen.
So, he started his own tortilla company.
It's a family-owned business.
My father is the owner of the company.
We've been doing business since 1979.
And, as the family has grown, so has the factory.
They now make over 300 different sizes and varieties of tortilla products.
One of the faves is an Italian twist on the classic tortilla tomato basil.
It all starts here as dry ingredients are carefully measured and dropped down this chute into one of La Chiquita's five minivan-sized mixers.
The recipe is simple and just like you'd make at home.
There's flour, there's shortening, and there's some sugar and salt.
But there's also something that wasn't in the original family recipe a secret blend of tomato and basil powder.
We use a natural tomato powder, fresh tomato powder, and also natural spices.
Once the dry ingredients are properly combined, it's time for the water lots of it.
Water is one of our crucial ingredients.
We use over 3 million gallons of water per year.
Once everything is mixed together in the perfect proportions, it forms a huge mound of yellowy-orange dough.
We use over 50 million pounds of dough per year.
That's 25,000 tons, over 100 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty.
What happens next? It's an absolute avalanche of dough dumping into transport carts.
First, they get shuttled over to a lift.
The lift raises the dough Then it's dumped into a huge machine called the divider.
The divider, as you probably guessed, divides the dough into identically-sized dough balls.
Whee! Next step, Its carefully controlled temperature and humidity level is what allows the yeast to leaven, or the dough to rise.
The leavening system is what gives the tortilla the softness, the pliability, the rollability.
Now it's time for these properly-proofed portions to get plastered.
What that means is, the dough balls are sifted through vertical pipes where they're pre-flattened and then dropped onto a conveyer belt where they are squashed by a large hydraulic press into the more familiar shape of tortilla wraps.
This machine is serious.
We're talking 2,000 pounds per square inch, and this press can do Ouch! The price of perfection.
The fully-flattened disks of dough will be heat-sealed on both sides, sort of a first pass at baking.
Then they travel onto the ovens to fully bake.
Once out of the ovens, things are looking up as the freshly-baked tortillas travel up the cooler conveyer.
You don't just want to bring down the temperature of the tortilla, but you also want to make sure that you're pulling a lot of that moisture out.
Finally, a vision system on the line takes a picture of every single tortilla.
Each must pass eight individual tests for things like size, shape, and transparency.
Those that don't measure up are sent to the reject bin.
The wraps that pass muster and most do carry on to be stacked and pressed once more before they are ready for hand packaging.
If you take all the tortillas that we manufacture in one year and you put them end-to-end, it would actually wrap around the earth five times and actually get you halfway to the moon.
Wow.
With numbers like that, there's only one thing left to say.
That's a wrap.
Coming up, what started in a small southern kitchen and eventually launched a travel empire? And later, the most iconic roll of them all.
Rolling down America's highways and byways is a great way to discover some amazing treats, but if you took a road trip back in the day, there's one treat every kid remembers, and it's just as popular today as it was back then.
Stuckey's Pecan Log Roll is an American road-trip classic.
But what is it, exactly? A Pecan Log Roll is a unique candy that has a balance between the nugget, the caramel, and the pecan.
It all started down south in the 1930s.
Stuckey's Pecan Log was made the first time in Eastman, Georgia, in 1937 in a family kitchen.
It was sold on the roadside out of the trunk of a car.
Stuckey's Pecan Log Rolls are still made in Eastman, Georgia, but in a much bigger kitchen.
But bigger doesn't mean faster.
Even with all this modern technology, some steps still need to be done by hand.
And, in fact, the Pecan Log Roll takes four full days to make.
And the first part of the process making the nougat takes three of those four days.
It's very difficult to make because it's sensitive to weather and sensitive to barometric pressure.
Making the nougat starts by heating corn syrup in these giant copper pots.
Now, copper is the pot of choice when making candy because it withstands high heat and conducts it evenly and consistently, which is the key to making the perfect nougat.
But there's more to nougat than corn syrup.
While the syrup is being cooked to the perfect consistency, workers in another part of the factory are combining egg whites and sugar, which are whipped together by a giant mixer.
Then, the heated corn syrup is poured oh so slowly into the pot.
But it's not Stuckey's special nougat just yet.
Next, they add vanilla, and then they top it all off with what else cherries.
The little pink dots are thrown in to give it a little color and a different flavor.
Now that all the ingredients are in the pot, it's time for more mixing, but how do they know when it's done? As the nougat is being whipped into the mixer, it is actually being thrown from the blades to the side of the pot, and it makes a distinctive sound when it reaches the perfect consistency.
Then the whole shebang is poured onto a floured marble table for an overnight cooldown.
On day 2, the cool and relaxed nougat is hoisted into extruding machines.
The extruders squeeze the nougat into perfectly-sized rolls.
Then it's off to the cutters.
Once the rolls of nougat are sliced into the proper length, they're transferred to trays and put in racks to spend another night resting, this time in a humidity-controlled room set at a perfect 55%, which draws moisture out of the nougat to firm it up.
Don't you wish resting overnight would firm you up? That humidity is gonna firm that nougat up so it is then at the right consistency.
And if rest doesn't do it, how about a swim? On the third day, the rolls of nougat take a dip in a pool of creamy caramel.
A layer of caramel is applied as a bonding agent for the pecan.
During the dipping process, we will submerge the nougat into the caramel.
At that point, it's then pulled out, gently shaken for any excess caramel to drip off, and then it's placed into a vat of pecan pieces.
That's right, it's time to get rolling.
You want the correct relationship of pecans, caramel, and nougat to make the perfect Log Roll.
Once shrouded in ooey, gooey caramel and coated in crunchy pecans, the logs get a final hand roll to shape them into nine-inch-long pieces.
But you can't eat them just yet.
It's then put back on racks, and then it's gonna go through another night of a resting process.
And that final night of resting process is solidifying the caramel on the outside of it before it's wrapped and it goes to its package.
On average, roll out of here each day and make their way to some 200 locations in 19 states.
But I still have a lingering question.
Am I pronouncing "pecan" right? Pe-con or pe-can? That is the question.
There's been a 100-year debate about whether to call pe-con or pe-can.
Mr.
Stuckey told me that it's a pe-can if it's under $3 a pound and it's a pe-con if it's over $3 a pound.
Some people say pe-can.
Some people say pe-con.
Some people say trash can, but nobody says trash "con.
" Coming up, what looks likes a sausage but tastes oh so sweet? You can roll sushi, you can roll tacos, and you can certainly roll chocolate.
But be careful, because when you do, you just might get something crazy, and I mean crazy delicious.
Salame Di Cioccolato sounds a lot fancier than chocolate salami.
But that's pretty much what it is.
For the past 10 years, Cacao Atlanta Chocolate has been making these spectacular sweet salamis.
The chocolate salami is an old historical recipe that I acquired while I was in Italy and transformed just a little bit to make it our own.
It all starts with the very finest cacao beans.
Once the aromatic bags of carefully-selected cacao beans arrive at the shop, the process of turning them into scrumptious chocolate begins.
The first step roasting them.
Just like coffee, roasting the raw beans completely changes their flavor.
As the beans roast, they become separated from their shells, or husks.
We don't want to use the husk because it adds bitterness in the end.
The shell is full of tannins, kind of like the same way wine has tannins.
So, we want to get rid of as much of that as we can.
And, of course, it's all carefully watched over by Elvis.
But separating the husk from the beans is easier said than done, and that's where the Vortex Winnower comes in.
It may sound like a super villain's weapon, but the Vortex Winnower is actually a high-tech vacuum cleaner combined with a nutcracker.
They're getting basically just smushed, and that smushing breaks them apart and gets the shell away from the nib.
But those smushed-up nibs and husks are still all together in one batch, so it's on to the sifter to further separate them.
The sifter actually separates everything out into different size categories, which also means they're separated into different weights.
So, that's what's really crucial is having everything a uniform weight.
So, once everything has become that uniform weight, we can put it back into the Winnower, and instead of cracking the beans, we're gonna winnow them.
The Winnower's job is to vacuum the light shells up and away from the heavier nibs.
Let me tell you You can't rush the Vortex Winnower.
It takes a while up to a day per 50 pounds.
Which means that removing all the husks from each one-ton shipment of beans can take well over a month, but all that effort pays off big-time.
Putting in that time, it really comes out in our final product, for sure.
Now we're ready to make some chocolate.
You may call this a mixer, but I say melanger because it sounds fancy.
Fancy or not, the melanger is a lot like an old stone grinding mill.
It grinds the cacao beans for days until it produces a smooth, chocolaty liquid.
We grind that for at least three days, so it runs day and night.
Once it's gotten to the point where it's nice and smooth and all the flavors are there, we can dump out the chocolate, and then it gets aged.
How'd you like to have a closet like this in your house? We age them for a minimum of two weeks to mellow out the flavors.
Milk and dark chocolates, as well as any additional flavored varieties, have different aging times, and one thing is for sure.
You can't rush fine chocolate, which is why they're always experimenting with things like roasting and aging times.
Everything we do is a work in progress.
Even 10 years later, I'm still figuring it out.
There's just one step left, the tempering machine, which adjusts the chocolate's temperature in finely-calibrated ways to make it as smooth and creamy as possible.
You have to raise and lower the temperature of the chocolate, so think of it like this.
The raising and lowering of the chocolate, all those particles are coming together.
And once those particles are together, that's when you have a nice snap in your chocolate, and it has a much better consistency once it's been tempered.
Now that they've got it where they want it, they're ready to rock and roll on that salami.
They start by whipping tasty morsels of amaretto biscuit and butter biscuit into the luscious tempered chocolate.
They'll take that chocolate, they'll melt it down after it's been tempered, and then they'll add all the other ingredients that go into the salami to make it look like, you know, a marbled piece of meat when there's actually no meat in the product, so it's really cool.
Once all the ingredients are mixed together, each batch is precisely measured and rolled by hand.
They use paper to roll the forms and to create little sausage-like crinkles at the edges.
Once each roll sets for about a half-hour, it's time for the final two steps.
Once the paper comes off, it looks just like meat, but it's sweet, and it's about to get sweeter.
It's rolled in powdered sugar and packaged just like a salami.
The white from the sugar and the classic mesh wrapping really do make it look just like a succulent, artisanal sausage, only a lot sweeter.
Coming up, the roll that started it all.
A little bit of chew and a whole lot of chocolate.
These tiny, tasty treats date all the way back to the 1800s, but today, they're more popular than ever.
Nothing rolls like a Tootsie Roll.
These little guys have been one of America's favorite chocolate snacks for, well, forever.
Austrian Leo Hirshfield brought the original Tootsie recipe to New York in 1896.
He didn't have to think very hard to come up with a name.
When he decided what to name it, he thought he would call it after his daughter, who he called Tootsie.
Back then, he whipped them up by hand in a small Manhattan storefront.
But today, they're made in Tootsie Roll Industries' state-of-the-art facility in Chicago.
But one thing has remained the same.
The Tootsie Roll formula is pretty simple.
It is the same ingredients we've had for forever.
The process starts here in a huge cooker shaped like, well, what else, a giant Tootsie Roll.
Inside the secret recipe of cocoa, sugar, milk, and corn syrup are heated until they melt and combine.
How much corn syrup, you ask? We bring in corn syrup through railcars, and that's what you see railroad tracks coming into our building.
Every day, arrive at Tootsie station.
All aboard! Once the ingredients are heated to the proper temperature, the sweet, gooey mixture is poured onto large sheets to cool.
It cools for about 60 minutes, and then it's funneled into an extruder to cut it into 13-pound Tootsie Rolls.
Sorry to say, these mega Tootsie Rolls are not for sale.
Each giant Tootsie log then goes through a series of extruders and rollers that eventually slim it down to a Tootsie rope.
And that rope looks like literally looks like it's kind of a dancing snake as it gets through the machine.
But it's not a Tootsie Roll yet.
The most popular size Tootsie makes is called a midgee, which is about a half-inch in diameter.
So, it's on to more rollers and extruders.
Finally, the rope has been slimmed down to the proper diameter.
All that's left to do is to slice it and wrap it into perfectly-sized bites.
And that all happens fast inside this state-of-the-art machine.
We wrap multiple sizes of Tootsie Rolls at about 1,600 pieces per minute per machine.
We have about 48 of those machines running at any one given time.
So, go ahead, take a guess at how many Tootsie Rolls Tootsie Roll Industries puts out in a day.
We make over 65 million Tootsie Rolls every single day.
That's enough Tootsie Rolls to stretch from New York to Chicago and back twice.
Yep, I'm good to go.
All right, let's not scare the little kids this time.
But there's one that's just about right for everything.
Yes, everything.
Simmer down, now.
Simmer down.
I will get small.
If you say anything about my my delivery,