Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e13 Episode Script
Melting Pot
Hi, I'm Alfonso Ribeiro.
Welcome to "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" Whether it's as old school as pizza or as hip as a new sushi roll, we welcome the world's tastiest foods to our shores, then make them our own.
East and West, North and South, we say, "Bring us your favorites and toss them right into the great American melting pot.
" Whether it's a crispy cookie from the Far East, a sweet and creamy Sicilian pastry, or a cheese-filled Mexican chile, there's a whole world of flavor in these American favorites.
It's sweet, it's creamy, it's crunchy, and it's Italian.
This fabled treat from the Southern end of the boot is a big hit in America.
The cannoli That's the plural of the Italian word "cannula," meaning "little tube.
" These short tubes of deliciousness have a long history dating back to the 10th Century, when Arabs brought them to Sicily during an occupation of the island.
The pastries were so desired that soon Italians up and down the peninsula were saying, "Buongiorno" to the dessert.
When an influx of Italian immigrants made their way to the New World in the early 20th Century, they brought the much-loved pastry with them.
Two of those former Italians, the Termini brothers, opened a bakery in Philadelphia in 1921, and the family has been concocting the tasty treats for those lucky enough to visit Philadelphia ever since.
Our version of the cannoli is based on Sicilian tradition, where my grandfather was born and raised.
That Sicilian tradition starts with the "little tube" of pastry, whose recipe is nearly 100 years old.
The ingredients of the cannoli are flour, sugar, eggs, and wine.
I totally get the eggs, sugar, and flour, but wine in a pastry shell? Other than making the cannolis smell incredible, the wine also forms the bubbles that develop in the dough once it's fried.
I'll get to that, but first, the dry ingredients are weighed out on the very same scale Grandpa Termini used in the early days.
Then it's into one of the family's original mixers.
A short 5-to-7-minute trip produces a roughly 70-pound dough ball, which the bakers then cart into the next room.
Here they combine it with scraps from a previous batch that helps gives the dough the right balance of flexibility and texture.
The combined dough is roughly folded and fed by hand through a heavy-duty machine called a vertical sheeter until the two have become one partially flattened sheet.
Now that the sheet is thin enough, the baker uses a rolling cutter, similar to the one used for pizza, to cut the dough in half.
Then it's given a little time to relax.
That way, the slight shrinking that occurs as the dough cools happens before the cut.
After a short rest, it's time for the final cut, but you can't trust something as special as a cannoli shell to just any cutter.
We like for our cannoli shells to be pristine.
To get that pristine cut, they use a custom-made multi-cut tool that allows the bakers to create the exact shape required for a perfect cannoli.
This slow-turning conveyor helps to arrange the now-perfect pieces into neat stacks.
The stacks make their way to a prep area where the bakers separate them, lay them out on boards, and pin them.
This, in my opinion, is the heart and soul of what our cannoli is all about.
Pinning refers to the process of hand-wrapping the cut ovals around a wooden dowel and securing them in place with a bit of baker's glue made of egg and flour paste.
Typically, people use stainless steel.
We like to use maple because it holds in the flavor of the cannoli.
Rolled and ready, it's fry time, and it's probably no surprise that the Termini brothers still fry their cannoli the old-fashioned way.
We don't have any modern fryers.
That's not the way it works for us.
These bakers know their dough by heart, and they're watching for the exact time to remove the shells from the 400-degree vegetable oil in order to get the perfect crisp usually about 20 to 30 seconds.
Once they're perfect, the bakers carefully remove the dowels and place the crispy shells on cooling racks.
So, that takes care of the shells, but a cannoli wouldn't be a cannoli without that sweet cheese filling.
The cheese filling is something I hold very close to my heart, because my grandfather taught me how to make the cheese filling.
Each batch starts with at least two 30-pound bags of ricotta cheese.
Then the workers add milk to large industrial mixers and combine it with the ricotta until a proper consistency is reached.
What's better than How about 30 more? Additional cheese is blended in, and depending on the exact filling flavor, they'll add sugars, citron, or chocolate chips.
The whole process takes anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes and usually ends with someone up to their elbows in sweet cheese.
At this point, the filling may be delicious, but it doesn't go into the shell until just before it's ready to eat.
Nobody likes a soggy cannoli.
Just powder some sugar on there, and, you know, go to town.
Enjoy life! Cannolis are life! Coming up, what Chinese treat has Japanese roots? And later, a chile chock-full of cheesy goodness.
Here's the thing Sometimes food that seems foreign actually isn't, so if you've ever gotten a sweet treat at the end of a Chinese meal, have I got a surprise for you.
There's no food more tied to the American-Chinese restaurant than the humble fortune cookie, a crispy, crunchy dessert with a little piece of advice hidden in the center.
Funny thing, though.
Did you know that fortune cookies aren't even originally Chinese? They're loosely based on a Japanese tradition.
Japan had a history of always creating fortunes that were sold inside goods in the temples, public areas.
And this custom was actually brought over from Japan to the United States.
There's still some debate about the specifics, but one thing is for sure The fortune cookie was invented not in China or Japan but in California.
Today, many companies make the crescent-shaped cookie, but the Peking Noodle Company in Los Angeles is the largest and one of the oldest manufacturers in the U.
S.
My grandfather Mr.
Tom Ying Woo started the company in 1914.
He thought that there was a good need to have Chinese food for the many immigrants.
Their product line eventually expanded to include fortune cookies for Chinese restaurants.
But let's get to what you really want to know How do they get those little slips of paper inside these things anyway? Well, just like with any other cookie, it begins with batter.
The secret to fortune cookies is to use the right amount of oil and the right of amount of flour to have the perfect shape, the perfect size, and the perfect crunch.
So every ingredient is measured out carefully, one by one.
First soybean oil, then the vanilla and coloring, oh, and don't forget the sugar and plenty of it.
Approximately 320 pounds of sugar are used per batch.
All that sugar goes into a high-speed mixer, where it's joined by water and flour that gets pumped in from a silo more than 500 pounds of it for each batch of cookie batter.
Then the batter is transferred into tanks that will feed each of our machines.
And here's where things really get interesting.
First, the machine squirts out a row of six circles of dough, then top plates come down and cover the dough to keep it in a perfect circle as it enters the oven.
They cook in that oven at about 140 degrees, but they don't stay in there for long just 30 seconds.
Each oven, it averages out and that would make it about 2,000 cookies in total per minute.
That adds up to about 133 million a year.
And now the star of the show the fortune.
The company has been writing, editing, and collecting them for decades.
The cookie is scraped off the plate, where it will then transfer to a conveyor where the fortune is inserted into the cookie and then formed.
That happens in a machine called a molding press.
First, a tiny arm picks up the fortune using air pressure.
Then, it places it in the middle of the circle of dough while two arms come down and fold the cookie into its famous crescent shape, and it all has to happen really fast.
Even a deviation of a couple of seconds can mean that the cookie will harden before it enters the press, and no shape will come out.
That is cool, and it sure beats the old-fashioned way of folding fortune cookies by hand.
I had an uncle that was doing it, and he told me one day that he didn't have a fingerprint.
They were essentially burned from all the heat.
Ouch! Whoo, nowadays these cookies get to cool down on a conveyor belt before anyone has to handle them.
The cookies then make their way to an assembly line where a giant funnel controls the wrapping rate.
The funnel releases each cookie individually one by one into the wrapping machine.
Now they're ready to be boxed up and shipped off to restaurants, where they'll play their starring role in the enduring Chinese-American end-of-meal ritual.
There's nothing better than opening up a fortune cookie and then sharing what's inside with your friends.
Coming up, a Middle-Eastern wrap with some mighty delicious secrets.
They may have begun as crispy fried balls of chickpea dough, but then this classic Middle-Eastern snack wound up here, and suddenly, things got interesting.
Falafel may be an ancient delicacy, but this vegetarian wrap made from old-age family recipes takes modern portability to a whole new level.
When TaDah! Food's John Sorial set out to make the traditional falafels he grew up with, he discovered his relatives weren't all that eager to share their recipes I don't think they want to actually share their secrets.
but that didn't stop John from trying to craft the perfect patty.
I would just spend days and days having friends try different versions.
And today, his falafel wraps are a huge hit.
It all starts with thousands of pounds of dried chickpeas, also known as garbanzo beans.
These little guys are the main staple for both the falafels and the fresh hummus TaDah! uses in their wraps.
Any given day, we will use about 4,000 to 6,000 pounds of chickpeas to make the falafel wraps.
Just so you know, that is two to three tons of chickpeas.
The dried chickpeas are brought in and soaked for roughly 18 hours in room-temperature water, where they will double in size.
After they're fully hydrated, the chickpeas are then drained in large colanders.
From there, the chickpeas are split up into two different types chickpeas that we use for our falafel manufacturing and the chickpeas that we use to create our world-famous hummus.
Next, they wheel the hummus chickpeas into the kitchen and scoop them into large kettles, where they're cooked for 30 minutes at 212 degrees until they're soft.
Then, they're pumped into a strainer and transferred to another kettle.
Here, cooks add cumin, salt, and cayenne pepper.
Once all the ingredients are mixed together, they make their way into this industrial-sized grinder that purees the fresh hummus to a perfect creamy consistency.
The hummus is then transferred to the production floor, where it is added to the hopper.
Meanwhile, back in the soaking room, the falafel makers transport the second half of the chickpeas into a grinder that mixes in cilantro, green onions, parsley, and garlic.
They're all different shades of green, so if you're eating a fresh falafel, it should have a nice, bright-green color to it.
The grinder churns and mixes.
Once the batter is perfectly blended, they load the mix into an extruder, which uses specially-designed forms called V-Mags to pump out the unique falafel shape.
At the end of that former, there are pneumatic guillotines that are timed so that they cut the falafel at set intervals so that we get the same exact size every time.
The foreign patties exit onto a conveyor belt, where they travel a short distance to the fryer.
Here, workers help to gently transition the falafels into the oil, and a few minutes later, they exit the other side fully cooked.
As the fresh falafels move on down the line, they cool just enough to be handled, because now it's time to put it all together.
Each wrap starts with a whole-wheat tortilla, then a falafel patty, and finally a layer of hummus before being hand-rolled by a line of super-speedy ladies.
The first time I saw them roll it, I got carpal tunnel just looking at them, because they're so fast.
Once our wraps are rolled, it's time to chill literally.
In the interest of freshness, we make everything warm, and we wrap them.
In only a few minutes, they're travelling into the spiral freezer.
This specially-designed rotating freezer runs at 50 degrees below zero.
Once the rolled wraps are fully frozen, they move on to packaging.
We film-wrap so that they stay fresh in the freezer.
The machine individually seals the freshly frozen wraps, and the workers pack them into cartons.
And while millions of people may enjoy them, the biggest concern is one tough customer.
The one thing I was most hesitant about is having my mother try it, but, yeah, my mom loves it.
You know, she's always asking me to send her stuff.
And there you have it a taste not only a mother could love.
Coming up, a Mexican meal that packs quite a peppery punch.
The chile pepper sweet, hot, and delicious.
And there's no better way to enjoy them than battered, stuffed, and layered with melted cheese and yummy tomato sauce.
We're talking chile relleno.
Hailing from the colonial city of Puebla, this traditional Mexican meal has become popular from Maine to California.
And don't fret if you're not up to the challenge of packing these peppers yourself.
L.
A.
's Cedar Lane Natural Foods has got you covered.
Cedar Lane starts their rellenos with what I consider the best part the cheese.
The cheese filling consists of three cheeses Cotija, fresh mozzarella, and fresh cheddar.
Each 50-pound block of cheese goes through a gigantic shredder before heading into a mixer.
Then we mix it with fresh vegetables, like onions and peppers, bread crumbs, and spices that give the flavor.
Once it's mixed together, the filling is set aside, then it's on to to the chiles.
Cedar Lane uses both poblanos and pasillas, and first up for them, a little bath.
Workers lift shovels full of peppers onto a conveyor belt that deposits them into a trough filled with water to wash away any dirt or debris from the farm.
Then the tops are cut off, and workers remove the core to make way for the stuffing.
Once cleaned out, a gigantic suspended colander dips the peppers into a 200-degree bath, a process known as blanching.
Three minutes later, just long enough to tenderize them, our topless chiles are ready for a quick cool-down.
This water bath stops the cooking process and makes the peppers easy to handle during the next step the filling.
The filling is loaded into a hopper that dispenses and shapes a 3-ounce ball that will fit perfectly into its chile mate's shape.
The peppers then travel down a conveyor, where they're covered in flour, bathed in an egg and milk wash, and sprinkled with bread crumbs.
Once the peppers are fully stuffed and coated, they're loaded 24 at a time onto racks.
After a five- to six-hour post-roast cool-down in the blast chiller, where the peppers need to reach 45 degrees, it's time to add the sauce.
This is a tomato-based sauce that uses fresh tomato, fresh onion, fresh peppers, and seasoning with a hint of cilantro.
The peppers are placed four to a container on a bed of sauce before being smothered in shredded cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese.
Next, on to packaging, but you may be asking yourself, where are they shipping them? To Mars? Actually, this rocket-ship-shaped container is part of a process called high-pressure pasteurization that extends the shelf life of refrigerated items.
It maintains it at the same quality for the whole period of the shelf life.
After it goes through the first sealer, the trays are transported to another machine that double heat-seals the product.
Now that all that yummy chile and cheese goodness is sealed in, it's off to grocery stores around the country so everyone can enjoy a little piece of Mexico at home.
They may have begun as crispy fried balls of chickpea though chickpea dough.
Dough.
Dough.
Doe, a deer Yep.
Chickpea dough.
I don't know why that sentence just does not flow out of my mouth.
Welcome to "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" Whether it's as old school as pizza or as hip as a new sushi roll, we welcome the world's tastiest foods to our shores, then make them our own.
East and West, North and South, we say, "Bring us your favorites and toss them right into the great American melting pot.
" Whether it's a crispy cookie from the Far East, a sweet and creamy Sicilian pastry, or a cheese-filled Mexican chile, there's a whole world of flavor in these American favorites.
It's sweet, it's creamy, it's crunchy, and it's Italian.
This fabled treat from the Southern end of the boot is a big hit in America.
The cannoli That's the plural of the Italian word "cannula," meaning "little tube.
" These short tubes of deliciousness have a long history dating back to the 10th Century, when Arabs brought them to Sicily during an occupation of the island.
The pastries were so desired that soon Italians up and down the peninsula were saying, "Buongiorno" to the dessert.
When an influx of Italian immigrants made their way to the New World in the early 20th Century, they brought the much-loved pastry with them.
Two of those former Italians, the Termini brothers, opened a bakery in Philadelphia in 1921, and the family has been concocting the tasty treats for those lucky enough to visit Philadelphia ever since.
Our version of the cannoli is based on Sicilian tradition, where my grandfather was born and raised.
That Sicilian tradition starts with the "little tube" of pastry, whose recipe is nearly 100 years old.
The ingredients of the cannoli are flour, sugar, eggs, and wine.
I totally get the eggs, sugar, and flour, but wine in a pastry shell? Other than making the cannolis smell incredible, the wine also forms the bubbles that develop in the dough once it's fried.
I'll get to that, but first, the dry ingredients are weighed out on the very same scale Grandpa Termini used in the early days.
Then it's into one of the family's original mixers.
A short 5-to-7-minute trip produces a roughly 70-pound dough ball, which the bakers then cart into the next room.
Here they combine it with scraps from a previous batch that helps gives the dough the right balance of flexibility and texture.
The combined dough is roughly folded and fed by hand through a heavy-duty machine called a vertical sheeter until the two have become one partially flattened sheet.
Now that the sheet is thin enough, the baker uses a rolling cutter, similar to the one used for pizza, to cut the dough in half.
Then it's given a little time to relax.
That way, the slight shrinking that occurs as the dough cools happens before the cut.
After a short rest, it's time for the final cut, but you can't trust something as special as a cannoli shell to just any cutter.
We like for our cannoli shells to be pristine.
To get that pristine cut, they use a custom-made multi-cut tool that allows the bakers to create the exact shape required for a perfect cannoli.
This slow-turning conveyor helps to arrange the now-perfect pieces into neat stacks.
The stacks make their way to a prep area where the bakers separate them, lay them out on boards, and pin them.
This, in my opinion, is the heart and soul of what our cannoli is all about.
Pinning refers to the process of hand-wrapping the cut ovals around a wooden dowel and securing them in place with a bit of baker's glue made of egg and flour paste.
Typically, people use stainless steel.
We like to use maple because it holds in the flavor of the cannoli.
Rolled and ready, it's fry time, and it's probably no surprise that the Termini brothers still fry their cannoli the old-fashioned way.
We don't have any modern fryers.
That's not the way it works for us.
These bakers know their dough by heart, and they're watching for the exact time to remove the shells from the 400-degree vegetable oil in order to get the perfect crisp usually about 20 to 30 seconds.
Once they're perfect, the bakers carefully remove the dowels and place the crispy shells on cooling racks.
So, that takes care of the shells, but a cannoli wouldn't be a cannoli without that sweet cheese filling.
The cheese filling is something I hold very close to my heart, because my grandfather taught me how to make the cheese filling.
Each batch starts with at least two 30-pound bags of ricotta cheese.
Then the workers add milk to large industrial mixers and combine it with the ricotta until a proper consistency is reached.
What's better than How about 30 more? Additional cheese is blended in, and depending on the exact filling flavor, they'll add sugars, citron, or chocolate chips.
The whole process takes anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes and usually ends with someone up to their elbows in sweet cheese.
At this point, the filling may be delicious, but it doesn't go into the shell until just before it's ready to eat.
Nobody likes a soggy cannoli.
Just powder some sugar on there, and, you know, go to town.
Enjoy life! Cannolis are life! Coming up, what Chinese treat has Japanese roots? And later, a chile chock-full of cheesy goodness.
Here's the thing Sometimes food that seems foreign actually isn't, so if you've ever gotten a sweet treat at the end of a Chinese meal, have I got a surprise for you.
There's no food more tied to the American-Chinese restaurant than the humble fortune cookie, a crispy, crunchy dessert with a little piece of advice hidden in the center.
Funny thing, though.
Did you know that fortune cookies aren't even originally Chinese? They're loosely based on a Japanese tradition.
Japan had a history of always creating fortunes that were sold inside goods in the temples, public areas.
And this custom was actually brought over from Japan to the United States.
There's still some debate about the specifics, but one thing is for sure The fortune cookie was invented not in China or Japan but in California.
Today, many companies make the crescent-shaped cookie, but the Peking Noodle Company in Los Angeles is the largest and one of the oldest manufacturers in the U.
S.
My grandfather Mr.
Tom Ying Woo started the company in 1914.
He thought that there was a good need to have Chinese food for the many immigrants.
Their product line eventually expanded to include fortune cookies for Chinese restaurants.
But let's get to what you really want to know How do they get those little slips of paper inside these things anyway? Well, just like with any other cookie, it begins with batter.
The secret to fortune cookies is to use the right amount of oil and the right of amount of flour to have the perfect shape, the perfect size, and the perfect crunch.
So every ingredient is measured out carefully, one by one.
First soybean oil, then the vanilla and coloring, oh, and don't forget the sugar and plenty of it.
Approximately 320 pounds of sugar are used per batch.
All that sugar goes into a high-speed mixer, where it's joined by water and flour that gets pumped in from a silo more than 500 pounds of it for each batch of cookie batter.
Then the batter is transferred into tanks that will feed each of our machines.
And here's where things really get interesting.
First, the machine squirts out a row of six circles of dough, then top plates come down and cover the dough to keep it in a perfect circle as it enters the oven.
They cook in that oven at about 140 degrees, but they don't stay in there for long just 30 seconds.
Each oven, it averages out and that would make it about 2,000 cookies in total per minute.
That adds up to about 133 million a year.
And now the star of the show the fortune.
The company has been writing, editing, and collecting them for decades.
The cookie is scraped off the plate, where it will then transfer to a conveyor where the fortune is inserted into the cookie and then formed.
That happens in a machine called a molding press.
First, a tiny arm picks up the fortune using air pressure.
Then, it places it in the middle of the circle of dough while two arms come down and fold the cookie into its famous crescent shape, and it all has to happen really fast.
Even a deviation of a couple of seconds can mean that the cookie will harden before it enters the press, and no shape will come out.
That is cool, and it sure beats the old-fashioned way of folding fortune cookies by hand.
I had an uncle that was doing it, and he told me one day that he didn't have a fingerprint.
They were essentially burned from all the heat.
Ouch! Whoo, nowadays these cookies get to cool down on a conveyor belt before anyone has to handle them.
The cookies then make their way to an assembly line where a giant funnel controls the wrapping rate.
The funnel releases each cookie individually one by one into the wrapping machine.
Now they're ready to be boxed up and shipped off to restaurants, where they'll play their starring role in the enduring Chinese-American end-of-meal ritual.
There's nothing better than opening up a fortune cookie and then sharing what's inside with your friends.
Coming up, a Middle-Eastern wrap with some mighty delicious secrets.
They may have begun as crispy fried balls of chickpea dough, but then this classic Middle-Eastern snack wound up here, and suddenly, things got interesting.
Falafel may be an ancient delicacy, but this vegetarian wrap made from old-age family recipes takes modern portability to a whole new level.
When TaDah! Food's John Sorial set out to make the traditional falafels he grew up with, he discovered his relatives weren't all that eager to share their recipes I don't think they want to actually share their secrets.
but that didn't stop John from trying to craft the perfect patty.
I would just spend days and days having friends try different versions.
And today, his falafel wraps are a huge hit.
It all starts with thousands of pounds of dried chickpeas, also known as garbanzo beans.
These little guys are the main staple for both the falafels and the fresh hummus TaDah! uses in their wraps.
Any given day, we will use about 4,000 to 6,000 pounds of chickpeas to make the falafel wraps.
Just so you know, that is two to three tons of chickpeas.
The dried chickpeas are brought in and soaked for roughly 18 hours in room-temperature water, where they will double in size.
After they're fully hydrated, the chickpeas are then drained in large colanders.
From there, the chickpeas are split up into two different types chickpeas that we use for our falafel manufacturing and the chickpeas that we use to create our world-famous hummus.
Next, they wheel the hummus chickpeas into the kitchen and scoop them into large kettles, where they're cooked for 30 minutes at 212 degrees until they're soft.
Then, they're pumped into a strainer and transferred to another kettle.
Here, cooks add cumin, salt, and cayenne pepper.
Once all the ingredients are mixed together, they make their way into this industrial-sized grinder that purees the fresh hummus to a perfect creamy consistency.
The hummus is then transferred to the production floor, where it is added to the hopper.
Meanwhile, back in the soaking room, the falafel makers transport the second half of the chickpeas into a grinder that mixes in cilantro, green onions, parsley, and garlic.
They're all different shades of green, so if you're eating a fresh falafel, it should have a nice, bright-green color to it.
The grinder churns and mixes.
Once the batter is perfectly blended, they load the mix into an extruder, which uses specially-designed forms called V-Mags to pump out the unique falafel shape.
At the end of that former, there are pneumatic guillotines that are timed so that they cut the falafel at set intervals so that we get the same exact size every time.
The foreign patties exit onto a conveyor belt, where they travel a short distance to the fryer.
Here, workers help to gently transition the falafels into the oil, and a few minutes later, they exit the other side fully cooked.
As the fresh falafels move on down the line, they cool just enough to be handled, because now it's time to put it all together.
Each wrap starts with a whole-wheat tortilla, then a falafel patty, and finally a layer of hummus before being hand-rolled by a line of super-speedy ladies.
The first time I saw them roll it, I got carpal tunnel just looking at them, because they're so fast.
Once our wraps are rolled, it's time to chill literally.
In the interest of freshness, we make everything warm, and we wrap them.
In only a few minutes, they're travelling into the spiral freezer.
This specially-designed rotating freezer runs at 50 degrees below zero.
Once the rolled wraps are fully frozen, they move on to packaging.
We film-wrap so that they stay fresh in the freezer.
The machine individually seals the freshly frozen wraps, and the workers pack them into cartons.
And while millions of people may enjoy them, the biggest concern is one tough customer.
The one thing I was most hesitant about is having my mother try it, but, yeah, my mom loves it.
You know, she's always asking me to send her stuff.
And there you have it a taste not only a mother could love.
Coming up, a Mexican meal that packs quite a peppery punch.
The chile pepper sweet, hot, and delicious.
And there's no better way to enjoy them than battered, stuffed, and layered with melted cheese and yummy tomato sauce.
We're talking chile relleno.
Hailing from the colonial city of Puebla, this traditional Mexican meal has become popular from Maine to California.
And don't fret if you're not up to the challenge of packing these peppers yourself.
L.
A.
's Cedar Lane Natural Foods has got you covered.
Cedar Lane starts their rellenos with what I consider the best part the cheese.
The cheese filling consists of three cheeses Cotija, fresh mozzarella, and fresh cheddar.
Each 50-pound block of cheese goes through a gigantic shredder before heading into a mixer.
Then we mix it with fresh vegetables, like onions and peppers, bread crumbs, and spices that give the flavor.
Once it's mixed together, the filling is set aside, then it's on to to the chiles.
Cedar Lane uses both poblanos and pasillas, and first up for them, a little bath.
Workers lift shovels full of peppers onto a conveyor belt that deposits them into a trough filled with water to wash away any dirt or debris from the farm.
Then the tops are cut off, and workers remove the core to make way for the stuffing.
Once cleaned out, a gigantic suspended colander dips the peppers into a 200-degree bath, a process known as blanching.
Three minutes later, just long enough to tenderize them, our topless chiles are ready for a quick cool-down.
This water bath stops the cooking process and makes the peppers easy to handle during the next step the filling.
The filling is loaded into a hopper that dispenses and shapes a 3-ounce ball that will fit perfectly into its chile mate's shape.
The peppers then travel down a conveyor, where they're covered in flour, bathed in an egg and milk wash, and sprinkled with bread crumbs.
Once the peppers are fully stuffed and coated, they're loaded 24 at a time onto racks.
After a five- to six-hour post-roast cool-down in the blast chiller, where the peppers need to reach 45 degrees, it's time to add the sauce.
This is a tomato-based sauce that uses fresh tomato, fresh onion, fresh peppers, and seasoning with a hint of cilantro.
The peppers are placed four to a container on a bed of sauce before being smothered in shredded cheddar and Monterey Jack cheese.
Next, on to packaging, but you may be asking yourself, where are they shipping them? To Mars? Actually, this rocket-ship-shaped container is part of a process called high-pressure pasteurization that extends the shelf life of refrigerated items.
It maintains it at the same quality for the whole period of the shelf life.
After it goes through the first sealer, the trays are transported to another machine that double heat-seals the product.
Now that all that yummy chile and cheese goodness is sealed in, it's off to grocery stores around the country so everyone can enjoy a little piece of Mexico at home.
They may have begun as crispy fried balls of chickpea though chickpea dough.
Dough.
Dough.
Doe, a deer Yep.
Chickpea dough.
I don't know why that sentence just does not flow out of my mouth.