Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s02e02 Episode Script

On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we get our crunch on.
From zesty rolled tortilla chips that make you want to munch to little hard candies with a fruit surprise to buttery bits of peanuty brittle, you'll be left craving these crunchy delights.
Some people like to let these little hard candies melt in their mouth, but I'll admit it, I can't resist the temptation to crunch down and get to that soft, chewy center.
Mmm! The strawberry bon bon from Chicago's Primrose Candy Company has been around since the early 20th century.
The company was started in 1928 by my great-grandfather and his wife.
The strawberry bon bon is actually one of our original candies.
Four generations have been making these fruity delights for over 85 years.
There's been no changes to the formula.
The recipe he created all those years ago starts off with that soft, irresistible chewy strawberry center.
We start with sugar and starch.
And we cook that and agitate it for about 30 minutes.
They mix it up and then empty the jellied goodness into buckets, where it will wait for its other half.
That's because a strawberry bon bon wouldn't be the same without its crunchy shell.
That is done through our vacuum cooking process.
Sugar and corn syrup mix inside the vacuum cooker at 300 degrees before it's slowly poured out using a roller to cool it down.
Then the batch is wheeled to the the next station to get its red color and strawberry flavor.
From that 120-pound batch, they'll take about 5 pounds, and they'll put it on a table.
To get the perfect taste and color, they add the strawberry flavoring and red dye by hand to a five-pound ball.
The ball is thrown back into the big batch and transferred to the mixing table.
Then it's time to let the machine do the heavy lifting.
Robotic arms scoop up the massive candy.
It mashes and smashes it all together so the strawberry flavor and color get distributed evenly.
The silver robot arms mix the entire 120-pound batch in just 7 minutes.
When mixing time is up, the bon bon outer shell is moved to a hot table set at 120 degrees.
This ensures the candy stays flexible for shaping.
Then each sweet red pile of candy is fed into this batch roller.
The roller starts the process of squeezing a giant mound of candy into a tiny, crunchy bon bon.
But wait what happened to the chewy, soft center? Well, never fear.
It's time for the chewy center to join the party.
This batch roller has a tube to pump in the liquid bon bon jelly.
They'll take the candy, and they'll wrap it around the pump going through the batch roller.
As the batch roller does its job by rolling the candy into one long rope, it surrounds the tube filled with a strawberry filling.
Joined at last! The outer, crunchy shell and soft, strawberry center start out almost a foot wide.
But don't worry, it gets thin in a hurry.
By the time it gets through to the end of the batch roller, the whole rope that will go through might be about an inch wide.
Now our thin rope of jelly-filled candy goodness just needs to be cut into individual pieces.
And that's a task for the chain rollers.
These whirling cutters turn the giant ribbon of candy into 75,000 individual bon bons.
If you do the math carry the one That's over 23 million bon bons a year.
Next, all those bon bons need to cool down before they can be wrapped up.
It's time to take a chilly ride.
It will go through the cooling conveyor at different levels for about 10 minutes to help it cool to keep the shape.
By the time the candy comes off the conveyor, it's down to room temperature and ready to be brought over to the rapping machines.
We put it into a hopper.
That hopper holds about five pounds of candy, and it vibrates out of the hopper onto a plate.
That plate takes each individual candy and brings it over to the mechanical fingers that wrap each piece.
Those classic strawberry wrappers are designed to let you know that in a moment, you'll be enjoying that undeniable fruity strawberry flavor.
It's just like this great surprise at the end of the piece that you get where it's got the little bit of jelly, and it's just soft and chewy.
Coming up, learn how this rolled tortilla chip packs twice the crunch.
And, later, the secret behind a crispy noodle that spices up your salad.
Hey! When I think of indulging in a crunchy treat, one of the first things I reach for is chips and dip.
But what if there was a crispy chip packed with so much flavor that no dip was required? We were looking for a product that had a lot of crunch and a lot of flavor and would be fun to eat.
They came up with a chip that's rolled up like a taco.
We love to say that our Taco-Litos are rolled and bold.
Rolled comes from the shape of the product that gives it that great crunch, and then the bold, you'll know when you taste it with the seasoning.
The trick to getting those Taco-Litos just right starts here as gigantic bags of flour.
We start with a corn masa flour that is brought in in about 2,000-pound totes.
That literally weights a ton.
Those totes get lifted up by a massive forklift and poured into a hopper, which is fed flour through the wall and into mixers.
Once the flour arrives, all they need to do is add water to get their dough.
Seems simple enough.
We create about a 450-pound dough ball.
Whoa! That's a lot of dough.
But let's face it something that large isn't easy to cook.
So, it's time to roll on over to the next station.
We'll move that into a kibbler that will make that into smaller dough balls.
After breaking down the tortilla dough into smaller, more manageable pieces, they take a conveyor belt ride to a pre-sheeter which presses the dough into a single long, thin sheet of dough.
The uniformity of that sheeting is important.
Too thin, and the chips will crumble.
Too thick, and they won't have a crunchy bite.
The next step after pre-sheeting is you guessed it sheeting, which is a fancy way of saying stamping out dough into shapes.
If you're making, like, cookies at home or Christmas cookies at home, it's very similar to that.
But unlike what I can do in the kitchen with my cookie cutter, this sheeter stamps out over 7,000 Taco-Lito shapes every minutes.
But these still aren't the Taco-Litos we know just yet.
They still need that extra special shape to give it that extra crunch.
It then goes from the sheeter onto a conveyor.
It goes into our special secret rolling device, where we roll it into the nice, tight, little rolls.
The secret rolling device is highly classified, so we can't show you exactly how it works.
But we can show you the results perfect, little Taco-Litos ready to cook.
About 21/2 inches long and about 1/4 inch in diameter.
Now these little slices of tortilla are ready for the oven.
That oven is a zone oven that has a variance of temperatures.
The chips enter at the top of the oven at 400 degrees.
The temperature increases as they drop through three levels until it peaks at 700 degrees, which allows the chips to bake from the inside out.
When they come out of the oven, they cool down on a conveyor belt.
But they don't stay cool for long because it's out of the fire and into the fryer.
They are dipped into an oil bath.
Hot, hot, hot.
And that's where they develop the real crunch.
That crunch is easy to see.
Check out the gorgeous golden-brown color.
All they need now is the special seasoning.
That process happens in these gigantic tumblers.
They kind of work like a clothes dryer only with a lot more flavor.
We do spray a little more oil on it just to make sure that the seasoning adheres.
What goes into each flavor of Taco-Litos seasoning is another closely-guarded trade secret.
But I can tell you this They use a truckload of it A few truckloads, actually.
We use about 6,000 pounds or That's a whole lot of spices for a whole lot of Taco-Litos.
We make about 500,000 chips per hour, or 12 million chips a day.
Once all those Taco-Litos are spiced up, they fall onto a conveyor belt just waiting to be bagged.
Luckily, it's not up to one person to do that job.
Instead, a machine inside the packaging room handles millions of Taco-Litos every day.
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
You can hear it across the room, and it's a great feeling.
Next, we discover which crunchy treat's process needs a little help from Tweety and Sylvester.
Hey! Good old-fashioned peanut brittle.
A little sweet, a little salty, and a whole lot of peanut-buttery goodness.
And living in L.
A.
, there's only one place I go to satisfy that crunchy craving.
California's world-famous See's Candy.
They know what it takes to make the perfect peanut crunch, because they've been doing it for almost 100 years.
It was formed by Charles See in 1921 in the Los Angeles area.
He started making his iconic brittle in his candy shop.
Back in the days, our brittle was made in single batches using an open-fire mixer.
Today, things have grown a little.
But the recipe has stayed the same.
And it all starts with what else peanuts.
Because roasted peanuts would burn through the cooking process, they instead start with raw peanuts.
They arrive in massive bags weighing in at 2,200 pounds.
The peanuts are dumped down a hopper and shuffled to an inspection line that monitors the peanuts to make sure they meet the high-quality standards of See's Candy.
While the peanuts are checked for perfection, they're working on the other main ingredients creamy, rich butter.
An hour before the line starts up, we start melting butter.
More than a thousand pounds of butter is used in every batch.
With the melted butter in place, they're ready to start making some peanut brittle.
To make sure each bite has the perfect amount of peanut crunch, the hopper feeds the nuts into a cooker at a metered rate.
But See's brittle is more than just peanuts and melted butter.
Corn syrup and sugar are added to the mix from outside holding tanks.
The corn syrup slides down from a tank in the ceiling, and the sugar, well, that goes on quite a trip to get here.
We have this and it gets blown all the way, about 50 yards, over through the plant, and drops into the cooker.
And this is no ordinary cooker.
We purchase what we call a porcupine cooker.
Its output is about 800 pounds per hour.
Using steam heat, the four ingredients start churning inside the cooker so they can evenly caramelize the candy.
Butter, sugar, and peanuts? It's already an amazing combination.
The brittle comes out, and the last three ingredients are added salt, vanilla, and a touch of baking soda.
It's mixed in by two little mixers, like you'd have in your kitchen.
They may be small, but they have to work lightning quick.
They only have a few seconds to whip the ingredients before the brittle moves to the sizing roller.
The sizing roller is where the candy gets its thin shape.
Which gives us a lean, mean crispy brittle.
That's critical, the 3/8 of an inch, 'cause that's the thickness that makes it crispy and the texture just the way we want it.
The brittle comes out on a stainless steel belt and heads toward my favorite part of the process.
That's right, it's time for the robots to take over.
The first bot is yellow and kind of cute.
We call it Tweety.
Tweety is in charge of two things cutting the brittle into 14-inch pieces, and then flipping them over so both sides can cool.
That's really what gives the brittle that extra-crunchy texture in every bite.
Tweety might be done with this job, but his robot buddy is about to take over.
The slabs are on the move to the next machine, appropriately named Sylvester.
Sylvester separates the brittle into smaller pieces so it can continue to cool and give us that tasty brittle crunch.
That whole process of about 10 feet, that's what I think drives the texture and the crispiness of our peanut brittle.
Before it's off to packaging, the brittle travels down one last cooling tunnel.
When it emerges, the fully-cooked brittle gets chopped into pieces small enough to fit into bags.
But those pieces then have to be carefully checked by hand to make sure they're not too small.
We hand-pack our brittle to make sure that people get the right-size piece and not dust.
Each bag is nitrogen flushed to extend shelf life before being sealed and boxed up.
Then they're all ready to be shipped out to anyone looking for an extra-special, one of a kind, sweet crunch.
Nothing is close to our peanut brittle.
That's all, folks! Coming up, we find out how to turn a wet noodle into a crispy treat.
Hey! Crunchy isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind when I'm eating Chinese food, but there is one notable exception fried noodles.
The Peking Noodle Company in Los Angeles has been making these crunchy noodles for a long time.
My grandfather started this company in 1914.
And the key ingredient has remained the same for over 100 years flour 130,000 pounds of it, to be exact.
To get all that flour into their large mixers, they use some creative thinking.
Air pressure forces about down to the mixers.
Once it arrives, they add small amounts of egg, salt, flavoring, and color.
And then water is added into the mix to form a dough.
It's mixed thoroughly for several minutes and eventually dropped into a large holding container.
After it ages for a short period, the dough needs to be shaped, so it's off to the rolling machines.
That's right, machines not one, not two, but seven sets of rollers that gradually turn this big slab of dough into super-thin sheets.
The dough may start out thick, but after passing through a series of seven rollers, it's quickly flattened down to size.
After the dough moves through the last roller, it's ready to be cut into noodles.
They first cut the dough into thin strips, then a blade cuts the noodles to their proper length.
The cut noodles are collected and wheeled into a refrigerator room to age for 24 hours in 40-degree temperatures.
This helps so that when the noodle is fried, it is the right texture.
After a cold night in the refrigerator room, the noodles warm up and run through a tumbler to separate them before they take a steamy dip in the fryer.
Now these doughy noodles are ready to take the plunge.
These bite-sized bits will cook for a full minute till they have that perfect crunch.
To cook over 40 tons of dough each day, it requires more than just a cup of oil.
We used about 2,500 pounds of oil per day in the frying process.
That oil gives these lucky noodles the perfect golden color we've come to know and love.
When it's time to step out of the fryer, the noodles make their way onto a conveyor to cool off.
Then the cool-down continues in another tumbler, which also helps prevent sticking.
These fried noodles are ready to finish off their journey by getting wrapped up so they can hit the shelves.
A set of scales perfectly portions the fried noodles for packing.
Once the noodles make their way into the boxes, the lids are tucked in and taped by a machine before being transferred onto pallets.
Here at Peking Noodle, they produce about 15,000 pounds of fried noodles each day, every single noodle with that trademark, fried, crispy crunch.
It has a crispy texture to it, it's light, and anything and everything fried is kind of tasty.
Can't argue with that.
Let's make it clap.
I'm in a silly mood right now, guys.
This is when you want to get me.
That boy got comedy.
You got a problem with the way I roll on it? I should have just stopped myself.
Cut.
Beautiful.
That was the bomb diggity.