Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s02e06 Episode Script

It's time to savor the flavor on this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" From a classic apple pie with a yummy surprise filling, to a nostalgic treat who's origins are a timeless mystery, to a classic peanut-buttery candy that's been a favorite for over a century, we're digging deep into some classic flavors we've enjoyed forever.
When it comes to dessert, there's nothing I love more than a fresh-out-of-the-oven apple pie.
Of course, everyone loves Mom's pies best.
But when Mom's not around, well There's always Eli's.
The flaky crust, the fresh apple filling and a surprise twist on the inside make it a dessert to die for.
When we think of apple pie and what this great dessert would be, it really is our, um, answer to that.
Eli's Cheesecake Company in Chicago makes 10,000 of these delicious apple delights a year.
And it all starts with their signature crust.
Two types of cookie crumbs, melted butter, flour, sugar and eggs are poured into a gigantic mixer.
It's a wonderful, powerful mixer that can really mix heavy, heavy doughs.
As opposed to mixers with paddles or beaters like you use at home, this one is specifically for doughs.
After mixing, the dough crust is taken to another room, where these enormous, are divided into more manageable pieces.
This machine presses out little bricks of dough, each just 12 ounces, that are put into the hydraulic press machines and molded into pie tins.
We've had these machines since the early '80s.
And they're wonderful for pressing crusts.
After the crust is perfectly placed in the pan, it goes into an oven, where it's baked at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes.
The apple tart is going to get baked again in a very hot oven.
So we want to set the crust and get kind of a light, golden brown but not over-bake it at that point.
When those crusts are done, of course they need to be filled.
So another team is hard at work on the apple filling.
It starts, as you might imagine, with fresh apples, in this case specially grown Ida Reds from a farm in Michigan they've been using since the '80s.
We go through about 50,000 pounds of apples.
That's in a year.
But even a single batch can take 800 pounds of apples.
They come from the farm cored and sliced before being poured into the massive steam jacket and kettle.
Then, Eli's mixes in just enough cinnamon and brown sugar to heighten the apple flavor.
The apple filling tastes so good.
They don't get mushy.
They don't get soggy.
They have this beautiful cinnamon and a little bit of sugar.
And then it's all apple, just fresh apple with just a a nice little bite.
After an hour, the filling streams out of the bottom of this gigantic kettle and gets poured into smaller buckets to cool.
But they're not done yet.
This episode's all about flavor.
And Eli's really pumps up the flavor by adding Bavarian cream to their pies, which is a mixture of eggs, butter, milk and sugar, which you know is going to taste good.
They're assembled on a conveyor belt, where ingredients are dumped into huge hoppers and carefully squeezed out as each tart makes its way down the line.
Starts with 24 ounces in the bottom.
Then, the pastry cream goes in the middle.
So you have a a little surprise inside in the tarts.
And then, we're gonna put more apple filling on top.
They're almost done, more apples.
Then, we're gonna put what we call apple tops, which are apples that have been processed slightly different, without starch and with just a little sugar, so that they keep their beautiful shape and integrity and bite.
And to make sure each one is placed just right, they do it by hand.
There's no other way to make that design, which is a beautiful spiral on the outside.
The finished tarts are then put on trays in the baking rack, and then head back to the oven to bake.
They may look good enough to eat.
But they're not done quite yet.
They're gonna go right into the oven so that we can brown those apple tops and really give them a gorgeous, caramelized look.
The blast of heat caramelizes the edges to bring out a bit of extra sweetness in the naturally tart apples.
After baking, they're cooled at room temperature for about an hour.
Then, they're put in the freezer and flash-frozen before being lifted out of their pans and sent down the line to be glazed with a mixture of starch, water and sugar.
And it puts a light mist of glaze that'll seal the apples, protect them.
And that'll help them stay beautiful and glisten-y.
Then, it's off to a cutting machine, where the aptly-named guillotine cutter slices them into 14, Finally, the pies go on a conveyor, where they're prepped for shipping.
The cake does get a collar to protect it.
And then, it's run through a shrink-wrap machine.
We put it in our beautiful Eli's corrugated box that protects it even more.
From there, the cakes are ready to be shipped anywhere, from restaurants to hotels to people who may not have ready access to their mom's apple pie.
Well, it's really, uh, luscious, I think, that idea of the crust, the cream, the apples, the browning, that it's something that you're gonna eat every bite.
And then, suddenly, that pie is gone.
Coming up, the mystery behind America's strangest candy.
And later, where did this classic taffy get its name? It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a peanut.
Well, whatever it is, it's a flavor we've been savoring for over a century.
a nostalgic treat with the most unique flavor that goes way back to the 19th century, we think.
The funny thing about Circus Peanuts is, no one really knows what the origin is.
And it's really an enigma.
And you'd have thought that there'd be a simple explanation for an orange-colored, banana-flavored, peanut-shaped marshmallow, wouldn't you? We've looked through all our history books.
And we cannot find exactly why the circus got it's shape, how it got it's name, how it got it's flavor or how it got it's color.
Ah, well, the important thing is that Spangler Candy hasn't forgotten how to make this old-time sweet.
The main ingredient is sugar, of course, liquid sugar, to be precise.
It's pumped from tanks directly into the cooker, where it's about After about 10 minutes of that, the cooked sugar goes through overhead pipes into a cooling tank.
It's here that the rest of the ingredients are added by hand.
For everything to work just right, it all has to happen at precise times and temperatures.
First, the gelatin goes in at 140 degrees.
Next is the powdered sugar at 130 degrees.
Around 120 degrees, we add the color and the flavor.
Even though it's an orange peanut, it's banana flavored.
It all mixes and cools in there a bit longer, until it gets down to 110 degrees.
Letting gravity do the hard work, the mixture is pumped into an aerator that whips air into it until it becomes marshmallow.
And now, the secret to how they make this orange-colored, banana-flavored candy look like a peanut.
First, starch-filled trays pass under molds that stamp out the peanut shell shape and texture.
Then, the marshmallow mix flows through a depositer that fills the starch trays.
Each tray contains 144 peanut-shaped molds.
Once full, the trays are immediately collected in stacks.
There's 30 trays in each stack, which gives us a little over 4,000 peanuts per stack.
So we can run around 25 stacks an hour.
That adds up to about every day.
And each and every one has to rest for 24 hours at a precise 80 degrees.
During this time, the starch is continuously pulling the moisture from the peanuts to give us the good firmness that we want for the peanut.
The next day, those stacks of peanuts are rolled back out of the holding room and dumped, five trays at a time.
They go from the trays into a tumbler.
This shakes the starch off.
And then, the rest of the starch comes off with brushes and an air bath.
And now, these Circus Peanuts are ready for packaging.
And hurry up! I'm getting hungry.
First, they get carried up to an overhead conveyor belt that will take them on a journey across the whole length of the factory to the packaging room.
They emerge at the bagger, where they're inspected for quality.
Then, they're fed onto scales precisely calibrated for the various-sized bags.
The bags move onto a turntable, where operators are waiting to box them up and send them off to this cool, glass elevator.
Now, they're ready to be shipper to eager Circus Peanut fans across the country.
So while we may not know why these orange marshmallows look like peanuts and taste like bananas, we do know that Americans have loved them for generations.
It's definitely a unique experience.
You just have to eat one to really experience it.
They're very iconic.
And they're very American.
Coming up, you'll never guess where this classic peanut butter taffy got its start.
It's amazing how a piece of candy can take you right back to your childhood.
But some candy is so historic, it can take you right back to your great grandfather's childhood.
I'm talking about the iconic Mary Jane, a mouth-watering treat so sweet that you'll want to savor the flavor.
It lasts a long time in your mouth when you're chewing it.
And it's very satisfying.
I'm a peanut butter freak.
And it's all good.
Americans have been scarfing up these chewy peanut butter and molasses morsels for over 100 years.
Mary Janes were first made by Charles Miller in 1914.
He whipped up the first batch in his home, and not just any home.
That home was previously owned by Paul Revere.
And today, we make product in Revere, Massachusetts, so, this truly is the candy's home.
But the big question is, who is Mary Jane? Charles Miller's favorite aunt was Mary Jane.
No one is really sure if the little girl on the wrapper is Charles Miller's aunt.
But then, what really counts is what's beneath the wrapper.
Mary Janes start by combining sugar, corn syrup, molasses and a little bit of salt in a giant, 800-pound kettle.
The mixture is then cooked at a steamy 244 degrees for 30 minutes.
We cook that up to make a taffy.
The scorching-hot taffy is poured out of the kettle and onto the cooling wheel.
As the wheel turns, the taffy sticks to the outside of it.
And after almost one full revolution on the wheel, the candy's temperature drops to 110 degrees.
The cooling wheel has cold water circulating on the inside.
The product comes down, and it's captured in a trough.
Any excess is scraped from the wheel and transferred to the pulling machine.
Remember old-fashioned boardwalk taffy that was hand-stretched and hung from hooks? Well, this pulling machine imitates the twisting and knotting and pulling of the taffy but without the manual labor and at superhuman speed.
All that pulling and twisting puts air into the mix, which makes it softer and easier to eat.
Lookin' good.
Turns from the dark brown, gooey taffy into this light brown, chewy taffy.
After 5 minutes on a pulling machine, the now light and airy taffy is moved to the giant batch roller where the peanut butter is pumped into it.
That peanut butter's fresh-made right here in Revere.
It maintains all the traditions of when it was first introduced.
Now that the taffy is peanut butter filled, the batch roller stretches the candy into a long rope.
But we're not done yet.
That long rope is then molded into a square-shaped rope, ready to be cut down to size: Mary Jane size, that is, about 11/2 inches long and 1/2 inch wide.
The machine cuts it off into individual pieces at a rate of 900 pieces per minute.
At the same time, it is cutting paper and then inserting the candy into the paper and then folding the paper around each piece.
Since the taffy is still warm and soft when it pops out of the batch roller, it's conveyed to a cooling tunnel.
When it comes out of the cooling tunnel, it's about 75 degrees.
And that's firm enough for it to go through some of the more strains and pains it goes through in final packaging.
And that's Mary Jane's story, a story of love at first bite.
The eating experience is all about the first bite.
So you get that immediate release of that taffy flavor.
Your mouth starts to water.
And then, it's a lasting eat, filled with molasses and peanut butter.
It's just delicious.
Ho! Coming up, two favorite flavors together in one crispy chip.
Chips and salsa are just a perfect combination.
But did you know you can enjoy this treat without even needing a bowl? So imagine my delight when California Snak King came up with Salsitas, a brilliant chip and dip combo.
We didn't want to just take a tortilla chip and put some seasoning on top.
Everybody does that, which is why we took the secret ingredients, the salsa and herbs and spices, and put it in the dough.
And of course, a tortilla chip's dough starts with corn.
We use a great deal of corn here at Snak King.
It comes in 2,000-pound totes.
And it's basically, uh, fed into a pneumatic hopper which, uh, conveys it to the production line.
Then, all that corn is mixed in with the salsa, flavoring and water in a giant mixer, creating an enormous, It's so large that, uh, it needs to be broken up into smaller pieces.
And that's where the kibbler comes in.
Its giant, rotating teeth chop up the dough ball and convey the smaller chunks to the pre-sheeter.
The pre-sheeter assembles all those pieces into a sheet of dough, making it ready to go through the actual sheeter, located just below.
This pass makes the dough nice and thin and also cuts the dough into the proper shape.
We decided to do a round chip, uh, versus a triangle.
That was kind of to emulate the look of of of the tomatoes, which were kind of the base, uh, flavor ingredient.
They come off the sheeter and on to a conveyor, which sends them off to the oven to get hot, hot, hot to be precise, which means it only takes The chips then exit the oven and move on to what is called an equilibration belt.
It has less moisture on the outside than on the inside from the oven.
So we need a little time to let that equilibrate throughout the chip before it proceeds to the next step of the process.
And this is key to the perfect chip.
It's really important, uh, for the product to be able to fry properly.
If the moisture's not distributed right, we won't get the texture that we desire.
At this stage, it's time to make sure that every chip is perfect.
As they move past these hooks, any non-round pieces of corn get caught.
Now, it's time for all those perfectly round chips to take a 60-second bath in some smokin'- hot, Wow, those already look good enough to eat.
But they're not Salsitas 'til they go through the seasoning drum.
We dust on the secret ingredients on top.
It's spicy and, uh, zesty, a lot of different flavors: tomato, garlic, onion.
It tastes just like a bowl of salsa.
Each chip needs to turn over in the drum a couple times to make sure each side gets an even coat.
It's just the right amount of heat and sweetness.
It's kind of like that perfect salsa that you love to dip your chip into.
It's just a combination of the two.
No longer tortilla chips, but bona fide Salsitas, they are gently shaken out of the tumbler and onto another conveyor.
This tender touch is key to the Salsitas arriving in one piece.
It's kind of like pulling a tablecloth out from underneath the glasses.
You're able to to do that and move the product forward with a very gentle motion that doesn't break the chips at all.
The final conveyor carries them up and away towards the packaging room.
First stop, the scale.
A computer determines the exact amount of Salsitas for each bag.
And no matter what size they're filling, these machines package around 120 bags per minute.
We, uh, make about a million chips per hour and 24 million per day.
That's a lot of Salsitas.
If you take each of the Salsitas we make in one day and lay 'em edge to edge, you would be driving for about 750 miles.
That's practically the entire length of California.
And might I suggest a perfect snack for such a road trip, no dipping required.
But did you know you can enjoy this trate this treat Ha! What was that? Whew! Chips What the hell just came out my dang mouth?