Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s03e02 Episode Script
Local Legends
On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we find out what it takes for a tasty treat to become a local legend.
From a homegrown lollipop that turned into a chewy icon, to a Southern libation sensation, to a creamy chocolate named after a state tree, to a gumbo that tastes like it came straight out of New Orleans, these small-town treats became national home runs.
Candy and gum Separately, they're delicious.
But, if you combine them let's just say they become something really legendary.
It's that candy classic we all know and love the Charms Blow Pop.
Blow Pop has always been billed as a combination of two treats a hard candy shell on the outside and a soft, chewy bubble gum center.
In 1968, Walter Reid III took a gamble combining two of his candy company's top sellers lollipops and gum.
The result? The first bubble-gum-filled lollipop in the world was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
And just like in the old days, the process today still starts with lots of sugar.
The hard candy begins with one main ingredient, which is sweets mix.
So, what's a sweets mix? It's a combination of corn syrup and liquid sugar, and it forms the base of the candy.
The mix is pumped into a giant cooker and heated to 280 degrees.
As the candy comes out of the cooker, it flows into a mixing pot, where the color and flavor and acid are added to the candy.
It's here that the bubbling sweets mix starts to look like a real candy.
And after a few minutes of mixing, it's ready to go.
It cooks right there, and it discharges out on a steel band.
Two long ribbon sheets pour out of the cooker and onto a conveyer, where it starts to cool down.
In case you're wondering, that is a 60-foot-long piece of candy.
While the outer candy shell cools, the soft, chewy gum is being made.
The main ingredients to gum base resin, calcium carbonate, and special chewing rubber.
Wait.
Did he say "chewing rubber"? As in, rubber band? Well, not quite, but close.
An edible synthetic rubber that makes it the perfect base for gum.
That synthetic rubber and a few secret ingredients are mixed in a 2,000-pound blender.
After it's blended together, the ooey, gooey mix base is poured into another kettle where they add powdered sugar, corn syrup, flavoring, and that classic pink coloring.
Now that it's the perfect smooth and sticky consistency, the gum is pumped through a 60-foot tube and a date with destiny.
Or at least with its hard candy shell.
And the two come together here, at the batch roller.
The candy shell jumps from the belt and falls onto the batch roller.
You can't see it, but as the candy shell rotates, an extruder injects the gum into the center of the batch roller, right into the center of the candy shell.
The candy shell envelops the gum, and eventually is squeezed down into a thin rope.
Shrunken down to size, it's time for this rope to become a lollipop.
And that happens in one of my favorite machines the pop former.
This baby takes the long gum-filled candy rope and transforms it into a lollipop all in one lightning-quick motion.
I mean, just look at this thing.
We form pops up to 1,300 a minute, which is pretty impressive considering you still have to insert a stick at that speed.
These Blow Pops might look ready to eat, but they're still too warm.
Time for a cooldown.
Once they're out of the tunnel, the cooldown continues on a spinning spiral tower.
It's a carnival Tilt-A-Whirl ride for lollipops.
Here, as the pops go 'round and 'round, they harden to maintain their Blow Pop shape.
As the lollipops exit the spiral cooling conveyer, they are then transferred into individual wrapping machines.
Charms has that can wrap nearly That's enough bubble gum to blow a bubble large enough to encompass the Earth.
Sour apple, cherry, grape, strawberry, and mouthwatering watermelon That's a lot of bubble, and a lot of sweet candy suckers to go around.
The tidal wave of pops then make their way over to packaging.
We have machinery which is called "pick and place," and they pick the bags off of the conveyer line and place them into a case.
When the cases leave the warehouse, they make their way around the world for pop lovers to enjoy.
The best thing about eating a Blow Pop is the crunchy candy shell mixed in with the soft, chewy bubble gum.
I'll say! Yum.
Coming up, discover how this Tennessee spirit gets its campfire taste.
Later, find out how a tree nut became a chocolaty treat.
Hey Ah, whiskey! Neat, on the rocks, splash of water.
Irish, Scotch, Canadian.
It's all good.
But, for me, I like a good, old Tennessee whiskey.
And no one does it quite like Jack Daniel's Distillery.
Most people don't realize that Jack Daniel was a real person.
Yep, at a very young age, Jack set off on his own, bought a still, and by 1866, his now-world-famous distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, was up and running.
Every drop is made right here, in this small town that only has one red light.
And there's one thing about Lynchburg that makes it kind of a weird home for one of the world's most iconic brands of whiskey.
It's still made in a dry county.
That's right.
You can make Jack Daniel's in Moore County, Tennessee, but you can't sell it.
To make whiskey, the first thing you need is water, and Jack Daniel's gets theirs right here, at Cave Spring Hollow.
We're very blessed to have an abundant water source right here on the property.
Every drop of Jack Daniel's starts with that water.
The water is pumped from the cave to these huge fermentation tanks, where it's mixed with corn, barley, and rye.
All three arrive by truck daily.
We use 80% corn, 8% rye, and 12% malted barley.
Once that's all mixed together, they add the yeast.
And this particular yeast has been with the company for quite a while.
We use a proprietary yeast at Jack Daniel's that's been around since before Prohibition.
That's right That yeast is almost 100 years old.
Once it's all in the tank, it's left alone to ferment.
It's alive! The yeast will take about four to six days to take all the starches and sugars out of the grain.
At that step of the process, we'll call it distiller's beer.
Why distiller's beer? Well, it's because it's pretty close to actual beer in terms of recipe and alcohol content.
We're gonna get up to about and once the distiller's beer is done, we'll take it and flow it through a 40-foot-tall copper still.
And the still is where the beer becomes liquor.
By boiling the distiller's beer, they get rid of most of the water and turn that 11% beer into a pure, potent liquor that's almost 140 proof.
That liquor is then pumped to the top of 10-foot-tall barrels filled with hard sugar maple charcoal.
Over the next few days, the liquid is slowly released from the pipes and drips its way from the top to the bottom of the charcoal which, by the way, is actually made on the property, as well.
We'll actually take our own whiskey from our own stills, and we'll spray that onto the hard sugar maple.
And then we'll light it up, and we'll reduce it down to charcoal.
Filtering it through the charcoal removes impurities and mellows the taste a bit.
And it does one more thing, too.
As Jack Daniel's is distilled at 140 proof, it's actually bourbon whiskey.
It's charcoal mellowing that makes this Tennessee whiskey.
Wait a minute.
Jack Daniel's is brown, not clear.
What's up with that? That's where the barrels come in.
These barrels are made by hand, then charred on the insides to make that distinct color of Tennessee whiskey.
What that does is it caramelizes the sugar in the wood.
About 55 gallons of clear, filtered, is pumped into each specially made barrel.
When it's filled to the brim with good old-fashioned Tennessee whiskey, the barrels get a plug before heading off through a series of conveyer belts and elevators.
Where's all that delicious whiskey headed? Well, it's time to settle in for a nap inside a storage warehouse.
Actually, a lot of warehouses.
There are 88 of these huge barns on the Jack Daniel's property.
That will be just enough to cheers with all my Tennessean friends.
We go into the barrel as clear as water, and the color is gonna form naturally just over the years.
Yep, he said years.
The barrels sit in the warehouse for over four years.
Over time, the clear whiskey turns a brownish yellow, and eventually, a brownish orange.
When the whiskey reaches its peak maturity, the tasters will know and will draw that whiskey out of the barrel.
We have employees who are official whiskey tasters, who have dedicated themselves to tasting, every single day, Tennessee whiskey.
Hmm.
I guess I'm just gonna have to settle for "unofficial" whiskey taster.
Once they're properly aged, the barrels are taken down, rolled onto this special whiskey barrel elevator, and loaded onto a barrel truck.
Destination? The dump room.
We'll drill the bottoms out of the barrel and turn the barrel upside down so that every drop of whiskey comes out of it.
It's on to one more round of filtering in the charcoal barrels to remove any impurities before the whiskey is pumped into these gigantic holding tanks.
We'll take barrels from different floors of different warehouses and put together about a 150-barrel batch, and by taking different barrels from different floors, we can make it consistent.
Then, it's off to bottling, and I bet you can't guess the reason old Jack chose this iconic bottle.
There's no more, probably, iconic package than the square bottle with the black and white label.
We don't know exactly all the reasons why our founder chose the bottle, but they said that Jack once said that, "I'm gonna put my product in a square bottle because I'm a square dealer.
" But the whiskey isn't just poured in.
It's actually injected into the bottles through a vacuum process so that if there's a flaw in the bottle, like a tiny hole or crack, it won't fill.
Once the bottle is filled, it's capped, labeled, boxed up, and shipped to all points of the compass, all from the tiny town of Lynchburg, Tennessee.
We make our whiskey the same way that Jack made it.
It's the number-one-selling whiskey in the world.
Cheers to good old Jack for creating this small-town concoction turned iconic libation.
Coming up, learn how this chocolate treat gets its nutty shape.
And later, learn about the real man behind the curtain who started the soup craze in New York City.
No soup for you! Hey Golden, creamy peanut butter.
Eat it with jelly, banana slices, or all by itself.
But, for me, nothing comes close to the perfect pairing peanut butter and chocolate.
It's something that Fannie May knows all too well.
They've been making the classic peanut butter and chocolate buckeye candy for over 20 years, but the iconic Ohio sweet goes back further than that.
Home cooks and moms developed this home confection dipped in chocolate, which they named the buckeye.
The name came from its resemblance to the nut of the buckeye tree, the state tree of Ohio.
Fannie May's buckeyes are factory-molded, not dipped, but the basic idea is still the same a savory peanut butter ball wrapped in sweet, creamy milk chocolate.
And just like the local home version, every buckeye begins with a whole lot of chocolate truckloads.
Fanny May uses 6 million pounds of milk chocolate each year.
All that chocolate gets pumped into the melter, where it keeps the chocolate a constant 120 degrees.
From there, it's off to a tempering unit that cools the liquid to 86 degrees before heating it back up again.
That causes the cocoa butter to crystallize, which will give us a really nice shine on the chocolate and a good snap.
The shiny chocolate is then pumped into a hopper, where it's ready and waiting for the other parts of buckeye candy.
The buckeye has three components to it.
It has the chocolate shell, the peanut butter center, and, on top, what we call the cap.
The cap and the center are made out of white chocolate and peanut butter, which are mixed together in another huge melter.
The center and the shell have to be, like, a very similar viscosity, 'cause they're getting injected into the mold at the same time.
And now everything is in place for the molding to begin.
And, like all molded candies, buckeyes are made upside down, which means the cap on top is actually injected first.
To create the cap top, they inject a bit of peanut butter.
Then, a layer of tempered milk chocolate is added before the rich peanut butter center.
And finally, the rest of the mold is filled with more milk chocolate, which envelops the center and gives the candy its base.
Of course, it all happens fast 28 at a time.
We make almost a million pounds of buckeyes a year.
Once the molds are filled, they take a ride through a cooling tunnel.
In addition to maintaining a proper consistency, the cooling tunnel does one other thing.
As it sets, it actually contracts just a tiny little bit.
So, when the trays are flipped, the newly minted buckeyes pop out like cubes from an ice tray.
That may be the best invention ever chocolate peanut butter ice cubes.
Now, this I could watch all day except I'd get too hungry.
All those buckeyes travel down a series of conveyers, which gently coax and rearrange them into a single-file line.
Destination the high-speed wrapper.
The machine can do about 180 pieces a minute.
So it's phenomenal to watch.
The wrapped candies drop into a bucket and move on to final packaging.
Whether you want an individually wrapped piece or are hungry enough to eat a pack of four, the good news is, these days, you don't have to live in Ohio to enjoy a buckeye.
With just a click of the mouse, these babies can be yours.
Who knew a tree could be so tasty? Coming up, find out how a local favorite launched a national catchphrase.
Hey I'm a born-and-bred New Yorker, so I know all the inside info, and there's only one place to go if you're looking for a standout bowl of soup.
That's right I'm talking about The Original SoupMan, founded by Chef Al Yeganeh, whose New York City soup kitchen opened in 1984.
But you probably know SoupMan better by the actor who portrayed him on a certain '90s sitcom.
I did an episode of Seinfeld entitled "The Soup Nazi.
" There were three rules know your soup, have your money ready, order and step to the extreme left.
Know your soup, have the money ready Oh, no.
I forgot the third rule.
No soup for you! Lucky for me, Al's soup is now available in supermarkets around the country.
On the menu today New-Orleans-style chicken gumbo.
Inside a 3,000-pound kettle, they sauté onions and garlic by heating them in 65 pounds of butter and 7 gallons of olive oil.
Then, it's time to add Al's secret spice blend.
Can't talk about Al's secret spices.
Al's spices is like, you know, the Coke recipe.
You can't have it.
We don't know exactly what they are, but we do know where they go right into this special mixer.
They put them in what we call a liquefier, so it goes in water, and it mixes it all up so that there's no clumping and all the spices are all good together.
With no clumps in sight, the liquefied spice blend is pumped into the kettle to mix with the sautéed onions and garlic.
Workers add a red wine reduction and chicken broth to the batch.
Then, a medley of colorful vegetables are added to the gumbo.
Oh, yeah.
I am definitely gonna get my fill of veggies today.
They don't hold back.
Every day, and 2,000 pounds of okra are used in their soups.
Gumbos are all stared in New Orleans, and you need to have okra to make a good gumbo.
It might not be a gumbo without okra, but this is supposed to be chicken gumbo.
Chunks of chicken go in.
All of that slow-cooks in the kettle for about 40 minutes.
Now they have It might be ready to eat, but it's not ready to ship.
For that, the rich, savory gumbo heads down to a filling machine.
There, it awaits these 17-ounce boxes that ride along a conveyer before being pumped full of gumbo.
Then, the boxes cruise down the line for inspection, to ensure each and every carton meets their high quality standards.
But this isn't the end for the soup just yet.
It needs to go through one more cooking step, and it actually cooks right in the carton.
Over 2,000 cartons of soup are cooked at a time, but these babies don't go into an oven at least not one like I've ever seen.
It's like a big pressure cooker.
That's what makes sure that everything in the box is sterile, and that's what keeps the goodness locked in.
The pressure cooker, called a retort, sterilizes the soup with water and steam until it reaches 250 degrees.
Then, it brings the temperature back down to 110 degrees before the cartons exit the cooker.
The pressure cooking of the cartons is what makes The Original SoupMan's soups taste just like the stuff that Al ladled out in New York City.
When you taste something that's great and you crave it and you want more, that's the magic.
He created magic in his soup.
So, it's no longer, "No soup for you!" Now it's, "Soup for you!" Soup for everyone! Okay, cut.
Outer-r-r beauty.
I messed up.
Oh, yeah.
Sometimes I'm "unofficially" sexy.
Oh, yeah.
0," we find out what it takes for a tasty treat to become a local legend.
From a homegrown lollipop that turned into a chewy icon, to a Southern libation sensation, to a creamy chocolate named after a state tree, to a gumbo that tastes like it came straight out of New Orleans, these small-town treats became national home runs.
Candy and gum Separately, they're delicious.
But, if you combine them let's just say they become something really legendary.
It's that candy classic we all know and love the Charms Blow Pop.
Blow Pop has always been billed as a combination of two treats a hard candy shell on the outside and a soft, chewy bubble gum center.
In 1968, Walter Reid III took a gamble combining two of his candy company's top sellers lollipops and gum.
The result? The first bubble-gum-filled lollipop in the world was born in Bloomfield, New Jersey.
And just like in the old days, the process today still starts with lots of sugar.
The hard candy begins with one main ingredient, which is sweets mix.
So, what's a sweets mix? It's a combination of corn syrup and liquid sugar, and it forms the base of the candy.
The mix is pumped into a giant cooker and heated to 280 degrees.
As the candy comes out of the cooker, it flows into a mixing pot, where the color and flavor and acid are added to the candy.
It's here that the bubbling sweets mix starts to look like a real candy.
And after a few minutes of mixing, it's ready to go.
It cooks right there, and it discharges out on a steel band.
Two long ribbon sheets pour out of the cooker and onto a conveyer, where it starts to cool down.
In case you're wondering, that is a 60-foot-long piece of candy.
While the outer candy shell cools, the soft, chewy gum is being made.
The main ingredients to gum base resin, calcium carbonate, and special chewing rubber.
Wait.
Did he say "chewing rubber"? As in, rubber band? Well, not quite, but close.
An edible synthetic rubber that makes it the perfect base for gum.
That synthetic rubber and a few secret ingredients are mixed in a 2,000-pound blender.
After it's blended together, the ooey, gooey mix base is poured into another kettle where they add powdered sugar, corn syrup, flavoring, and that classic pink coloring.
Now that it's the perfect smooth and sticky consistency, the gum is pumped through a 60-foot tube and a date with destiny.
Or at least with its hard candy shell.
And the two come together here, at the batch roller.
The candy shell jumps from the belt and falls onto the batch roller.
You can't see it, but as the candy shell rotates, an extruder injects the gum into the center of the batch roller, right into the center of the candy shell.
The candy shell envelops the gum, and eventually is squeezed down into a thin rope.
Shrunken down to size, it's time for this rope to become a lollipop.
And that happens in one of my favorite machines the pop former.
This baby takes the long gum-filled candy rope and transforms it into a lollipop all in one lightning-quick motion.
I mean, just look at this thing.
We form pops up to 1,300 a minute, which is pretty impressive considering you still have to insert a stick at that speed.
These Blow Pops might look ready to eat, but they're still too warm.
Time for a cooldown.
Once they're out of the tunnel, the cooldown continues on a spinning spiral tower.
It's a carnival Tilt-A-Whirl ride for lollipops.
Here, as the pops go 'round and 'round, they harden to maintain their Blow Pop shape.
As the lollipops exit the spiral cooling conveyer, they are then transferred into individual wrapping machines.
Charms has that can wrap nearly That's enough bubble gum to blow a bubble large enough to encompass the Earth.
Sour apple, cherry, grape, strawberry, and mouthwatering watermelon That's a lot of bubble, and a lot of sweet candy suckers to go around.
The tidal wave of pops then make their way over to packaging.
We have machinery which is called "pick and place," and they pick the bags off of the conveyer line and place them into a case.
When the cases leave the warehouse, they make their way around the world for pop lovers to enjoy.
The best thing about eating a Blow Pop is the crunchy candy shell mixed in with the soft, chewy bubble gum.
I'll say! Yum.
Coming up, discover how this Tennessee spirit gets its campfire taste.
Later, find out how a tree nut became a chocolaty treat.
Hey Ah, whiskey! Neat, on the rocks, splash of water.
Irish, Scotch, Canadian.
It's all good.
But, for me, I like a good, old Tennessee whiskey.
And no one does it quite like Jack Daniel's Distillery.
Most people don't realize that Jack Daniel was a real person.
Yep, at a very young age, Jack set off on his own, bought a still, and by 1866, his now-world-famous distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee, was up and running.
Every drop is made right here, in this small town that only has one red light.
And there's one thing about Lynchburg that makes it kind of a weird home for one of the world's most iconic brands of whiskey.
It's still made in a dry county.
That's right.
You can make Jack Daniel's in Moore County, Tennessee, but you can't sell it.
To make whiskey, the first thing you need is water, and Jack Daniel's gets theirs right here, at Cave Spring Hollow.
We're very blessed to have an abundant water source right here on the property.
Every drop of Jack Daniel's starts with that water.
The water is pumped from the cave to these huge fermentation tanks, where it's mixed with corn, barley, and rye.
All three arrive by truck daily.
We use 80% corn, 8% rye, and 12% malted barley.
Once that's all mixed together, they add the yeast.
And this particular yeast has been with the company for quite a while.
We use a proprietary yeast at Jack Daniel's that's been around since before Prohibition.
That's right That yeast is almost 100 years old.
Once it's all in the tank, it's left alone to ferment.
It's alive! The yeast will take about four to six days to take all the starches and sugars out of the grain.
At that step of the process, we'll call it distiller's beer.
Why distiller's beer? Well, it's because it's pretty close to actual beer in terms of recipe and alcohol content.
We're gonna get up to about and once the distiller's beer is done, we'll take it and flow it through a 40-foot-tall copper still.
And the still is where the beer becomes liquor.
By boiling the distiller's beer, they get rid of most of the water and turn that 11% beer into a pure, potent liquor that's almost 140 proof.
That liquor is then pumped to the top of 10-foot-tall barrels filled with hard sugar maple charcoal.
Over the next few days, the liquid is slowly released from the pipes and drips its way from the top to the bottom of the charcoal which, by the way, is actually made on the property, as well.
We'll actually take our own whiskey from our own stills, and we'll spray that onto the hard sugar maple.
And then we'll light it up, and we'll reduce it down to charcoal.
Filtering it through the charcoal removes impurities and mellows the taste a bit.
And it does one more thing, too.
As Jack Daniel's is distilled at 140 proof, it's actually bourbon whiskey.
It's charcoal mellowing that makes this Tennessee whiskey.
Wait a minute.
Jack Daniel's is brown, not clear.
What's up with that? That's where the barrels come in.
These barrels are made by hand, then charred on the insides to make that distinct color of Tennessee whiskey.
What that does is it caramelizes the sugar in the wood.
About 55 gallons of clear, filtered, is pumped into each specially made barrel.
When it's filled to the brim with good old-fashioned Tennessee whiskey, the barrels get a plug before heading off through a series of conveyer belts and elevators.
Where's all that delicious whiskey headed? Well, it's time to settle in for a nap inside a storage warehouse.
Actually, a lot of warehouses.
There are 88 of these huge barns on the Jack Daniel's property.
That will be just enough to cheers with all my Tennessean friends.
We go into the barrel as clear as water, and the color is gonna form naturally just over the years.
Yep, he said years.
The barrels sit in the warehouse for over four years.
Over time, the clear whiskey turns a brownish yellow, and eventually, a brownish orange.
When the whiskey reaches its peak maturity, the tasters will know and will draw that whiskey out of the barrel.
We have employees who are official whiskey tasters, who have dedicated themselves to tasting, every single day, Tennessee whiskey.
Hmm.
I guess I'm just gonna have to settle for "unofficial" whiskey taster.
Once they're properly aged, the barrels are taken down, rolled onto this special whiskey barrel elevator, and loaded onto a barrel truck.
Destination? The dump room.
We'll drill the bottoms out of the barrel and turn the barrel upside down so that every drop of whiskey comes out of it.
It's on to one more round of filtering in the charcoal barrels to remove any impurities before the whiskey is pumped into these gigantic holding tanks.
We'll take barrels from different floors of different warehouses and put together about a 150-barrel batch, and by taking different barrels from different floors, we can make it consistent.
Then, it's off to bottling, and I bet you can't guess the reason old Jack chose this iconic bottle.
There's no more, probably, iconic package than the square bottle with the black and white label.
We don't know exactly all the reasons why our founder chose the bottle, but they said that Jack once said that, "I'm gonna put my product in a square bottle because I'm a square dealer.
" But the whiskey isn't just poured in.
It's actually injected into the bottles through a vacuum process so that if there's a flaw in the bottle, like a tiny hole or crack, it won't fill.
Once the bottle is filled, it's capped, labeled, boxed up, and shipped to all points of the compass, all from the tiny town of Lynchburg, Tennessee.
We make our whiskey the same way that Jack made it.
It's the number-one-selling whiskey in the world.
Cheers to good old Jack for creating this small-town concoction turned iconic libation.
Coming up, learn how this chocolate treat gets its nutty shape.
And later, learn about the real man behind the curtain who started the soup craze in New York City.
No soup for you! Hey Golden, creamy peanut butter.
Eat it with jelly, banana slices, or all by itself.
But, for me, nothing comes close to the perfect pairing peanut butter and chocolate.
It's something that Fannie May knows all too well.
They've been making the classic peanut butter and chocolate buckeye candy for over 20 years, but the iconic Ohio sweet goes back further than that.
Home cooks and moms developed this home confection dipped in chocolate, which they named the buckeye.
The name came from its resemblance to the nut of the buckeye tree, the state tree of Ohio.
Fannie May's buckeyes are factory-molded, not dipped, but the basic idea is still the same a savory peanut butter ball wrapped in sweet, creamy milk chocolate.
And just like the local home version, every buckeye begins with a whole lot of chocolate truckloads.
Fanny May uses 6 million pounds of milk chocolate each year.
All that chocolate gets pumped into the melter, where it keeps the chocolate a constant 120 degrees.
From there, it's off to a tempering unit that cools the liquid to 86 degrees before heating it back up again.
That causes the cocoa butter to crystallize, which will give us a really nice shine on the chocolate and a good snap.
The shiny chocolate is then pumped into a hopper, where it's ready and waiting for the other parts of buckeye candy.
The buckeye has three components to it.
It has the chocolate shell, the peanut butter center, and, on top, what we call the cap.
The cap and the center are made out of white chocolate and peanut butter, which are mixed together in another huge melter.
The center and the shell have to be, like, a very similar viscosity, 'cause they're getting injected into the mold at the same time.
And now everything is in place for the molding to begin.
And, like all molded candies, buckeyes are made upside down, which means the cap on top is actually injected first.
To create the cap top, they inject a bit of peanut butter.
Then, a layer of tempered milk chocolate is added before the rich peanut butter center.
And finally, the rest of the mold is filled with more milk chocolate, which envelops the center and gives the candy its base.
Of course, it all happens fast 28 at a time.
We make almost a million pounds of buckeyes a year.
Once the molds are filled, they take a ride through a cooling tunnel.
In addition to maintaining a proper consistency, the cooling tunnel does one other thing.
As it sets, it actually contracts just a tiny little bit.
So, when the trays are flipped, the newly minted buckeyes pop out like cubes from an ice tray.
That may be the best invention ever chocolate peanut butter ice cubes.
Now, this I could watch all day except I'd get too hungry.
All those buckeyes travel down a series of conveyers, which gently coax and rearrange them into a single-file line.
Destination the high-speed wrapper.
The machine can do about 180 pieces a minute.
So it's phenomenal to watch.
The wrapped candies drop into a bucket and move on to final packaging.
Whether you want an individually wrapped piece or are hungry enough to eat a pack of four, the good news is, these days, you don't have to live in Ohio to enjoy a buckeye.
With just a click of the mouse, these babies can be yours.
Who knew a tree could be so tasty? Coming up, find out how a local favorite launched a national catchphrase.
Hey I'm a born-and-bred New Yorker, so I know all the inside info, and there's only one place to go if you're looking for a standout bowl of soup.
That's right I'm talking about The Original SoupMan, founded by Chef Al Yeganeh, whose New York City soup kitchen opened in 1984.
But you probably know SoupMan better by the actor who portrayed him on a certain '90s sitcom.
I did an episode of Seinfeld entitled "The Soup Nazi.
" There were three rules know your soup, have your money ready, order and step to the extreme left.
Know your soup, have the money ready Oh, no.
I forgot the third rule.
No soup for you! Lucky for me, Al's soup is now available in supermarkets around the country.
On the menu today New-Orleans-style chicken gumbo.
Inside a 3,000-pound kettle, they sauté onions and garlic by heating them in 65 pounds of butter and 7 gallons of olive oil.
Then, it's time to add Al's secret spice blend.
Can't talk about Al's secret spices.
Al's spices is like, you know, the Coke recipe.
You can't have it.
We don't know exactly what they are, but we do know where they go right into this special mixer.
They put them in what we call a liquefier, so it goes in water, and it mixes it all up so that there's no clumping and all the spices are all good together.
With no clumps in sight, the liquefied spice blend is pumped into the kettle to mix with the sautéed onions and garlic.
Workers add a red wine reduction and chicken broth to the batch.
Then, a medley of colorful vegetables are added to the gumbo.
Oh, yeah.
I am definitely gonna get my fill of veggies today.
They don't hold back.
Every day, and 2,000 pounds of okra are used in their soups.
Gumbos are all stared in New Orleans, and you need to have okra to make a good gumbo.
It might not be a gumbo without okra, but this is supposed to be chicken gumbo.
Chunks of chicken go in.
All of that slow-cooks in the kettle for about 40 minutes.
Now they have It might be ready to eat, but it's not ready to ship.
For that, the rich, savory gumbo heads down to a filling machine.
There, it awaits these 17-ounce boxes that ride along a conveyer before being pumped full of gumbo.
Then, the boxes cruise down the line for inspection, to ensure each and every carton meets their high quality standards.
But this isn't the end for the soup just yet.
It needs to go through one more cooking step, and it actually cooks right in the carton.
Over 2,000 cartons of soup are cooked at a time, but these babies don't go into an oven at least not one like I've ever seen.
It's like a big pressure cooker.
That's what makes sure that everything in the box is sterile, and that's what keeps the goodness locked in.
The pressure cooker, called a retort, sterilizes the soup with water and steam until it reaches 250 degrees.
Then, it brings the temperature back down to 110 degrees before the cartons exit the cooker.
The pressure cooking of the cartons is what makes The Original SoupMan's soups taste just like the stuff that Al ladled out in New York City.
When you taste something that's great and you crave it and you want more, that's the magic.
He created magic in his soup.
So, it's no longer, "No soup for you!" Now it's, "Soup for you!" Soup for everyone! Okay, cut.
Outer-r-r beauty.
I messed up.
Oh, yeah.
Sometimes I'm "unofficially" sexy.
Oh, yeah.