Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s03e03 Episode Script

On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we're gonna twist your tongue.
From a sweet candy that'll leave you with a sour face to a rich chocolate with a fiery finish to a Mexican dish stuffed with surprises to a potent sauce with a subtle spiciness, these treats are sure to leave your tongue twisted.
I love sweet, and I love sour.
So this iconic little treat always does the trick.
And believe me, these Warheads Extreme Sours combine so much sweet and so much sour, they will get your tongue twisted.
When you put this Extreme Warhead candy in your mouth, you get an explosion of flavor, and it is really sour.
But here's a little surprise.
These sour candies are actually born sweet very, very, very sweet, like "40,000 gallons of liquid sugar and corn syrup" sweet.
When they start, a batch of sugar and corn syrup are pumped into huge kettles and mixed with water, just like making candy at home.
You heat it up as you would in a kitchen, except our kettles are 200 gallons versus what you have in your home.
And just like making candy at home, temperature is key.
The candy cooks for 15 to 20 minutes until it reaches exactly 288 degrees.
Then it's pumped into this reservoir station, and it's here that the sugar mix gets its first hint of flavor.
On the menu today, one that really takes me back to the candy aisle green apple.
The tangy green apple flavoring drips into the sugary liquid and gets good and blended in a giant mixer.
Now it's all mixed, but this sweet green candy slurry is still boiling hot.
To cool it off, the slurry is poured onto a conveyor for a little ride.
Where is it headed? To the batch roller.
The conical shaped rollers massage the gooey sugar sheet into one long, continuous rope, a very thick rope.
To get the rope down to candy size, it's pulled through a series of metal rolls.
Each set of wheels squeezes the roll thinner and thinner until it gets Warheads sized.
The rope has to be in order to cut and get to the proper candy size.
And this cutter works fast.
It slices through the rope at a speed of 3,000 cuts a minute.
Now these jewel tone candies are starting to look like Warheads but they're still missing the most important ingredient.
At this time, it's just a sugar hard candy.
They have to add the sour at a later point down the line.
In order to give the Warhead the explosion of sour that they're known for, the bits drop into a 60-foot-long tumbler.
Here, the little hard candies are sprayed with a mix of carnauba wax, gum, and the secret to their sour, malic acid.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Malic acid? Like, do I need to get my safety goggles? Nope.
Turns out, there's malic acid in apples, grapes, and all sorts of fruit.
It's what makes them tart.
But when it's concentrated, it kicks any candy up a gigantic notch on the sour scale.
And these guys get a ton of it.
They take a 45-minute tumble to make sure that each and every piece is thoroughly covered with the super-sour coating.
Now they are sweet and sour, but they still aren't ready to eat just yet.
They're still too soft.
So it's out of the tumbler and onto a cooling rack where they dry out and harden.
After they chill out on their ride, it's off to a packaging machine to get their shiny wrappers.
Each minute, 1,800 pieces are individually wrapped.
Sealed and ready to eat, this river of sour candies flows on to the boxing area where workers mix the candy to ensure the customers get all five flavors in every bag blue raspberry, watermelon, black cherry, lemon, and, of course, my favorite, green apple.
We make almost of hard candy a year.
That is a lot of sour.
Nobody else has as extreme flavor as our candy has.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Okay.
Wow.
Wow, that's sour.
Whoa, sour.
Okay.
Mm.
Sour.
Coming up, discover how an apple candy can set your mouth on fire.
And later, find out how the cayenne pepper unknowingly became a staple for football fans around the country.
I love a flavor that sneaks up on you.
These guys are extremely sneaky.
I mean, sure.
They look sweet and rich and creamy.
But believe me.
This bad boy is ready to bring the heat.
That's because these Bissinger's apple ghost chili salted caramels combine sweet chocolate, gooey caramel, and some of the hottest chilies in the world into a tongue twisting flavor combination.
It's an otherworldly experience.
When you first bite into it, you actually don't realize that you're eating one of the hottest chilies in the world.
While Bissinger's has been based in St.
Louis since 1927, they've actually been handcrafting top-quality confections for almost four times that long.
That's 350 years.
We got our origins back in the 1660s in Paris, where the King Louis XIV actually crowned us as Imperial Confectioner.
And you better believe that if you're making candy fit for a king, you'd better do it right.
Every batch of these caramels start with rice syrup and cane sugar poured into this giant copper pot.
Workers lift the copper pot onto a flame mixer and continue adding whole milk, cream, and dried apple powder to the batch.
We make the apple caramel by hand the old-fashioned way.
It's made in an old-world copper kettle monitored by hand by our candy cooks in the kitchen.
Creating the caramel is a delicate process that takes a bit of patience.
The heat and timing are critical.
Knowing when the caramel is cooked to the perfect consistency isn't an exact science.
It's really a learned art to understand where that point is that the caramel is just right.
This hand-testing method called proofing is unique to Bissinger's and is a highly guarded secret.
Because it's an apple-flavored caramel candy recipe, this particular batch calls for a couple extra ingredients sweet and baked apple extract to give the caramel a tart, appley tang.
Once the candy makers agree that the caramel has just the right feel, two workers pour the warm and sticky candy onto a chilling table for cooling.
Soon, the caramel will almost be as cool as me.
To prevent a runny candy that will ooze out of the chocolate, the caramel must be spread to the right thickness before it hardens and cools.
This is actually a very elaborate table that has water lines hooked up to it so we can properly cool the temperature to make sure we maintain the quality.
The water jets chill the slab of caramel for about 20 minutes, but the cool-down doesn't end there.
The table is on the move to the conditioning room, where the caramel chills to 52 degrees, which can take anywhere from a couple of hours to overnight, depending on the humidity.
Once the caramel is cooled to the appropriate temperature, it then gets hand cut by a large scoring reel into 12x12-inch squares.
This is done by hand to make sure it's the right consistency, the right thickness, and it's also produced at the right speed to make sure that we're not letting the caramel spread out too much.
The squares are then transferred to a special cutting machine that slices the caramel into individual Bissinger's isn't done with them yet.
These little beauties still have to get smothered in melty, ooey-gooey chocolate.
Chunks of chocolate are broken up by hand and added to the enrober machine, where they are heated to 120 degrees before being tempered, a cooling process that ensures the chocolate won't crumble when it's wrapped.
Inside that machine, there is a cooling plate that cools that chocolate at the right rate to give us that snap and shine.
The caramels are placed on a conveyor belt, where the bottoms are coated at a rate of 45 pieces per minute.
We make sure that it's nice and sealed, 'cause we don't want caramel to leak out.
Next, all those chocolate-bottomed beauties get a quick cooling on a moving chill table.
Once they are hard enough, these royal treats get a second coating of chocolate that completely encases the caramel.
Now these might look ready to eat, and they are, except there's a twist.
Up until now, it's a regular piece of sweet, delicious candy.
But it's time to kick it up with a little heat Ghost chili salt.
Each piece is given a sprinkle of heat as it exits the enrober.
This is what gives our Bissinger's apple ghost chili salted caramel that heat that everybody loves.
The ghost chili is one of the hottest peppers on the planet.
Think of the kick you get when you taste the standard hot sauce you have in your pantry.
Now multiply that kick by 400.
Wow! Now, that's a whole lot of heat.
Thank goodness there's luscious chocolate and caramel, too.
But before those scorching hot squares of sweetness can make it into the hands and mouths of their adoring customers, they have to be cool enough to pack.
To do this, the coated candies make a 15-minute trip down a 40-foot conveyor belt.
At any given time, there will be a couple hundred up to 3,000 pieces going through that cooling tunnel.
Once the trip through the tunnel is complete, each candy is hand-packed before heading out to sweet heat seekers across the globe.
You first have this wonderful apple.
Then you have a hint of the chocolate, and then you get the hit by the heat, and you're gonna say, "Wait a second.
What's going on here?" But then you have the caramel to balance it out.
So, it does get pretty hot, but I think that's what makes a piece really stand out.
Coming up, discover the surprise ingredient in an ancient dish that's been twisting tongues since 8,000 B.
C.
And later, find out how a touch of this sauce will set your mouth on fire.
I can't get enough of Mexican food.
It's spicy, zesty, and packed with traditional flavors.
But there's one dish I love to eat because I just like saying the word tamale.
Tamale.
This tasty staple of Mexican cuisine is basically seasoned meat wrapped in dough and steamed or baked in corn husks.
It's been around since 8,000 B.
C.
, but it wasn't until 1985 that Jorge Fiero took his family recipes from Mexico to Utah and started Rico Brand Foods.
When my father and my mother came from Mexico, and I cooked a meal for them, and my mother made the expression of que rico, which means, "How tasty.
" And so that's where the name came from.
And nothing is tastier than their best-seller, the chicken mole tamales.
These tamales start with the mixing of a special sauce called mole.
And let me tell you Some of the ingredients in this rich, complex sauce are pretty surprising.
In our mole sauce, there are tomatoes, plantains, peanuts, chilies, sesame seeds, salt, onions, and chocolate.
That's right chocolate.
In fact, there are in this one sauce.
The mole is really the core of the tamale.
Between all the ingredients, it really gives all the flavor.
All those ingredients go into a large pot, where they're mixed by hand and cooked for 90 minutes.
Everything that we do is handmade.
After an hour and a half, the mole boils down into a rich, dark sauce.
Then it's time to smooth things out.
The hand mixer blends the sauce until it reaches a silky, smooth texture.
Once it's mixed, the mole gets a little siesta while they get the other ingredients ready, like the chicken.
To create a juicy, moist chicken, the chefs at Rico start with the basics, a chicken broth.
To create the broth, you would start boiling Into the water goes chunks of onions and garlic that will cook between 10 and 15 minutes.
The water will turn slightly yellow as the onions and garlic start to break down in the water and create an immense flavor.
At this point, the broth tastes so good, you could eat it on its own.
But we're making chicken tamales, so you know what that means.
breasts go into the pot and cook for two to three hours until the meat is fully infused with the broth flavor.
You know the chicken's ready when the muscle fibers start to pull apart easily.
Which is good, because that's exactly what happens next.
The chicken is pulled out of the broth and shredded.
So far so good, but now it's time for the mole sauce to join the party.
The shredded chicken and the mole are mixed together by hand.
But to really infuse the meat with the chocolate and the chili flavors of the mole, the chicken marinates overnight.
The longer it sits in there, the more robust it is.
As the chicken mole sits, Rico's still has some work to do.
Remember that delicious broth the chicken was cooked in yesterday? You didn't think they just threw that away, did you? They use it to flavor the cornmeal that makes up the outside of the tamale.
First, the broth is mixed with a little lard, then two different types of flour, tortilla and a special flour called masa.
Masa is a coarse ground corn that helps the tamale hold its shape once it's filled.
The difference in the two is to soak up more of the fat and the lard.
It binds it together and gives an amazing texture.
Once the masa dough is finished, it's time for assembly.
And this is where things get interesting.
Most tamales are wrapped in corn husks, but Rico wraps theirs in banana leaves.
Banana leaves happen to give the tamale and the masa an earthy flavor.
Rico uses frozen banana leaves that first need to be grilled for about 10 to 15 seconds to dry them out.
There's a really fine window of the perfect banana leaf.
If you cook it too little, it will be soggy.
If you cook it too much, it will be crunchy.
A small amount of masa and chicken mole are spread in the center of each banana leaf.
They're hand folded before being placed in a steamer, where they are cooked for 15 to 30 minutes.
When you steam a banana leaf, it releases the flavor into the masa and into the tamale.
Next, the tamales are racked and rolled into a blast chiller for three hours.
The tamales are frozen to negative-40 degrees.
Finally, it's off to packaging, where workers place four tamales in every bag before labeling the product for customers around the country to enjoy.
We're feeding with healthiness, authenticity, and love.
And nothing tastes better than love.
Coming up, find out how a ground-down fiery pepper became a national sensation.
Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise It's all good.
But if you want to kick things up a notch, it's all about the hot sauce.
And when it comes to spicing up everything from pizza to eggs, Frank's Red Hot has got it covered.
I remember the first time I tried it, and it was absolutely mind-blowing.
It really does transform any dish that you use it on.
Created in 1920 and named after one of its founders, this spicy sauce quickly became a Louisiana staple.
In 1964, Frank's was used as the secret ingredient in the first hot wing sauce at the Anchor Bar and Grill in Buffalo, New York.
And the rest is history.
Almost a century later, the main ingredient for Red Hot is still the same.
There are no additives.
It's just aged red cayenne pepper.
Each day, 200,000 pounds of fermented pepper mash makes its way from the railcars into one of 14 And we use it all It is the skins, the seeds, the entire pepper, and that's what goes into the product, and that's what makes it so flavorful.
Bring on the whole pepper.
I'm not scared.
All right.
Maybe I'm a little scared.
To lower the heat a bit, they pump water and vinegar into massive batch tanks holding the pepper mash.
Then garlic powder is added to the mix by hand.
We have two batch tanks that are continuously batching.
It will make upwards of 100,000 gallons a day.
Then it's time to heat this hot sauce.
But this is no ordinary oven.
This is a heat exchanger that slowly raises the temperature to 200 degrees as it travels through hundreds of feet of metal pipes.
Is anyone else dizzy just looking at this maze of pipes? I don't know where it begins or ends.
What I do know is that by the time the sauce reaches the end of the line, it cools back down to room temperature and is pumped into tanks to start the finishing process.
It's a proprietary process.
We can't show you all their super-secret details.
But we can give you a sneak peak of their milling process.
Because all those delicious skins and seeds were used to create a unique, complex flavor, the sauce needs to be ground down into the smooth, silky texture that comes out of the bottle.
Then it's off to packaging, where bottles get a quick puff of air to remove any dust before heading into the filling machines.
We fill the bottles at about 300 bottles per minute.
The lines run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
That's over 150 million bottles a year, which is enough to make a whole bunch of hot wings.
The demand is so high that we do have to stockpile our product going into the Super Bowl.
Once filled, the bottles get a label and a tamper-proof seal before heading out to supermarkets around the globe and onto all of your favorite foods.
Pizza, meatloaf, macaroni and cheese You can pretty much put it on any food.
Whoa! Now I know what a dragon feels like.
Great.
Give me one more.
Sure! This little treat Iconic treat? That one? - Yep.
- Yeah, iconic one, yep.
Sweet, sweet candy