Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s03e11 Episode Script

On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we're gonna get some treats fresh from the farm.
From French fries with a subtle sweetness to a tart applesauce that tastes like you plucked the pouch right off the tree, and don't forget about a delicious dessert with a nutty crunch, or a salty cured meat that makes any dish better.
These goodies come fresh from the farm and straight onto your table.
You say "pe-can," I say "peh-kahn.
" Either way, you've got the makings of one of my all-time favorite American classics.
These are Carolina Foods Duchess Pecan Pies.
The company started as a small sandwich shop in 1934, but in the '50s, they expanded their product line to include sweet treats, and their pecan pie became a huge hit.
It's just a Southern treat we've all grown up enjoying, and my grandfather came up with a great recipe that we still use today.
And granddad's recipe starts with their flaky pie crust, made fresh every day.
and 80 pounds of water are mixed together for 10 minutes.
The 600-pound batch of dough is put into a trough and wheeled over to the extruder.
A worker hand-feeds chunks of pie crust dough into the machine, and what comes out the other end are long, rectangle-shaped rows of dough.
Then we have a guillotine that cuts it to the size of the chunk that we will deposit into the pan.
A 5-foot-long blade slices the rows of dough into individual This is gonna make a lot of pies.
We will deposit dough that has been cut from the guillotine to the aluminum pan to become the bottom crust for the pecan pie.
The pan then goes under a hot die press, which has ribs around the side.
As the hot die press comes down, it forms the dough into the crust shape, ridges on the outside and all.
Now it's time to get a little nuts.
Okay, a whole lot of nuts.
Carolina Foods will go through 2,000 pounds of farm-fresh Georgia pecans in one week.
The pecans are deposited by a dispenser into the pie shell.
Every pie gets 5 grams of farm-fresh, crunchy nuts.
In a 24-hour period, we use a year's worth of nuts from 70 pecan trees.
But what good is pie without its filling? Inside a massive mixer, they add a soupy batter of water, corn syrup, molasses, sugar, and Granddad's secret dry-blend mix.
All those pie-filling ingredients churn together for two minutes before the sugary mix is pumped into the top of the depositor machine.
Remember our doughy pie crust filled with pecans? Well, it's time they get their fill.
Just over 2 ounces of rich, sweet filling are deposited into every pan.
But I thought the nuts were on top of the pie.
When the filling gets dispensed, it's very thin and light, so the pecans will float to the top before they go to the oven, and that's how you get the pecans at the top of your pie.
Who knew? As the pecans are floating to the top of the pie, the pies themselves are out for a a little stroll on a conveyor system appropriately named "walker.
" When it's going down the walker, you're not spilling the filling out of the pan, or you'd have a mess everywhere.
That's why it slowly moves a little at a time.
Whoa! Hypnotic.
All these little pecan-pie tins are marching towards the same place the oven and this baby's not like the one you remember from your grandmother's kitchen.
The pies cook inside this massive tunnel oven at temperatures reaching 390 degrees.
This band oven stretches over 100 feet in length.
When the pie comes out, it's a nice, smooth, flat pie all the way to the top of the pan.
It's also golden-brown and crispy and Oh, man! These little beauties need to cool off so I can eat them, so they head towards a spiral cooling belt for one hour.
It finishes its baking process because that pie's extremely hot when it comes out of the oven.
On this spiral conveyor alone, the pies will travel over 525 feet.
After they're cooled down, it's on to packaging.
One by one, the pecan pies are sorted onto a conveyor that feeds them into the wrapping machine.
Each pie is covered in wrapping before a rotating cutter slices and seals the pies into individual bags.
With 18 million mini pecan pies baked here each year, everyone can have that farm-fresh taste at their fingertips.
You bite into one of our Duchess Pecan Pies, you really taste the crunch on top of all of the pecans, and then you get this sweet, gooey center that just melts in your mouth and tastes delicious.
Oh, yeah.
Mmm! Mmm! Coming up, see how you can get a fresh, orchard-tart taste right in your local grocery store.
And later, discover the secret to peeling tons of potatoes every day.
Hey I grew up in the Big Apple, and fall there is always apple time fresh, crispy, juicy, and right from the farm.
But you don't have to visit a farm every time you want that delicious, tart taste.
Just grab any flavor of Mott's applesauce, now in a super-convenient pouch.
The New York company has been the leader in apple products for over a century.
It started around 1842, when Samuel R.
Mott discovered a new way of growing and processing apples.
Today, Mott's makes nearly 50 apple products, and on tap for today is the tasty strawberry applesauce.
The process starts just like it did back in the old days on the farm.
Our apples are picked and sourced from just miles down the road.
Which means all the apples that make their way into the factory are super-fresh.
Over the course of a year, Mott's uses over 20 varieties of apples in their applesauce.
Some of our more popular varieties are Mclntosh, Greenings, Cortlands, Idareds.
The apples are unloaded onto rollers to help remove leaves and stems before heading to the wash cycle.
We have a really extensive cleaning process to make sure that the apples are clean and pristine.
A water-flume conveyor sweeps the apples into a large bin that holds over 1,000 pounds of the tart fruit.
Whoa! Cannonball! I'd probably have pretty good luck bobbing for apples in here.
After a little soak in the tub, large paddles slowly push the apples on to the next step.
From there, they follow up another incline conveyor and go through a series of washers to clean the apples.
Sort of like your washing machine at home, there's a wash, rinse, and spin action going on here.
Even after the 20-minute wash cycle, there are still a few leaves and stems, but no worries.
The apples drop in, skins and all.
Then the metal blades do their thing.
Once the apples are in the apple bin, they go through a process that we call the extraction.
That's where we're removing the white fruit, or the white part of the apple, from the skins and the seeds and the stem of the apple.
And there you have it applesauce.
But we're making strawberry applesauce, so we'll need strawberries.
Those strawberries and a few secret ingredients have already been mixed.
The process of combining the strawberries and the apples together is call stream-blending, where we mix them together and they enter the heating process.
The batch is heated to 200 degrees and cooks for several minutes.
That mix is then pumped over to the filler machines.
Here, 50 pouches at a time are loaded onto a plastic rail, and each gets a time and date stamp before they get sauced.
There's a bowl that's right above the filler that the applesauce is in that flows to the filler.
The machine fills with 3.
2 ounces of applesauce.
That's over 200,0000 pouches filled every day.
You know what they say an applesauce pouch a day keeps the doctor away.
We rinse off the nozzle to make sure there's no remnants of applesauce on the threads.
The nozzles of these plump pouches get a quick puff of air to dry them off, and finally they're capped to seal in the tart sauce.
Bagged, cleaned, and capped, the strawberry applesauce is ready to eat.
But because it's going to a grocery instead of immediately into your mouth, the pouches have to go through a pasteurization process that ensures they're sterilized and sealed for freshness.
They're heated to 200 degrees for five minutes inside the pasteurizer machine.
From there, they move into a cooling tunnel that's sort of like a car wash.
Cascading cool water showers the pouches to bring the applesauce back down to room temperature.
It's important to cool the pouches down so it stops the cooking process.
As the applesauce pouches leave the cooling tunnel, they go through a station where they're dried before entering the packaging equipment.
We have a series of blow-off nozzles that have compressed air that blows onto the pouches to dry them off.
With the pouches dry, they're finally ready to be packaged.
To make that happen, Mott's uses something straight out of a sci-fi film robots.
Electronic sensors show where the pouches are sitting on the conveyor, and one by one, they're picked up by suction-cup hands and placed into cartons.
Now that farm-fresh taste can be enjoyed by everyone.
It's a really great flavor explosion.
We have the added surprise of that strawberry flavor, and it's just delicious.
Coming up, find out how these potatoes become French fries in the blink of an eye.
Later, learn why this locally sourced hickory wood makes all the difference to these salty slices.
Hey I don't care which way you slice 'em, I love fries shoestring, wedges, crinkle-cut.
You name it, and I'll eat it.
And these days, I'm eating a lot of these tasty treats.
Southern Sweet Sweet Potato Fries from Trinity Frozen Foods in Pembroke, North Carolina.
North Carolina produces almost 50% of all sweet potatoes grown in North America.
And every day, those local farmers deliver about 40,000 pounds of the state's biggest and finest sweet potatoes.
We prefer larger sweet potatoes because we get a much better yield out of the product and less waste.
Once the big ol' potatoes arrive, they're sorted into 1,000-pound bins and carried over to the vat dumper.
It deposits the potatoes onto an incline conveyor that feeds into the steam-peeler.
This is definitely not the kind of potato peeler you use at home.
We're talking a blazing, forced in at 160 pounds per square inch.
So, the action of the steam cooking the outside of the potato, plus the action of them tumbling allows the peel to be gently removed from the outside of the potato.
Even after the steam-peeler, there's still some skin stuck because of the starches on the outside of the potato.
So they head off to the linear brush-scrubber.
The potatoes are tumbled inside of that machine in order to remove that excess peel waste.
Next, those freshly peeled, bright-orange sweet potatoes hit another conveyor that takes them to the trim table, where they're you guessed it trimmed.
There are things that naturally come on a potato, like root ends and maybe external defects.
And only the human eye can see that, so that's why they're hand-trimmed.
From there, they travel to the mechanical slicer.
Inside this machine, 27 blades spin at a very high speed so fast that you can't even see.
But let's just say sweet potatoes go in, and sweet potato fries come out, and they come out fast.
It ejects those French-fry shapes into a discharge tank at about 50 miles an hour.
At that pace, they need to hit water instead of metal to keep them intact.
Then they rumble down a shaking conveyor and over a series of rigid rollers.
There's a whole lot of shaking going on here.
Why? It's time to dry off the fries, 'cause nobody likes soggy fries.
Now the fries head to inspection, where workers remove any mis-cuts or pieces that are too small before they hit the blancher.
That's what allows us to naturally keep the orange color of that sweet potato.
In fact, most vegetables need to be steam-blanched if they're going to be frozen.
Otherwise, prolonged exposure to air would make their color fade.
And check out this next contraption the vibratory shaker conveyor that helps the fries dry out a bit more.
That shaker conveyor has fins installed on it in order to allow those fries to travel linearly but be separated from each other.
And that's because of where they're headed next the batter curtain.
See, sweet potatoes don't get crispy like regular fries, so to crisp them up doing cooking, Trinity adds a thin coating of batter.
But that recipe is top-secret.
I would love to talk to you about it, but I'm pretty sure someone would throw me into a van somewhere and you'd never see me again.
Well, we don't want that, but here's what we can tell you.
We use an actual rice-based batter to ensure that you have a clean-tasting sweet potato fry.
From there, it's into the fryer.
This one is a 750-gallon pan of 370-degree soybean oil.
Since these fries are meant to be finished at home in an oven, they're only partially fried, which takes a mere 26 seconds.
Then it's out of the frying pan and into the freezer.
To keep that farm-fresh taste, the fries take a quick ride on a conveyor belt straight into a 28-ton freezer, which is about the size of two school buses.
When those little, fresh, frozen fries come out of the freezer, they're a chilly -2 degrees.
They're quickly hand-sorted and inspected before they hit this super-shiny scale.
The most impressive piece of machinery we have here is our multi-head scaling system.
Yep.
That sweet machine weighs out over 32,000 bags of Southern Sweet fries every week.
It's Southern and it's sweet, and it's arguably the best sweet potato fry on the market.
Mmm.
No argument here.
Coming up, find out how long these salty-sweet seasoned racks of meat cook inside a smokehouse to create a one-of-a-kind flavor.
Hey You know what I love for breakfast? Bacon and eggs.
Except, sometimes I skip the eggs and just eat more bacon.
And this is some serious farm-style bacon.
Steeped in or should we say smoked in tradition, Allan Benton has been making his farm-fresh Smoky Mountain Country Bacon in southeast Tennessee for over 40 years.
Our bacon is a very intense-flavored bacon with a pronounced smoke flavor.
Today, Benton's bacon is used by some of the world's top chefs and can be found in retail stores around the country.
But, of course, to make the perfect bacon, you've got to start with the perfect pork, and Benton's only uses fresh pork bellies from select farmers.
Every week, they bring in up to 25,000 pounds of pork.
We'll take that and get that in to cure as quickly as we can.
Curing helps to preserve the pork.
At Benton's, they use a mixture of salt, black pepper, and brown sugar.
We still make the product using my original family recipe.
Each and every pork belly is then hand-rubbed by a worker to ensure the cut is completely covered in the house-made cure.
Everything we do here is done "the hard way," but it's all about quality.
Once the meat is covered in seasoning, it's cured for a week to 10 days in a frosty 39-degree cooler.
When its hibernation is over, the cured meat is on the move to the best-smelling oven ever the smokehouse.
It's a cinder-block building where we can fit about eight racks of bacon in.
We have a wood stove that we fire up.
We're looking for a rich, full smoke.
It might be a regular stove, but when it comes to wood, Benton's is very specific.
Hickory all day, every day.
In fact, they only use logs that come directly from their own neck of the woods.
Folks around here know, if you're clearing a field and you've got hickory, we'll take it.
The wood stove in Benton's smokehouse is cut into the wall so that the wood can be added and the fire tended to without opening the door to the room itself.
What's going on in the smokehouse is technically a cold-smoking process.
So, we want it to be warm, but not really hot.
They don't want to actually cook the meat or dry it out too much, so after two days in the smokehouse, the bacon is ready to move on down the line.
Mmm! Looks like I'm gonna need a bigger frying pan to cook this up.
Well, there is one more step before the bacon ends up on grocery-store shelves.
It needs to be sliced.
But there's one problem.
If you're slicing at room temperature, the slicer blade will grab pieces of that and just sling it all over the room, so we chill the bellies before we run it through the slicer.
After 48 hours in the cooler, the salty smoked pork belly is ready to take on its bacon shape.
We run it through a bacon press, just to flatten it out and make a little easier to slice and package.
Once firmly compacted and more uniform, the pork portions will enter the slicer, where this circular saw cuts the bacon into strips.
As the slices roll down the orange conveyor belt, workers remove them from the machine, weigh them, and pack them by hand.
The filled bags are then vacuum-sealed to be bundled and shipped to bacon lovers everywhere.
We end up making of Benton's Smoked Country Bacon every year.
I'm not ashamed to say I eat probably half of that.
This is going to be funny.
Cool, man! Mmm! Oh, yeah.
Mmm! Okie dokie.
Cooli-hi-harmony.
Why is it funny? Because I say so.
Oh, yeah! Gah-gah-gah! Gah-gah-gah!