Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s03e13 Episode Script

On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we're taking a bite of some timeless tastes.
From a classic sponge cake filled with a creamy surprise to a dinner dish straight from Italy to a flaky treat from ancient times to a sugary snack that'll cool you down during a hot summer day, every one of these treats delivers a timeless taste.
I know you know what this is because this is one treat that has stood the test of time.
Mmm.
The Twinkie.
These moist cream-filled sponge cakes have been a staple on grocery store shelves for generations.
Twinkies have this nostalgia and this aura about them that just make them fantastic.
The original flavor of the cream inside the Twinkies was banana, but they had to change it for an important reason.
During World War II, there was a banana shortage, and so that's when Hostess changed the Twinkie cream to the vanilla cream, which is still our most popular flavor today.
To get to that light, sweet vanilla cream, Hostess starts with its iconic golden-yellow sponge cake.
Inside a massive they add water, oil, flour, sugar, and the most important ingredient in any sponge cake eggs.
But you won't find these eggs in your fridge.
Instead of cracking open thousands of eggs each day, Hostess uses powdered eggs.
We use so many eggs in our Twinkies that we would need to employ 650,000 chickens to meet our needs.
Brilliant so much easier than breaking eggs and picking out shells.
As the mixer blends the ingredients together, teeth-like paddles help pump air into the batter.
And that's essential to create the iconic Twinkie cake texture.
I think the first thing you experience when you bite into a Twinkie is that delicious, light, fluffy cake.
After 90 seconds, the batter is aerated and then pumped through a series of overhead pipes to the depositor.
Here, the batter will start to take shape thanks to these cake pans.
Each pan gets a quick spray of oil before one ounce of batter is deposited into each of the 72 molds.
The nozzles are pumping out cake batter so fast that they can make a 1,100 Twinkies every minute.
Phew, these nozzles are working overtime.
Now that the pans have been filled, they travel down the a conveyer belt into a serpentine oven that is heated by oil.
The hot oil is pumped through coils and released through valves as needed to bake the product.
The Twinkies bake for 13 minutes at 400 degrees, creating perfect golden sponge cakes.
We bake with cooler temperatures at the start of the oven and warmer temperatures at the back of the oven to help give the leavening effect, with the later temps really giving it that golden color that's so classic.
When the cakes exit the oven, they're about 200 degrees, but they need to get down below 100 before they can get their vanilla cream filling.
Too cool off, the cake pans travel along a series of conveyers for 15 minutes in a refrigerated room.
When the cakes reach that perfect temperature, it means only one thing time for the cream filling.
The cream is made in 1,500-pound batches, where shortening, vanilla, and starch are mixed for 90 seconds.
Then they add 300 pounds of powdered sugar in the mixer.
And just like the sponge cake batter, a series of paddles aerates the cream.
The continuous mixer acts much like a whipping bowl that you have at home that you mom would use.
Except here, you can't lick the bowl.
Well, that's a bummer.
I guess I'll just have to eat some Twinkies to get to some of that cream.
Once it's finished, the batch is pumped from the mixer into the depositor machine.
Each cake gets three needles full of cream, which equals 1/2 an ounce of gooey goodness.
Using three needles on the Twinkies is important because the Twinkie is about four inches long, so having three needles ensures that every bite has some of that delicious cream filling.
Once the cakes are stuffed with sugary vanilla cream, an air knife blows compressed air into the pan, which makes the cakes almost jump out.
Now that the Twinkies are loose inside the pans, a conveyer belt turns them upside down, allowing all those cream-filled Twinkies to fall out onto another belt.
That is one tasty yellow-brick road.
And just like that, the cakes are ready for packaging.
Cake aligners ensure that the Twinkies are perfectly straight as they enter the flow-wrapping machines.
Each Twinkie is wrapped and carefully placed in a box before every one of the Hostess makes daily are shipped out all over the world.
Eating a Twinkie is so great because you get some of that soft, fluffy cake and then a bit of the rich, creamy filling with the vanilla notes that all mash up in your mouth.
You can never out grow eating a Twinkie.
Coming up, discover the timeless secret in this zesty sauce.
And later, learn how this biblical bread gets its flaky texture.
I love food that comes from a classic tradition, especially when it's a timeless taste combination of juicy chicken, gooey cheese, and zesty sauce.
Chicken Parmesan and penne no one does it quite like the folks at Bertolli.
They've been serving up authentic tastes of Italy to Americans since the 1800s when Francesco Bertolli started the company.
As migrants immigrated to the United States, they wanted to bring this rich culture of authentic Italian cuisine with them.
And they used Francesco's recipes as they started developing the different food.
In 2005, Bertolli decided to expand their brand, bringing some of the traditional foods they've been selling for over a century to the freezer section.
Those timeless tastes get started here inside their Russellville, Arkansas, factory.
Like with any great chicken Parmesan, it all begins with the sauce.
A mix of soy oil and water is pumped into a massive kettle along with 3,700 pounds of crushed tomatoes.
is made out of tomatoes, and that's one thing that we are very, very proud of.
To create a thick and rich sauce, the mixture is cooked at 176 degrees for about 5 minutes.
The water itself will be reduced off, giving it a higher flavor, a higher intensity of sauce.
en it's timp the sauce with a little spice actually, four spices.
salt, basil, red pepper, and black pepper are scooped into the bins.
The dry mix is then lifted and dumped into the kettle.
They bring out flavor.
I think with anything else, a good chef or a good cook is gonna add a little spice.
After five minutes, the sauce is blended and ready to eat, but it's too hot for packaging.
So instead, it's piped into the crazy contraption called a stem machine.
The first step in the stem process is to created a level, half-inch layer of sauce.
To do this, each batch of sauce is poured out of a nozzle onto a 6-foot-wide conveyer belt.
Then a gigantic roller travels over the sauce, making sure it's perfectly level.
Once it reaches the proper thickness, the sauce enters an 80-foot freezer that lowers the temperature to a frosty 5 degrees.
It's important for that temperature to be right so that the pieces that we cut out are relatively uniform.
When the frozen sauce emerges, it passes underneath two sharp blades.
Together they simultaneously slice the sauce into 1.
5-inch pellets.
Anyone else suddenly have a hankering for some zesty tomato sauce? Out of the slices and onto a conveyer, the pellets travel through a second 40-foot freezer that brings the temperature down to negative 25 degrees.
Now that the pellets are frozen rock solid, they go into 1,000-pound totes that are brought over to the production line, where they'll join pre-cooked chicken, penne, and a mix of assorted cheese and diced tomatoes.
We have dump stations.
And each of these dump stations are allocated for certain components of our dinners, whether it's the sauce in lane 1 or chicken in lane 2.
All the totes are lifted up by forklifts and dumped into giant hoppers.
I don't think I have a pot big enough to cook all of this.
Those hoppers hold the individual ingredients until it's time to portion out each one into the scales.
Each component has their own scale, whose primary job is to ensure that the weights for each component matches the recipe.
Buckets line the automated conveyer belt that continuously pass underneath a series of scaling stations.
When a bucket lines up properly, a spout releases the dinner to the bagger, filling bag after bag after bag with delicious chicken Parmesan and penne goodness.
Now that the right amount of cheese, chicken strips, al dente pasta, and sauce pellets are in the bags, they're sealed and sent by conveyer to packaging.
The packaging machines created 200 bags a minute or 60,000 every day.
Finally, the bags are hand-packed into the boxes before making their way to freezers around the country.
From the moment you open the bag, you forget that you didn't make it from scratch because of the quality way it's made here in the plant.
Coming up, find out why this ancient flatbread only has a couple of simple ingredients.
And later, learn how this colorful maze of tubes can cool you off on a hot summer day.
Don't get me wrong I like fancy food as much as the next guy.
But sometimes the simpler the better.
And in many cases, that's how some foods become timeless.
Like matzo.
That's right the unleavened bread that's been around since ancient times.
It's symbolic to the times that the Jews were slaves in Egypt, and it was the unleavened bread that they escaped with.
In 1888, New Jersey-based Manischewitz continued this time-old tradition by selling their first piece of matzo.
We were the first ones to commercialize matzo baking in America.
The process of baking matzo begins just as it did thousands of years ago with kosher flour.
So, what's kosher flour? It's pretty simple.
A trained rabbinical observer called a mashgiach watches over the flour until it's deposited into one of Manischewitz's When it's time to start a batch, flour is pumped through a sifter and into a mixer.
Once inside, it'll meet the only other ingredient in the recipe water.
From the time flour and water touch until the time it gets into the oven needs to be less than 18 minutes.
So we work on a very tight time clock.
Why such a quick turnaround? That's because this is unleavened bread.
If they waited any longer, the matzo dough would begin to rise, and the batch would be unusable.
After the flour and water mix for less than a minute, the newly formed dough is poured onto conveyer belt that's headed for the sheeting room.
We keep our mixing and our sheeting in two separate rooms, and that's for kosher requirements.
Inside the sheeting room, the dough goes through an extruder machine that squeezes the large chunks into 1-5/8-inch-thick continuous sheet of matzo dough.
But this first squeeze doesn't get the dough thin enough.
So they have to continue squeezing the dough down to size using a series of rollers.
With each succeeding set of compression rollers, the dough gets milled out thinner and thinner until we have the thickness that we're looking for for the matzo.
Once the dough reaches the proper 5/8-inch thickness, the sheet passes underneath this blade.
As it rotates, the blade cuts the continuos sheet into smaller 42-inch pieces.
The smaller sections then move towards the lamination machine, which begins layering the dough sheets on top of one another.
Layer after layer after layer the goodness never stops.
What happens is when you bake that, it forms ridges and cracks and pockets of air inside the matzo, which give it its crunchy and flaky texture.
But matzo is thin, so these layers of dough aren't ready for the oven quite yet.
All seven layers of dough first need to pass through three compression rollers.
As the dough passes underneath each roller, it becomes thinner and thinner until it's only 1 millimeter thick.
If you would take that dough and try to get it from a 1/4 inch down to a millimeter with one compression roller, it would be a tremendous amount of stress on our machinery.
So we do it in stages.
Now that the dough has reached its perfect thickness, rotary knives cut it into separate strips.
Each sheet of dough passes underneath one of seven rollers as a conveyer belt moves them towards a docker roller.
The docker roller has one job punching itty-bitty holes in the dough.
If you would not punch the holes in the matzo and you just put a piece of dough through the oven, it would kind of act like a pita bread.
It would just blow up.
And that would be a big no-no for matzo.
No no-nos here.
The holes also let steam escape, which causes the brown dots that appear on the finished matzo.
Filled with holes, the dough travels through another set of rotary blades that slices it into Now it's ready for the oven.
But first, they need one more check from a mashgiach to ensure that they've been properly docked and that no matzo pieces are overlapping.
If something's touching, overlapping, when you come out of the oven, that part will be raw and not cooked.
The matzo travels through three zones of a 150-foot oven for about 2 minutes.
You might think that's quick, but at nearly 800 degrees, any longer would burn the matzo.
Once out of the oven, the matzo travels for 3 minutes down a 300-foot cooling conveyer.
That's a football field of nothing but piping-hot matzo.
Cooled down to 80 degrees, the matzo move to the packaging area.
They're stacked five or six to a sleeve, then flow-wrapped before sliding into the Manischewitz boxes people have come to know over the last century.
Matzo brings everybody back to their roots.
It's something that we're very proud of here in Manischewitz.
Whether you're enjoying it at your Passover Seder or serving it with a savory spread, Manischewitz matzo is more than just your average cracker.
Making a food that touches people's hearts in such an important way is extremely fulfilling.
Coming up, learn how a few simple ingredients can create these fruity tube treats.
Lollipops, pudding pops, even cake pops but when summer rolls around, there's nothing I like better than enjoying a timeless taste of these icy pops.
I'm talking about Otter Pops.
Packed with flavors like lime and raspberry, there's nothing more refreshing on a hot day than this fruity popsicle.
Otter Pops are one of those brands that really connect with summer.
We something cool, and there's nothing better than an Otter Pop.
Jel Sert bought the brand in the 1990s, but the original Otter Pop has been satisfying icy-cool cravings since the 1960s.
It was an idea by a man named Paul Pope.
Paul wanted a freezer pop that had characters associated with each flavor.
Otter Pop enthusiasts may have their favorite character, but it's the great refreshing taste that keeps people coming back for more.
To make the frozen pops, you first have to start with simple liquid ingredients.
water, and sweetener are electronically measured before being dumped into a gigantic 500-gallon mixing tank.
Next, they add a proprietary blend of dry ingredients.
The recipe is a closely guarded secret, but you can be sure that it tastes delicious.
All those dry ingredients are deposited into the tank by a specialized machine called an inductor.
It's basically a funnel, and it uses air to bring the powder up into the mixing tanks.
The batch gets mixed for 10 to 12 minutes before going through a pasteurization process where the mixture is heated to 162 degrees.
After pumping up, down, and all around through a series of pipes, the liquid batch is cooled off before arriving at the mezzanine area, where colors and flavors are added.
We will make six different flavors on that mezzanine, and those flavor slurries, as we call them, are introduced into that generic base from the mixing room to create final Otter Pop liquid.
Check out all these colors.
How can I pick just one? Green, orange, red, blue, and purple liquids make their colorful way through the tubes down to the filling lines.
If you look across our filling lines, you'll see a kaleidoscope of color.
Here, nine plastic tubes are filled to the brim with a variety of Otter Pop flavors.
The tubes are then sealed in a proprietary process that helps keep the Otter Pops fresh, whether on the shelf in the supermarket or at home in your freezer.
There's a tremendous cost savings to the consumer to freeze it at home rather than buy it in the frozen aisle.
Each batch makes and they make close to 70 batches each day.
That's over 300 million pops a year.
And everyone of those pops makes their way into the classic blue-and-red-striped Otter Pop boxes.
So when the temperatures rises and you want to beat the heat, you can reach into your freezer for this frosty pop.
Without an Otter Pop, summer is just not summer.
Because this has When I don't say the words right.
Why don't we tidy it up.
Yes.
I'm good like that.
Everybody wanna go where everybody know Shut up.
Shut up, people.
Good.
It's good.