Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e02 Episode Script
Let it Roll
Hi.
I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" You might have heard that your tongue can taste four different flavors salty, bitter, sweet, and sour.
But two of those flavors seem to go really great together.
So great that there's a whole bunch of delicious treats that combine the two, snacks that add sweet and sour for a tongue-tingling twist.
Whether it's a classic tart candy, a crispy cookie with a sour secret, or a tart treat with a caramel coating, it's time to unwrap the mystery of sweet and sour.
Nothing combines sweet and sour like Sechler's Pickles candied sweet Mix.
In pickles, people actually want a combination of sweet and acid, and so it's kind of that combination that makes a good flavor.
For the last century, Sechler has been making all sorts of pickles at their homestead barn in St.
Joe, Indiana.
But today, their number-one seller is the candied sweet mix.
On a sweetness level, if a sweet pickle is a 1, then a candied pickle would be about 20% sweeter.
And all that sweetness starts with a fresh crop of local cucumbers.
First, the cucumbers go for a soak in the huge wooden tanks filled with saltwater.
We've been using those for probably about 60 to 70 years.
They're made, usually, out of cypress, and so they're very long-lasting.
There's enough salty brine in these 112 tanks to float a yacht on.
Several of our tanks came out of the Saint Louis Brewery when they converted from wooden tanks to use for fermentation to stainless tanks, and so we repurposed them to be pickle tanks.
And just like a good beer, the barrel adds to the pickle's flavor.
The fermenting process takes time.
The cucumbers soak in these tanks for two to three weeks.
When they've finally soaked up enough flavor, they ride what looks like a pickle roller coaster to their next destination the dipper.
Each time that it comes around, it takes a little scoop of pickles out and brings it up and puts it into this large, stainless tub that we use to transfer the pickles into the factory.
Time for another dip, this time into the desalting tank.
I know, it sounds crazy.
After weeks of packing salt into these guys, now they're gonna take it out again.
But there's a method to this madness.
There's so much salt in that pickle when you bring it out of the tank that you'd spit it out as fast as you put it into your mouth.
To get the salt down to manageable levels, they cook the pickles in freshwater using good, old-fashioned steam heat.
We'll come through a couple times during the day, and we have little jets in the bottom of that tank that will agitate the tank.
Shaken and stirred.
By the next morning, there's just the right amount of salt in each and every one of the The pickles are dipped out of the tank, and they're put into our washer.
They're elevated up onto a conveyor where they're sorted for defects.
Don't feel bad for the rejects.
They'll be turned into relish later.
The pickles that do make the cut, they move on to be, well, cut.
There's a wheel that goes onto that machine, and there's knives on that wheel.
So if we want a thicker cut, we take more knives off of the wheel.
If we want a thinner cut, we put more blades on.
So the adjustment of the number of knives on that wheel will determine the thickness of the pickle.
Next they have to pass inspection by the pickle patrol before taking yet another plunge, this time in a vinegar bath to sour and preserve these little guys.
Now we have ourselves some pickles.
Didn't we say something about a sweet mix, so sweet, in fact, they're called candy? How does that happen? In the sweetening room, of course, and they get sweetened not once but twice.
During the first sweetening, we elevate them up into the copper kettle, and they're cooked in there with sugar.
Sounds good.
But why are there two sweetenings? Turns out, you can have too much of a good thing.
If we added the sugar all at once, we would turn the pickles into raisins, because the osmotic pressure would draw all the moisture out of the pickle and make it shriveled up.
That's what they call sugar shock.
But, in fact, the right amount of sugar will preserve the pickles in much the same way the salt does.
After a couple of days soaking up the sugar, the pickles get some colorful company.
They don't call it candied sweet mix for nothing.
We dip those pickles out and put them onto a conveyor, and then we add the different vegetables.
Cauliflower, we add pearl onions and red bell pepper.
In case you're wondering, it's turmeric that makes the cauliflower so yellow.
Then it's second sweetening time.
They get a sweet juice added back to them, and then they sit for two to three days.
One last ride to where the sweet-and-sour mix is put into the jars.
This machine shakes the jars to be sure as many delicious pickles as possible make it in, then the jars are filled with a basic salt, vinegar, and water brine.
And finally, they're sealed and washed before being shipped out nationwide.
Coming up, how to make something that's already known as the original temptation even more tempting.
If a crisp, tart apple makes your mouth water and ooey, gooey caramel taunts your sweet tooth, then you'll definitely want to sink your teeth into this crunchy treat.
The Affy Tapple Caramel Apple with peanuts has been an American favorite since 1948, but where'd it get its name? Turns out it's something the founder came up with.
Edna Kastrup decided that she wanted to be first in the phone book, so she took the "T" off of "taffy" and changed the name to Affy Tapple.
The Affy Tapple starts with what else? tapples.
I mean apples.
We hunt high and low to find the right orchards to be able to get the right size, sweetness, texture, sugar content, acidity, a lot of the little nuances that make the apple right.
Once those apples are deemed worthy, they still have one more test.
They enter a hopper where we, as gently as we can, pour them out into a trough that feeds them into a sizing and sorting machine.
They use mostly Empire and Jonathan apples, and the perfect apple is about tennis-ball size.
Those who make the cut are in for a bit of a sticky situation next.
A line of skilled workers position the apples as fast as the machine can insert the sticks.
We take a lot of extra effort to make sure that the apple is aligned so that the stick will go right into the middle of the apple.
An experienced operator can stick almost 60 apples in one minute's time.
While all that's going on, some serious caramel goodness is being whipped up right around the corner.
It's a simple, time-honored recipe milk, butter, and sugar.
Speaking of time-honored, they still use copper kettles to heat the caramel.
Even in this day and age of technology, we still use that old-fashioned method because we're able to control the quality in those small batches.
To make a caramel apple properly, you have to get the caramel really, really hot and then keep it that way.
They don't call these machines fire mixers for nothing.
It's 160,000 BTUs on every burner, so when we've got it's like 32 furnaces going at the same time.
It can get pretty hot in the kitchen.
And all those small batches add up to one huge batch.
We're producing 40,000 pounds of caramel a day, so that's enough for a full truckload of just caramel.
Once the caramel's at the perfect temp, it's ready for the apples.
A Ferris-wheel-type contraption called a chuck dips them into a trough of thick, creamy goodness.
The chuck holds onto the apple where it's dragged through the caramel and then spun at high speed to make sure we get just the right amount of caramel on it.
Both the heat of the caramel and the speed of the spin are crucial to keeping the caramel on the apple.
Anybody that's tried to make these at home knows what happens after a couple days.
The caramel droops off the apple.
Well, there's a trick to getting the caramel to stay on the apple.
It's an important detail that makes our caramel really good, and we're not gonna tell you all the secrets about how we do it.
Mmm.
They look good enough to eat, but they're not Affy Tapples yet.
First, they have to be dipped in peanuts twice.
Then we roll it in nuts, and then it drops onto another peanut table that covers the bottom of each apple with peanuts.
And from there, we have an operator pick up those apples and put it onto a cooling tray.
The apples cool 10 to 20 minutes before they're packaged in threes and ready for shipping.
From the very beginning to the very end, once that apple comes out of the hopper into the packaging, I guess only maybe We're knocking on the door of 450 apples a minute.
That's great, but do you think I could have just one? Please? Coming up, how do you pack an entire pie into a cookie not much larger than a quarter? Then, the iconic Lemonhead starts hanging around with a much more colorful crowd.
What is it about that blast of sweet and that blast of sour that makes our taste buds tingle? It's a culinary mystery, but it's also the key to a truly classic dessert the Key lime pie.
And now there's a way to have that classic Key lime pie taste in a much more portable size.
This is Byrd Cookie Company's Key Lime Cooler, but it isn't the first cookie in the jar for Byrd's.
These folks have been cookie experts since 1924, when Benjamin Tillman Byrd founded the family enterprise in Savannah, Georgia.
He baked these wonderful, little oatmeal cookies that he would deliver in these panel trucks all throughout the Southeast.
The Key Lime Cooler starts with the cookie basics flour, eggs, and shortening but then they add a genuine Key lime juice for that sour kick, and that's about as much as we can say.
The details of this recipe are a closely-guarded family secret.
We mix in small batches, which means that most of our cookies are mixed under 400 pounds at a time.
Mind you, that small batch of dough weighs as much as the average black bear.
It mixes up in there for about three-quarters of an hour, and then it's put into a big hydraulic lift that the folks at Byrd's call the hopper.
That gets raised up, and then there's kind of a door underneath that the baker will open, and it allows the weight of the dough to slide into the top of the depositor.
The depositor takes all that dough and squeezes it out of little pipes into thousands of Key Lime Coolers, Each 400-pound batch of dough makes over 100,000 cookies.
We have a wire cut that comes across at about 42 strokes a minute and cuts the cookies into perfect, even, little disks.
Time is of the essence.
They've got a 45-minute window to make the magic happen.
The temperature is real important because if it's too warm, the fats in the dough will allow it slip through, and you'll have no control whatsoever over the consistency of the cut of the cookie.
To make sure it's cutting each row of cookies just right, now and then, the baker will pick up a whole row and make sure every cookie is perfect.
Each of those cookies have to be picked up and then put it on the scales, and you maintain your cookie weight that way.
You heard that right.
Even cookies have to watch their weight.
After all, they have to be in top condition before they can move on to the most important moment in any cookie's life the baking.
It's very important for us to bake in small batches with particular times, particular temperatures, to keep that consistently great cookie.
Wow.
They look pretty scrumptious right out of the oven, but they're not Key Lime Coolers yet.
First, they have to cool off a bit.
They slide on to the cooling band.
There is a level that they'll flip over, and it's to get the other side as cool as we can as fast as we can.
But to really bring the sweet to their sour, these cookies have one more stop the sugar tumbler.
I knew I wanted there to be a coating on the outside of the cookie, so what we wound up doing was creating a machine that would take care of the cookie itself and not break it or crack it but also coat it in a delicious dry powdered sugar.
The sugar tumbler is what really makes them fantastic, because it evenly coats every cookie with just the right amount of a specially-formulated Key lime powdered sugar.
So the cookie not only has Key lime inside the cookie, but it has it on the outside of the cookie.
Mmm-mmm.
Just look at all those fabulous Key Lime Coolers.
Now they just have to be bagged up and shipped out and out and out and out.
Byrd Cookie Company bakes and that is a lot of cookies.
In fact, it's enough cookies for every single person in the Key lime state of Florida to have two and share what's left with Alabama.
Coming up, we'll get to the center of why an iconic hard candy has turned soft.
There's sweet, and there's sour.
Put them together, and it's an instant kick to the taste buds, so if you like to pucker up and rev up your sweet tooth at the same time, this tantalizing treat is the best of both worlds.
Lemonheads have been around since the early '60s, but recently, the classic hard candy has gone soft on the inside and has been mixing with some other multicolored friends.
We've taken the Applehead, the Orangehead, Cherryhead, and Grapehead, and we've combined them all together in the same box.
Every day, 200,000 pounds of sugar arrive by railcar to Ferrara Pan Candy Company.
That sugar, along with massive amounts of corn syrup and water, are mixed and heated in these giant tanks.
Meanwhile, the molds that will be used to form the candy are being made out of cornstarch.
We take a tray, and we fill it up with cornstarch, and we deposit into the cornstarch in a mold we make with what we call a print board.
The cornstarch keeps the candy from sticking, kind of like flouring a pan at home.
Once the mold's ready, it's filled with a warm, sweet center filling.
This machine doesn't mess around.
It's filling enough trays here to produce 300 cartons of Lemonheads every minute.
That's nearly half a million a day.
Next the chewy centers have to cure, so finally some rest.
We've got to get the moisture out, so when you deposit it, you're waiting 24 hours to get the moisture out of the starch.
So now that the formerly liquid candy centers are firmed up, they're ready for their unveiling.
A little flip out of the starch trays, and out they go down a chute, then into a sifter to help shake off some of that starch.
At this point, they may look like Lemonheads, but they've still got a ways to go.
So after we shake the product out of starch, we sand them, which is hitting them with steam and rolling them in a sugar-acid blend, and that's the center of the Chewy Lemonhead.
Then it's on to another conveyor belt and from there into trays that hold 30 pounds of chewy centers each.
The trays of candy are then transferred into these giant pans, and it's here that they get their color to match their flavor.
In the panning process, we add some liquid sugar and corn syrup blend, some color, flavor, and more acid to give it more of that sweet and sour.
And then they're gonna tumble it all around in the pan until the centers get all sticky and gooey.
It turns out these rotating pans are the secret weapon of Ferrara's candy history.
The turning drum of the pan builds up the ultimate candy shell on all kinds of different candies.
Remember Atomic FireBalls and Red Hots? Same process.
We'll then dry the product using sugar, and as the product spins in the pan and tumbles, it picks up the sugar that they've added, and the theory is a snowball rolling down a hill so it gets larger and larger and larger.
And crunchier.
Then it's on to the polishing room.
First, all of the individual colors are mixed and dumped into these specially- designed polishing tanks.
We add a little bit of liquid sugar.
We let them rub together as the pans are turning.
We want some friction created to smooth the outer shell of the product.
While they're tumbling, they add a little wax and mineral oil for shine.
And now these perfectly-polished Chewy Lemonheads & Friends are about to become best friends.
When we're ready to pack, we're going to dump the product into these bins, and then they travel through a pipe that goes through the floor and down to the partner on the floor below them.
This ultimate fast-packing machine fills the individual boxes, seals the boxes, and even assembles a case, all in seconds.
Just one last thing Where'd the name "Lemonhead" come from, anyway? Rumor has it from one of the company's founders.
When his son was born, his head was shaped like a lemon.
He said that it was in the shape of his son's head, and that's where he got the name "Lemonhead.
" And it has stuck for the past 50 years.
Better than my name, which is Knucklehead.
For a tongue-tingling twist.
No twist! Put them together, and it's an instant kick to the taste buds.
Let's go back.
I felt like I stumbled on a word.
You might have heard that your tongue can add can can add.
It can.
I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" You might have heard that your tongue can taste four different flavors salty, bitter, sweet, and sour.
But two of those flavors seem to go really great together.
So great that there's a whole bunch of delicious treats that combine the two, snacks that add sweet and sour for a tongue-tingling twist.
Whether it's a classic tart candy, a crispy cookie with a sour secret, or a tart treat with a caramel coating, it's time to unwrap the mystery of sweet and sour.
Nothing combines sweet and sour like Sechler's Pickles candied sweet Mix.
In pickles, people actually want a combination of sweet and acid, and so it's kind of that combination that makes a good flavor.
For the last century, Sechler has been making all sorts of pickles at their homestead barn in St.
Joe, Indiana.
But today, their number-one seller is the candied sweet mix.
On a sweetness level, if a sweet pickle is a 1, then a candied pickle would be about 20% sweeter.
And all that sweetness starts with a fresh crop of local cucumbers.
First, the cucumbers go for a soak in the huge wooden tanks filled with saltwater.
We've been using those for probably about 60 to 70 years.
They're made, usually, out of cypress, and so they're very long-lasting.
There's enough salty brine in these 112 tanks to float a yacht on.
Several of our tanks came out of the Saint Louis Brewery when they converted from wooden tanks to use for fermentation to stainless tanks, and so we repurposed them to be pickle tanks.
And just like a good beer, the barrel adds to the pickle's flavor.
The fermenting process takes time.
The cucumbers soak in these tanks for two to three weeks.
When they've finally soaked up enough flavor, they ride what looks like a pickle roller coaster to their next destination the dipper.
Each time that it comes around, it takes a little scoop of pickles out and brings it up and puts it into this large, stainless tub that we use to transfer the pickles into the factory.
Time for another dip, this time into the desalting tank.
I know, it sounds crazy.
After weeks of packing salt into these guys, now they're gonna take it out again.
But there's a method to this madness.
There's so much salt in that pickle when you bring it out of the tank that you'd spit it out as fast as you put it into your mouth.
To get the salt down to manageable levels, they cook the pickles in freshwater using good, old-fashioned steam heat.
We'll come through a couple times during the day, and we have little jets in the bottom of that tank that will agitate the tank.
Shaken and stirred.
By the next morning, there's just the right amount of salt in each and every one of the The pickles are dipped out of the tank, and they're put into our washer.
They're elevated up onto a conveyor where they're sorted for defects.
Don't feel bad for the rejects.
They'll be turned into relish later.
The pickles that do make the cut, they move on to be, well, cut.
There's a wheel that goes onto that machine, and there's knives on that wheel.
So if we want a thicker cut, we take more knives off of the wheel.
If we want a thinner cut, we put more blades on.
So the adjustment of the number of knives on that wheel will determine the thickness of the pickle.
Next they have to pass inspection by the pickle patrol before taking yet another plunge, this time in a vinegar bath to sour and preserve these little guys.
Now we have ourselves some pickles.
Didn't we say something about a sweet mix, so sweet, in fact, they're called candy? How does that happen? In the sweetening room, of course, and they get sweetened not once but twice.
During the first sweetening, we elevate them up into the copper kettle, and they're cooked in there with sugar.
Sounds good.
But why are there two sweetenings? Turns out, you can have too much of a good thing.
If we added the sugar all at once, we would turn the pickles into raisins, because the osmotic pressure would draw all the moisture out of the pickle and make it shriveled up.
That's what they call sugar shock.
But, in fact, the right amount of sugar will preserve the pickles in much the same way the salt does.
After a couple of days soaking up the sugar, the pickles get some colorful company.
They don't call it candied sweet mix for nothing.
We dip those pickles out and put them onto a conveyor, and then we add the different vegetables.
Cauliflower, we add pearl onions and red bell pepper.
In case you're wondering, it's turmeric that makes the cauliflower so yellow.
Then it's second sweetening time.
They get a sweet juice added back to them, and then they sit for two to three days.
One last ride to where the sweet-and-sour mix is put into the jars.
This machine shakes the jars to be sure as many delicious pickles as possible make it in, then the jars are filled with a basic salt, vinegar, and water brine.
And finally, they're sealed and washed before being shipped out nationwide.
Coming up, how to make something that's already known as the original temptation even more tempting.
If a crisp, tart apple makes your mouth water and ooey, gooey caramel taunts your sweet tooth, then you'll definitely want to sink your teeth into this crunchy treat.
The Affy Tapple Caramel Apple with peanuts has been an American favorite since 1948, but where'd it get its name? Turns out it's something the founder came up with.
Edna Kastrup decided that she wanted to be first in the phone book, so she took the "T" off of "taffy" and changed the name to Affy Tapple.
The Affy Tapple starts with what else? tapples.
I mean apples.
We hunt high and low to find the right orchards to be able to get the right size, sweetness, texture, sugar content, acidity, a lot of the little nuances that make the apple right.
Once those apples are deemed worthy, they still have one more test.
They enter a hopper where we, as gently as we can, pour them out into a trough that feeds them into a sizing and sorting machine.
They use mostly Empire and Jonathan apples, and the perfect apple is about tennis-ball size.
Those who make the cut are in for a bit of a sticky situation next.
A line of skilled workers position the apples as fast as the machine can insert the sticks.
We take a lot of extra effort to make sure that the apple is aligned so that the stick will go right into the middle of the apple.
An experienced operator can stick almost 60 apples in one minute's time.
While all that's going on, some serious caramel goodness is being whipped up right around the corner.
It's a simple, time-honored recipe milk, butter, and sugar.
Speaking of time-honored, they still use copper kettles to heat the caramel.
Even in this day and age of technology, we still use that old-fashioned method because we're able to control the quality in those small batches.
To make a caramel apple properly, you have to get the caramel really, really hot and then keep it that way.
They don't call these machines fire mixers for nothing.
It's 160,000 BTUs on every burner, so when we've got it's like 32 furnaces going at the same time.
It can get pretty hot in the kitchen.
And all those small batches add up to one huge batch.
We're producing 40,000 pounds of caramel a day, so that's enough for a full truckload of just caramel.
Once the caramel's at the perfect temp, it's ready for the apples.
A Ferris-wheel-type contraption called a chuck dips them into a trough of thick, creamy goodness.
The chuck holds onto the apple where it's dragged through the caramel and then spun at high speed to make sure we get just the right amount of caramel on it.
Both the heat of the caramel and the speed of the spin are crucial to keeping the caramel on the apple.
Anybody that's tried to make these at home knows what happens after a couple days.
The caramel droops off the apple.
Well, there's a trick to getting the caramel to stay on the apple.
It's an important detail that makes our caramel really good, and we're not gonna tell you all the secrets about how we do it.
Mmm.
They look good enough to eat, but they're not Affy Tapples yet.
First, they have to be dipped in peanuts twice.
Then we roll it in nuts, and then it drops onto another peanut table that covers the bottom of each apple with peanuts.
And from there, we have an operator pick up those apples and put it onto a cooling tray.
The apples cool 10 to 20 minutes before they're packaged in threes and ready for shipping.
From the very beginning to the very end, once that apple comes out of the hopper into the packaging, I guess only maybe We're knocking on the door of 450 apples a minute.
That's great, but do you think I could have just one? Please? Coming up, how do you pack an entire pie into a cookie not much larger than a quarter? Then, the iconic Lemonhead starts hanging around with a much more colorful crowd.
What is it about that blast of sweet and that blast of sour that makes our taste buds tingle? It's a culinary mystery, but it's also the key to a truly classic dessert the Key lime pie.
And now there's a way to have that classic Key lime pie taste in a much more portable size.
This is Byrd Cookie Company's Key Lime Cooler, but it isn't the first cookie in the jar for Byrd's.
These folks have been cookie experts since 1924, when Benjamin Tillman Byrd founded the family enterprise in Savannah, Georgia.
He baked these wonderful, little oatmeal cookies that he would deliver in these panel trucks all throughout the Southeast.
The Key Lime Cooler starts with the cookie basics flour, eggs, and shortening but then they add a genuine Key lime juice for that sour kick, and that's about as much as we can say.
The details of this recipe are a closely-guarded family secret.
We mix in small batches, which means that most of our cookies are mixed under 400 pounds at a time.
Mind you, that small batch of dough weighs as much as the average black bear.
It mixes up in there for about three-quarters of an hour, and then it's put into a big hydraulic lift that the folks at Byrd's call the hopper.
That gets raised up, and then there's kind of a door underneath that the baker will open, and it allows the weight of the dough to slide into the top of the depositor.
The depositor takes all that dough and squeezes it out of little pipes into thousands of Key Lime Coolers, Each 400-pound batch of dough makes over 100,000 cookies.
We have a wire cut that comes across at about 42 strokes a minute and cuts the cookies into perfect, even, little disks.
Time is of the essence.
They've got a 45-minute window to make the magic happen.
The temperature is real important because if it's too warm, the fats in the dough will allow it slip through, and you'll have no control whatsoever over the consistency of the cut of the cookie.
To make sure it's cutting each row of cookies just right, now and then, the baker will pick up a whole row and make sure every cookie is perfect.
Each of those cookies have to be picked up and then put it on the scales, and you maintain your cookie weight that way.
You heard that right.
Even cookies have to watch their weight.
After all, they have to be in top condition before they can move on to the most important moment in any cookie's life the baking.
It's very important for us to bake in small batches with particular times, particular temperatures, to keep that consistently great cookie.
Wow.
They look pretty scrumptious right out of the oven, but they're not Key Lime Coolers yet.
First, they have to cool off a bit.
They slide on to the cooling band.
There is a level that they'll flip over, and it's to get the other side as cool as we can as fast as we can.
But to really bring the sweet to their sour, these cookies have one more stop the sugar tumbler.
I knew I wanted there to be a coating on the outside of the cookie, so what we wound up doing was creating a machine that would take care of the cookie itself and not break it or crack it but also coat it in a delicious dry powdered sugar.
The sugar tumbler is what really makes them fantastic, because it evenly coats every cookie with just the right amount of a specially-formulated Key lime powdered sugar.
So the cookie not only has Key lime inside the cookie, but it has it on the outside of the cookie.
Mmm-mmm.
Just look at all those fabulous Key Lime Coolers.
Now they just have to be bagged up and shipped out and out and out and out.
Byrd Cookie Company bakes and that is a lot of cookies.
In fact, it's enough cookies for every single person in the Key lime state of Florida to have two and share what's left with Alabama.
Coming up, we'll get to the center of why an iconic hard candy has turned soft.
There's sweet, and there's sour.
Put them together, and it's an instant kick to the taste buds, so if you like to pucker up and rev up your sweet tooth at the same time, this tantalizing treat is the best of both worlds.
Lemonheads have been around since the early '60s, but recently, the classic hard candy has gone soft on the inside and has been mixing with some other multicolored friends.
We've taken the Applehead, the Orangehead, Cherryhead, and Grapehead, and we've combined them all together in the same box.
Every day, 200,000 pounds of sugar arrive by railcar to Ferrara Pan Candy Company.
That sugar, along with massive amounts of corn syrup and water, are mixed and heated in these giant tanks.
Meanwhile, the molds that will be used to form the candy are being made out of cornstarch.
We take a tray, and we fill it up with cornstarch, and we deposit into the cornstarch in a mold we make with what we call a print board.
The cornstarch keeps the candy from sticking, kind of like flouring a pan at home.
Once the mold's ready, it's filled with a warm, sweet center filling.
This machine doesn't mess around.
It's filling enough trays here to produce 300 cartons of Lemonheads every minute.
That's nearly half a million a day.
Next the chewy centers have to cure, so finally some rest.
We've got to get the moisture out, so when you deposit it, you're waiting 24 hours to get the moisture out of the starch.
So now that the formerly liquid candy centers are firmed up, they're ready for their unveiling.
A little flip out of the starch trays, and out they go down a chute, then into a sifter to help shake off some of that starch.
At this point, they may look like Lemonheads, but they've still got a ways to go.
So after we shake the product out of starch, we sand them, which is hitting them with steam and rolling them in a sugar-acid blend, and that's the center of the Chewy Lemonhead.
Then it's on to another conveyor belt and from there into trays that hold 30 pounds of chewy centers each.
The trays of candy are then transferred into these giant pans, and it's here that they get their color to match their flavor.
In the panning process, we add some liquid sugar and corn syrup blend, some color, flavor, and more acid to give it more of that sweet and sour.
And then they're gonna tumble it all around in the pan until the centers get all sticky and gooey.
It turns out these rotating pans are the secret weapon of Ferrara's candy history.
The turning drum of the pan builds up the ultimate candy shell on all kinds of different candies.
Remember Atomic FireBalls and Red Hots? Same process.
We'll then dry the product using sugar, and as the product spins in the pan and tumbles, it picks up the sugar that they've added, and the theory is a snowball rolling down a hill so it gets larger and larger and larger.
And crunchier.
Then it's on to the polishing room.
First, all of the individual colors are mixed and dumped into these specially- designed polishing tanks.
We add a little bit of liquid sugar.
We let them rub together as the pans are turning.
We want some friction created to smooth the outer shell of the product.
While they're tumbling, they add a little wax and mineral oil for shine.
And now these perfectly-polished Chewy Lemonheads & Friends are about to become best friends.
When we're ready to pack, we're going to dump the product into these bins, and then they travel through a pipe that goes through the floor and down to the partner on the floor below them.
This ultimate fast-packing machine fills the individual boxes, seals the boxes, and even assembles a case, all in seconds.
Just one last thing Where'd the name "Lemonhead" come from, anyway? Rumor has it from one of the company's founders.
When his son was born, his head was shaped like a lemon.
He said that it was in the shape of his son's head, and that's where he got the name "Lemonhead.
" And it has stuck for the past 50 years.
Better than my name, which is Knucklehead.
For a tongue-tingling twist.
No twist! Put them together, and it's an instant kick to the taste buds.
Let's go back.
I felt like I stumbled on a word.
You might have heard that your tongue can add can can add.
It can.