Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e04 Episode Script

Hi.
I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" Just about every family's got them, handed down for generations till they feel like they're part of the family itself.
I'm talking about family recipes grandma's cookies, aunt Shelley's chicken soup, mom's meat loaf.
But some families have turned their family recipes into the family business.
From soft, creamy ice cream to a cheesy Southern tradition to even marshmallows, we all win when a family decides to share their recipes with the rest of us.
It's creamy, it's delicious, and it's the perfect way to cool down on a hot afternoon.
Believe it or not, people used to make ice cream by hand.
Some people still do.
The Graeter family has been churning out ice cream since 1870 when Louis Charles Graeter sold it out of a small storefront.
But at that time, since you didn't have modern refrigeration, you had to eat it as soon as you finished making it.
So he would make up a batch and sell it to the passersby, and that's how he got started.
Four generations later, Graeters is still a family-owned business using the original family recipe.
The recipe for ice cream is real basic.
It's cream, milk, sugar, and eggs.
Of course, it's not quite that simple.
The thing that makes this family recipe unique is they don't just use eggs they use egg custard.
And making that egg custard is the first step.
Milk, sugar, and eggs go into a huge, high-shear mixer.
Once they're mixed, they're pumped into one of these large aluminum pasteurizers where they're heated to 195 degrees.
Back when I was a kid and I worked with my grandpa, we would make the egg custard in 12-gallon batches in a copper kettle over an open flame.
Now, we use that vat pasteurizer, and it makes about 260 gallon batches of egg custard.
Once it's ready, the custard is pumped into these holding tanks.
But wait a minute.
Aren't we making ice cream? Where's the cream? It's here in these huge, Once everything's ready, it's all pumped into the flavor vat, where they add you guessed it flavor.
Today, we were making black raspberry chocolate chip.
So it's very simple.
We add pure black raspberry puree.
Once the flavor's stirred all the way in, more dairy mix is added.
And here's where the cream meets the ice.
Graeters still makes ice cream just like great-great-grandpa Graeter did in small batches using a special mixer called a French pot.
The French pot method is how everybody made ice cream back in the 1800s before you had modern equipment.
Once the flavored mix is poured into a pot, it's placed in a specially designed freezer that spins the pot.
As the cream on the outside edges freeze, it's scraped off, forming a super-soft, slow-frozen ice cream.
It's basically a high-tech version of the old hand-crank ice cream buckets.
The one thing that makes Graeters Graeters is that French pot freezer making ice cream in small, 21/2-gallon batches.
And we still do that.
And we are the only place in the world where you can come and see ice cream made that way.
Once the ice cream is finished, it's time to add the chocolate chips.
They don't just dump chips in.
Instead, they take 10-pound bars of dark chocolate, melt them down, and then pour the chocolate into the frozen, spinning pot where it solidifies again.
And then, the ice cream artisan will lower the blade back into the French pot and stick his paddle in.
And then, that chops it up into a bunch of little pieces.
Little and not-so-little, that is.
Well, we say little, but they're all different sizes.
Sometimes, you can find a chunk that just can't even fit on a spoon.
All that thick, creamy ice cream and big chocolate chunks also can't fit through a filling nozzle.
It's so thick that you can't pack it with an automatic filling machine.
Every pint has to be packed by hand, with a spoon, one at a time.
So our little plant will hand-pack maybe 4 million pints a year.
Every year, Graeters makes around 900,000 gallons of ice cream.
That's enough to give an ice cream cone to every person who enters Disney Land for a year.
Coming up What's cheesy, creamy, and comes from Poland? Many of our favorite foods came to America from Old World family recipes.
And one of them, a Polish staple, can now be found on American tables from coast to coast.
Mrs.
T's Pierogies are as family as it gets.
The real Mrs.
T and yes, she is real was the mother of company founder Ted Twardzik Sr.
And he started the company using her recipe.
He started commercially making pierogies here in Shenandoah originally on her kitchen table.
Today, these delicious, iconic potato-and-cheese-filled dumplings are made in this huge facility in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where the whole process starts off just like in the old recipe with potatoes, only now, they're pretty flaky.
We'll add our potato flakes into the process.
We receive them in 40-pound bags from a number of potato-flake vendors throughout the United States.
Potato flakes are basically dehydrated potatoes, and 20 to 25 bags go into this bin at a time.
From here, the flakes are transferred via large vacuum tubes over to gigantic, cone-shaped hoppers that will weigh and deposit the proper amount of potato flakes into the mixing chamber.
These super-capacity automated mixers are similar to the stand mixer you might use at home.
But these are super-sized for a kitchen the size of a football field.
It's a big, big kitchen compared to the one at home or the one that Mary Twardzik started with.
We'll mix up a 300-pound batch of filling about every six to seven minutes.
Next, some water and oil are piped in and added to the potatoes.
And then it's time for the cheese.
A five-cheese blend and special spices are added to the potato mixture by hand.
As that all mixes together, let's check in on the other key pierogi component the dough.
At the same time, we bring our two types of flour in from our storage system.
Mrs.
T's uses a blend of flour, water, eggs, and salt to create the perfect pierogi.
And much like the process for the filling, all of the dough ingredients are carefully measured and blended together in these industrial-sized mixers.
They're capable of putting out every six minutes.
The finished dough is then dumped out onto this conveyor in large, heavy clumps.
So in order to get things down to size, Mrs.
T's uses another specialized piece of equipment with a very technical name.
We have a machine that we've dubbed "the chunker.
" And what it does is it takes these large masses of dough and turns them into smaller, more manageable pieces for the actual pierogi-making process.
So we've got the dough, and we've got the cheesy potato filling.
Now, all we need to do is make the shells and fill them.
For that, Mrs.
T's uses another well-named machine.
And what we do is we'll then add that dough into the pierogi-making machine.
I wish I could tell you more about the pierogi-making process.
It's something that we are very protective of.
It's very secretive for us.
It's safe to say this machine does things the same way you would do it if you were making them from scratch at home.
It rolls the dough into a sheet, creates a pocket for the potato-cheddar filling, folds it over, and crimps the edges to keep the filling in place.
So if you could imagine, we're doing that at a much faster and much bigger scale than than can be done on the kitchen table.
And by much faster, he means much, much faster.
Typically, when we're running the plant at full capacity, we're making about That would calculate out to about 11.
7 million pierogies per week.
If you add that all up, that means Mrs.
T's is producing between 500 and 600 million pierogies a year.
That's enough to go all the way around the globe plus another 1,000 miles.
As the pierogies exit the machine, small, orange air knives blow out any wayward dumplings that may not have been filled properly.
Once any rejects are removed, the rest of the group happily marches on to be partially cooked in a quick, hot bath.
Inside the blancher, air is injected into the water to keep these cheesy potato darlings from sticking together.
And, after a six-minute paddle through the bubbles, it's time to cool things down as the steaming pierogies get a fast, cold shower.
Super-chilled water is circulated to rain down upon the parboiled bunch and help cool them to room temperature.
We're using that process to help set the dough and prepare the pierogies for the freezing process.
Now that our cheesy, little friends are way cool, they'll run through one more inspection before it's off to the deep freeze.
But first, this ingenious machine shakes the pierogies into straight lines before they enter the freezer.
This two-story spiral freezer is 20 feet tall and works like a large spiral staircase.
After about 30 minutes, the pierogies arrive at the top frozen and ready for packaging.
So, as the pierogies are then discharged from the spiral freezer, they go across a series of scales.
These specialized scales group 12 frozen pierogies into exactly 16-ounce portions.
Those 16 are then poured into a carton and whisked away to the packing machine.
The packing machine folds down the lids and seals the cartons.
Then it's on to the palletizer.
The palletizer will pick up two cases at a time.
These yellow, high-tech robotic arms are all business, making the packing of the pierogies no problem.
They continue to stack boxes until they reach 100 cases and are ready for shipping.
Coming up, a campfire favorite like you've never seen.
When I toasted marshmallows as a kid, they came out of a bag.
But one family always made their own.
And now, you can taste the sweet, puffy results yourself.
Growing up, I remember when I was young My mother used to make marshmallows, and so I just took a basic recipe, and I changed it a little bit, and we tweaked it.
DeBrand Chocolates of Fort Wayne, Indiana, now makes four varieties of homemade marshmallows vanilla, cinnamon, cocoa, and berry.
And unlike the marshmallows you find at most campfires, these are made almost entirely by hand.
They start by hand-mixing powdered gelatin and water.
Once it sets, they transfer it to a giant mixer.
The gelatin is broken up just so it will melt faster.
Next, a syrupy blend is prepared in a separate pot.
We call that a sweet syrup, which is a sugar mixture that is boiled and then added to that mixing bowl.
And then, all that's mixed together with a giant whip.
Once that solution is mixed thoroughly, we will then add corn syrup.
And we use a pure Madagascar vanilla.
Once the corn syrup and vanilla are in, the whip is shifted into a higher gear.
And that's when the magic happens.
That's when this weird, hot, sweet liquid that doesn't look anything like a marshmallow will start to expand as air gets introduced into it and fill the mixing bowl and turn white and pillowy.
Now it's starting to look like a marshmallow.
You don't want to do it too much or too little.
There's kind of a sweet spot to hit with making a good marshmallow.
To pinpoint that exact moment of marshmallow perfection, every now and then, the cooks at DeBrand need to stop the whipping to dip a spatula in.
They will look for what we call stiff peaks, and if they are too soft and fall over, then we know we need to whip it a little bit longer.
So we'll start the mixer back up again.
When they finally do see those stiff peaks, it's time to remove the whip and scrape off the excess.
Is that not every kid's dream right there? Then, all that fluffy stuff is brought over to a giant table.
You see this fluffy, white cloud of marshmallow just pour onto a table.
It's one of the best things ever to watch.
And from there, it's spread by hand and leveled out.
Believe it or not, that leveling out is one of the secrets to a perfect batch of marshmallows.
The marshmallow is so soft and still warm when it comes out of the mixer, so we do want to make sure that we give ourselves the best chance of not having the marshmallow tip too far in one direction or the other.
Once it's level, the giant marshmallow gets covered in a powdered sugar mixture and a blanket of parchment paper to set overnight.
Sweet dreams.
Overnight, that marshmallow will set up and become firm, and you can actually feel it the next morning when you come in.
You can put your hands on that parchment paper, and you can tell that it's firm enough to cut.
Once it's determined to be at the perfect firmness, it's time to turn this huge marshmallow into lots of little ones.
One of our kitchen employees will then use the cutter to go both lengthwise and widthwise across the entire table to produce a square marshmallow cut.
The sliced marshmallow is then broken up by hand into individual cubes, and it's a lot of cubes.
One table will make approximately On a daily basis, we typically will make two tables a day.
Then it's one more dip in the flavor coating to make sure they don't stick to each other when they're packaged.
Then what? Well, that's up to you.
Have one now, and then have one later.
And maybe, if they're feeling generous, share them with a few other people.
Really, you can't really go wrong with a marshmallow any way you like to enjoy it.
True, that.
Coming up It's cheesy, it's crunchy, and it's called a straw.
But it's not for drinking.
Now, there was a time when this cheesy, crunchy, melt-in-your mouth goody could only be found on a silver platter at a Southern wedding.
But thanks to one family's recipe, you could find a box of this savory snack just about anywhere in the country.
Cheese straws combine everything that's great about a cracker and everything that's great about cheese.
And that's just how Geraldine's Cheese Straws owner Cathy Cunningham-Hays planned it.
My mother had been sending these cheese straws to me, and my people would just descend on them like locusts.
And when they were gone, then they were begging for more.
So I said, "You know something? "I think I'm gonna make a business out of these cheese straws.
" The first step to making cheese straws is you guessed it cheese.
In the case of Geraldine's, it's made with over 50 percent In fact, they use over 2,000 pounds of cheddar a day.
That's a ton of cheese literally a ton.
Once the cheese is grated, it's added to this 80-pound mixer.
We combine it with flour, margarine and butter, and some spices to give it the kick necessary to give you a little bit of heat.
Next, that cheesy mass travels up a conveyor belt.
Destination the extruder.
The extruder's job is to pump the mixture out through small tubes to form narrow, rope-like lines which are quickly cut to size.
Then, we have a wire cutter that cuts it into the shapes that you see, makes them somewhat consistent.
Up to 10,000 of these twisty treats are produced every day.
Like little soldiers marching off to battle, they're heading toward the last step in their journey to become delicious, crispy cheese straws the oven.
In the olden days, my mother used to do one or two rows at a time.
Now, we do hundreds at a time and thousands at a time.
Now that they've gotten themselves crisped up and the cheese and flour have completely melted into one another, it's time for the straws to relax and just be cool.
Were you to bag all of the cheese straws before the cooldown process, they would literally melt each other.
Once the cheese straws are properly cooled, it's on to the packing machines.
And here's where some space-age technology comes in.
Instead of filling the bag with air, it fills it with nitrogen, which keeps the cheese straws as crispy and fresh as the day they were made.
The bag is what makes us viable to go on a grocery shelf, and they're gonna taste just as fresh as that day they were made on the line as the day that you bought them.
cookies, aunt Shilley's "Aunt Shilley's.
" Aunt Shelley's.
Aunt Shelley's sick chicken soup.
I just I know the truck was going by.
Why have these big, old trucks with no mufflers?! A box of this saves and country.