Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e05 Episode Script

Hi, I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" Let's say you're looking for the ultimate lineup of game-day snacks.
Your fantasy league of treats, if you will.
You know, something delicious and easy to eat without taking your eyes off the game.
Well, if I were a betting man, I'd say your table would be filled with a team of sweet, salty, and savory finger food.
You can't talk about game-day snacks without talking about pizza.
And the meat lovers frozen pizza from Home Run Inn can turn any game-day menu into a big hit.
In the 1940s, Home Run Inn's original owner, Nick Perrino, started putting out pizza to complement the beer at his South Side Chicago tavern.
Eventually, the pizza started outselling the beer, and they switched to a restaurant.
Frozen pizza was pretty much an afterthought.
Frozen pizza just started out, something that we would do to fill down time in the restaurants.
and slowly over time, it really started to pick up speed.
Picked up speed indeed.
These days, Home Run Inn's frozen foods can make up to 80,000 pizzas in one day.
And as any true pizza connoisseur knows, every one of those 80,000 pizzas start with an awesome crust.
We make our dough with wheat flour, yeast, water, corn oil, and salt.
That's it.
All natural ingredients.
That may sound pretty simple, but these are no ordinary little batches of dough.
Each one is approximately 400 pounds or about the weight of a male lion.
And each batch will make around 800 pizzas.
After it's mixed, the 400-pound mound is ready to be divided into the correct individual pizza sizes.
The different size pizzas that we run primarily are 6-inch and 12-inch.
We also run variations of that product.
We do an ultra thick, a deep dish, and an ultra thin product.
This lightning-quick machine portions and cuts the dough just perfectly as it's loaded onto trays for a brief time-out.
Dough's got to riseand shine, 'cause now, it's onto the hot press for the first partial baking.
You need to set the crust, the dough, so that it can move along the topping line.
It's about a 20-second press, and it hits hard.
Each plate comes down at around Whew! Once flattened, the crusts make their way to a second oven set at a steamy 490 degrees.
This affords us the opportunity to actually form the crust and give it rigidity.
That's the main purpose of parbaking it.
Once they're parbaked, it's time to get sauced.
Home Run Inn uses close to 5 million pounds of sauce a year.
Yes.
That's right.
He said 5 million pounds.
That's equal to the weight of a space shuttle.
Within every one of those cans is Home Run Inn's special blend of tomatoes and spices.
This fancy giant can opener also dumps the sauce, sends it into a pump, and then pours it onto the crust.
We use a tomato puree versus a sauce.
It is the most flavorful part of the tomato.
Next come the toppings.
And for the meat lovers pizza, that means sausage, pepperoni, and bacon.
We get our meat from a local supplier in the Chicago area.
We get it fresh daily, and we will grind what we need that particular day.
But first up, sausage.
Here, a large grinder cuts and deposits it onto the sauced pizzas as they pass underneath on the conveyor.
As the pizzas move on down the line, workers help to beef things up.
We'll add the extra toppings on just in case the machines don't correctly apply the right amount, and also it's always better to have more than less.
And that apparently goes for cheese, too.
We use 6 million pounds of cheese a year.
That's over brought in and shredded fresh every production day.
As the partially dressed pizzas pass underneath, a waterfall of cheese rains down to cover each pie in a fresh blanket of mozzarella.
Oh, but we're not done yet.
From there, it goes into another oven, which blanches all the flavors.
And once it leaves the oven, we'll put the final toppings on.
No.
We haven't forgotten the pepperoni and bacon.
These vertical tubes slice and deposit the pepperoni onto the pizzas.
And again, workers make sure every pie is fully covered.
Then, all that glorious bacon rains down to complete the meat.
And now, it's chill time.
It is a chain-driven spiral freezer, and it allows us to get the amount of freeze that we need in a small footprint.
Less space, but optimal freeze.
After a 45-minute trip through the -45 degree freezer, these meaty masterpieces come out at a frosty -10 degrees.
Brr! Next, automated packers wrap each pizza before a two-armed wheel with suction cups drops a box top onto the finished pizza.
Then it's one more run through to seal and stack the boxes.
So, where did the name "Home Run" come from? Our original restaurant was across the street from a baseball park.
And one day when my grandfather was working in the restaurant, a ball from the game across the street crashed through the window.
So he decided to name our family establishment Home Run Inn.
See, this frozen pizza's got "game day" written all over it.
How is science maximizing the taste of every handful of your favorite game-day delight? Find out when we come back.
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! You know, it's always good to have a little sweet and salty combination for your game-day snacks, right? Well, there may be no better way to put together sweet and salty than caramel and cheese popcorn.
The delectable caramel and cheese popcorn mix from Chicago Bay's Garrett Popcorn Shops might be an unexpected flavor combo.
But don't knock it till you've tried it.
It's got the savory, which is the savory goodness of the cheese corn, and it's got the sweet, which is the sophisticated sweetness of caramel crisp.
The process starts, of course, with corn specially grown to meet the company's very specific standards.
The expansion ratio on our kernels is exceptional, so if they're not popping to the proper ratio, we don't accept it.
The kernels that make the grade go into the continuous feed pop.
You couldn't make this much popcorn in your microwave, that's for sure.
Our hot air poppers pop about 80 pounds per hour.
Wow.
Over 600 pounds popped a day.
Believe it or not, that's around 780,000 kernels.
They call their special blend butterfly kernels.
Because it has wings on it with nooks and crannies and flanges, it allows more of our handcrafted cheese or our handcrafted caramel to stick to each and every kernel.
But it's not just a lot of hot air.
You know how you find a lot of unpopped kernels in your popcorn at home? Not here.
There are filters that sample out or pull out any unpopped kernels, and the fact that it's hot air popped means it's not already weighed down with oils.
So they're like sponges.
And those sponges are just begging to soak up some flavor.
First up caramel.
Our caramel crisp, for example, contains seven ingredients water, our proprietary blend of kernels, butter, salt, baking soda, brown sugar, and corn syrup.
The caramel starts out as a bowl full of brown sugar with a nice, big dollop of corn syrup in the middle, what the folks at Garrett's call a sugar bomb.
Those ingredients are mixed in these old-fashioned copper kettles that have been working at the company longer than anyone else.
first batches of caramel crisp in copper kettles, and we continue to do that today.
Copper pots are perfect for cooking with sugar.
High heat with no burn.
I like to call our cooks sometimes alchemists because they literally take water and they create caramel gold on a daily basis.
And when that caramel is the color of an old penny, it's ready for the popcorn.
We give it a good stir, and then, we add a little more butter.
And after about 25 minutes, our chefs can tell that the batch is ready.
Then, it's on to the cooling table where there's one more vital task to perform before these are truly caramel crisps.
If we didn't stir it, it would solidify into one large, delicious bundle of caramel crisp.
Our shakers, as we call them, are very cautious.
They want to be very gentle, yet thorough because they want each individual kernel to shine on its own.
So that takes care of the sweet.
What about the savory? For its cheese corn, Garrett uses a whole separate process and a whole separate set of machines and naturally, lots of cheese.
This sharp, tangy variety is made especially for Garrett's, then melted down to liquid form.
We then add it to a tumbler where our freshly popped kernels are spinning around.
We want those kernels to absorb all of the handcrafted cheesiness.
Once it's deemed sufficiently cheesy, the cheese and caramel corn are shipped separately to Garrett stores around the world where customers can decide just what kind of mix they want to take home for the game.
Some folks like with 20 percent cheese corn.
Other folks like with 25 percent caramel crisp.
And I like to think that every tin of Garrett Popcorn Shops is a culinary adventure.
It's like a party in your mouth.
Want to know how to combine three of America's favorite flavors into one, single snack? Stay tuned.
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Try and eat a loaded baked potato with your bare hands.
Actually, don't.
Instead, why not try a savory snack you could eat right of the bag? No knife and fork required.
It's Jaxn's Twice-Baked Cheddar Bacon Potato Stix.
I'll say it again.
Twice-Baked Cheddar Bacon Potato Stix.
Just as the name implies, every crispy batch starts with potatoes real Idaho potato flakes, that is.
We take the potatoes, rehydrate them to make them like mashed potatoes.
We add a little bit of rice flour and a little bit of spices.
But the intense flavor pop comes from their not-so-secret weapon cheddar cheese.
And we use a lot.
Our number-one ingredient is real cheese aged at least 12 months from a family-owned cheesemaker up in Wisconsin.
And this is where the fresh blocks of cheddar cheese meets its grater.
Jaxn goes through over That's basically the weight of a cow.
Then, it's into the bin and onto the mixer.
Mix it in the mixer with a little bit of oil till we get this nice, consistent dough.
But it's still got a ways to go before it can become the ultimate potato snack.
After the dough is mixed, a hydraulic lift raises the kettle and empties this super cheesy concoction onto a conveyor.
Then, it travels into the depositor to be cut into 25,000 Once cut, these little guys continue on to the first of two runs through the oven, but this no ordinary oven.
Our oven is 100 feet long.
It's one of the largest ovens in Georgia.
Yes.
This oven is 33 times longer than the average home oven, and that's just the first one.
We bake in our first oven which gives us the nice color and the texture and the bake through, but it's still moist on the inside.
The first oven is set to a toasty 460 degrees.
And it's a pretty quick trip through about six minutes.
So we step it down to another oven at a lower temperature that really bakes out the moisture and gets it nice and crisp.
The second oven 18 minutes, and it only reaches a balmy 275.
That's how you get that nice crunch versus a lot of the puff texture that a lot of similar products have.
Think of it as a tanning bed for the potato sticks.
And now, they're tan, twice-baked, and ready.
Ready, that is, for the bacon.
Enter the tumbler.
As the sticks leave the second oven, they are run through a seasoning tumbler that coats these little crispies with Jaxn's secret blend of real bacon flavor.
On that, we use this bacon flavoring, a little salt, and just a little bit of added cheese to give it roundness and that crispiest, full flavor.
Once the potato sticks have been fully seasoned, it's a short trip to the cooling conveyor and a slow, cool ride up to packaging where they're divided and weighed into proper proportions.
On a daily basis, we produce about 370,000 individual sticks a day.
And 370,000 is nothing to shake a stick at.
Placed end to end, that would be enough twice-baked potato sticks to cover over 17 delicious, crispy miles.
What can go wrong? The two favorite America's favorite flavors, Cheese and bacon together in a crispy snack.
Want to know which of the world's oldest snacks is making a game-day comeback? Find out after the break.
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Let's think about inventing the ultimate snack to munch on during the game.
It'd be salty.
It'd be crunchy.
It'd be crispy.
And it would have some serious savory snap.
Well, guess what? This dream snack food already exists.
It's called pork rinds.
It's one of the world's oldest snack foods and dates all the way back to ancient China.
As long as people have been raising pigs, they've been eating pork rinds.
Well, what the Chinese started, Atlanta's Rudolph Foods Company may have perfected with their 60-year-old barbecue recipe.
It all starts with smoked pig skin.
The smoked skins arrive here as snack-sized nuggets called pellets.
We bring in over 10 million pounds a month, of pork skin.
They may not look like much, but these smoky slices are the beginning of every great pork rind.
But first, a special machine bounces the pellets up and down, separating them so they don't clump together when fried.
The process is a finely tuned science.
It has to be because the science of fry is the key to the rind's crispy crunch.
When it goes in the fryer, they're cooked for just less than a minute.
And then the moisture in the pellet starts movin' around at high rates of speed, and then explodes and puffs up to 5- or 6-to-1 expansion ratio.
It goes from this big to this big.
That's why it becomes that light, airy snack that everybody loves so much.
Now that they're cooked, there are two more steps before the rinds are ready for the big game.
From there, they go into a three-deck cooler where we cool the pork rind down and then right into the seasoner.
Although the basic process for making pork rinds is similar the world over, it's Rudolph's seasoning process that has made the company's rinds so popular.
Nothing goes better with pork rinds than barbecue seasoning.
And the recipe for this secret barbecue seasoning has not changed since founder Mary Rudolph created it over a half-century ago.
The seasoner is a special piece of equipment that is incredibly important to our flavored pork rinds 'cause as they go in, we tumble them, the seasoning's applied.
It's a little bit hotter barbecue seasoning.
It's not as sweet.
And I think that appeals to a lot of people.
Not only does it have a great barbecue zest to it, but it's also got a great bacon-y pork flavor.
Seasoned to perfection, the rinds travel upwards to be packaged.
The whole process is lightning fast.
From the time the pellet goes into the fryer to the time it goes into the bag, it's less than four minutes.
So that bag is processed and packaged with the ultimate freshness.
Rudolph sells over 65 million bags of pork rinds a year all over the world.
In England, they're called scratchings.
In Mexico, they're called chicharrónes.
Whatever you call them, there may be no better snack to reach for as you settle in for the opening whistle.
Finally, pork rinds have their own official holiday.
It is on the Super Bowl Sunday, and it gives us an opportunity to show how pig skin and pigskins really go together.
Let's just start over.
Go on back.
Go on back.
Go on back.
Shall we? Yeah.
Hmm? We got to go a little faster.
Well, guess what? Messed it up.
One more time.
Hey, well, I didn't know.