Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e08 Episode Script

Hi.
I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" We need to talk.
You know what we need to talk about? Cheese.
That's right gooey, yummy, decadent cheese.
Whether it's on pizza, potatoes, or even dessert, cheese will always be king.
So sit back, relax, and get ready for cheese, glorious cheese.
From a handy way to eat a sweet and creamy treat on the go to a classic snack that never goes out of style, and a unique chip inspired by a favorite appetizer, we're about to get real cheesy.
So, let's talk cheesecake on a stick.
We're talking Eli's unbelievably delicious Cheesecake Dippers.
Actually, let's first just talk cheesecake, because that's where the Dipper hails from.
In 1966, Chicago restaurateur Eli Schulman opened Eli's The Place For Steak.
Although they specialized in beef, Schulman wanted to be known for the signature dessert he created cheesecake.
But not just any cheesecake.
We call it a Chicago-style Cheesecake because it's very different from New York style, which is more cakey.
Ours is very creamy.
It's a vanilla, as opposed to citrus, and it's on a cookie crust, as opposed to graham crust.
Eli's cheesecake went on to become a Chicago favorite.
But just how did a cheesecake become a frozen treat on a stick? It all started in 1995, at the food event Taste of Chicago.
We realized that we needed a dessert on a stick so that people could walk around while they were enjoying the cake.
The Cheesecake Dipper was so popular that it quickly made the move from Taste of Chicago to the frozen-food aisle.
But before it makes its way to your freezer, it starts out like all cheesecakes with the crust.
The all-butter shortbread cookie that they sheet, cut out, and put in a pan and bake.
Once that's ready, it's time to work on the cheesecake batter itself.
We make about 40 batches a day.
That's a lot of cheesecake.
Yeah, it is.
That works out to about 20,000 pounds a day.
And what's the first ingredient in that cheesecake batter? Cream cheese, of course.
We use, I think, about 4 million pounds of cream cheese a year.
All that delectable, velvety cheese goes into a big metal vat with some flour and sugar.
The sugar comes in 2,500-pound sacks, and then is sifted and automatically deposited into the bowl.
That doesn't look like any bowl I've used in my kitchen.
You could call this a mixer, but it looks more like an elevator.
And it kind of is.
It's called a Tonelli Mixer, and it lifts the batter up and whips it into shape.
It'll mix for 11 minutes on the mixer to cream those together and get it nice and thick and creamy.
Once the mixing is complete, then come the liquids eggs, vanilla, and sour cream.
And believe it or not, that's pretty much all there is to the recipe.
It's five basic ingredients, so you really have to make sure those ingredients are high-quality.
A little more time on the Tonelli, and it's ready to fill those cookie crusts.
It is then put on a crane because we have to put it into what we call a hopper, which will hold about The hopper is calibrated to fill each crust with just the right amount of batter so the cakes come out the same thickness each time.
Now the cheesecakes are ready to bake.
That happens in the tunnel oven.
They don't call it the tunnel for nothing.
This thing is 70 feet long, longer than a bowling alley.
It's like an Easy Bake, but it's much bigger.
The cakes take their sweet time getting through the tunnel.
It's about a 40-minute trip for each one.
Then, they slide on to the next ride in this culinary amusement park.
The spiral cooler is one of our favorite pieces of equipment.
So, they'll come out of the oven, go on a conveyer belt, and then work their way up this tower for over an hour and a half.
And then, when they come off the tower, they're at the right temperature.
But hang on to your cheesecake.
There's still one more ride to come.
It comes down these two long racetracks for its last length.
They're just moving fast, and they're a little bit more slanted at that point.
Wave the checkered flag.
These cheesecakes are done.
Eli's cake masters just have to pop them out of their pans.
But hold on aren't we making Dippers? They may be cool, but now they've got to get even cooler.
We'll push them into our blast freezer, which is a negative-15-degree freezer, to bring the temperature down quickly.
After an ice-cold 24-hour stint in the blast freezer, they're ready for cutting.
That happens here, on a machine affectionately known as "the guillotine.
" Once the cakes are cut into Dipper-size wedges, they're ready for perhaps the most crucial ingredient of them all the stick.
At long last, the Dippers are ready to be dunked by hand into Eli's custom-made rich dark chocolate.
And lickety-split, there's a whole tray full of Eli's Cheesecake Dippers all ready for wrapping in the chilled packaging room.
Once all that ultra-creamy cheesecake deliciousness is sealed in, the Dippers are shipped out to cheesecake lovers everywhere.
What is better than food on a stick? Then, dipping it in chocolate makes me happy.
Coming up, a kid favorite that will have even moms asking for more.
And later, how do you turn a popular appetizer into an even more popular chip? Macaroni, cheese.
There you go.
Macaroni, cheese.
I mean, I could say more, but really, macaroni, cheese.
Put them together, and you've got just about my favorite meal in the world.
And I know I'm not alone.
Even the pickiest of kids are drawn to it a bowl of hot noodles slathered in gooey cheese and baked to perfection.
Kids in the U.
S.
will eat an average of 10 pounds of mac and cheese per year.
Can you believe that? Yes, I can.
I have kids.
In fact, I could eat But let's face it eating that much mac and cheese is probably not a great idea, health-wise.
That is, until Heather Stouffer came along.
As a mom, I really wanted something convenient and healthy to feed my kids, but I couldn't find anything that I actually felt good about feeding them.
So, to satisfy her kids' craving while making Mom happy, too, Heather headed into her kitchen to create a unique take on the American classic.
Mom Made cheesy mac was born.
But these days, this mom makes her cheesy mac in a much bigger kitchen, and she starts with skim milk in a kettle a gigantic kettle.
In one batch of sauce, we use over 1,000 pounds of organic skim milk.
As the milk is stirred in one kettle, is melted in another.
Now, here's a little secret that you don't have to tell the kids.
Mom Made adds fresh, pureed sweet potatoes and squash to the milk and butter.
Everything we do at Mom Made is taking family-favorite recipes and making them as healthy was we can.
Now, this is mac and cheese, after all, so next up, the cheese.
But there's no messy grating here.
Mom Made uses cheese powder for two very good reasons.
It adds the cheese flavor in a concentrated way, and also, it allows it to freeze.
But don't worry there's plenty more cheese to come.
Once everything is mixed together, which takes about 20 minutes, the cheesy mixture is heated to further bind the ingredients.
We heat those to 165 degrees.
Well, that pretty much takes care of the cheese.
Now for the mac.
The pasta is made fresh for each run that we do, and it's made by taking organic semolina flour, mixing it with water.
It's pumped into an extrusion machine, which makes the individual macaroni noodles that are just the size that kids love.
To make the pasta, every hour, they're pumping up to 1,000 pounds of semolina flour through this machine.
It goes right from the machine into huge vats of boiling water.
And timing is critical.
Those fresh noodles are cooked for four minutes in boiling water, and then cooled for four to five minutes.
Remember the sweet potatoes and squash they added to the sauce? Well, there's still one more dose of veggies to add fresh peas.
The sweet potato and butternut squash add the color to it, and then the peas are a pop of fun and a twist.
I know some of you kids are saying, "Peas in mac and cheese?" Well, before you pass up one delicious meal, just wait and see what comes next a whole lot of creamy, gooey cheese.
I don't know about you, but I think everything tastes better when it's smothered in cheese.
Well, maybe not cameras.
Up next, a 20-minute trip through a flash-freezing tunnel, with some unexpected benefits.
That part of our process is magic, as far as we're concerned, because there's no preservatives that we need to add, as a result.
The most important result, though, is the yumminess factor.
Adults love it, too.
That's part of the fun, is that the whole family can eat it.
No arguments there.
Coming up, a crunchy classy that really leaves its mark.
You always think of cheese as being, well, cheesy.
Well, what if there was some magical way to make it crunchy, crispy, even puffy? Oh, wait! There is.
You know I'm talking about the cheese puff, that ultra-light and super-cheesy snack known for its classic crunch and accompanying orange fingerprints.
I don't know when the cheese puff was created.
I just know when the best cheese puff was created.
Granny Goose was started in 1946 in Oakland, California, as a potato chip company.
But by the '80s, they had expanded their business to include popcorn and the light and crispy cheese puff.
Snak King bought the company in 2000.
While the process has gone high-tech, the recipe is still the same as when the first puff came out of the oven.
And it all begins with ginormous bags of cornmeal.
It's dried corn that we have ground to a mixture that we bring in the 2,000-pound totes and place them into our silos, where the computer controls everything through the process from there.
A series of cranes and lifts wrestle these 2,000-pound bags of cornmeal into place.
Then, gravity, along with technology, does the work to empty them into the silos.
Then we can monitor it all right from a centralized computer screen.
Once the grain's in the silos, the cornmeal is blown through pipes down to a hopper, where it's weighed and portioned out.
Even moisture levels can be monitored and controlled.
At that stage, cornmeal has about 10% moisture.
We need to bring the moisture up to between 15% and 20%.
We add moisture to the corn so we can control the texture and the density of the product.
To do that, just the right amount of water must be added to the mix.
A giant spinning drill inside these pipes keep it all moving until it reaches the extruder.
The extruder head heats up to about 280 degrees.
Inside the extruder is a screw.
As the screw turns, it creates friction.
That friction creates heat, and it turns the corn almost into a liquid.
That's an intense pressure, pushing the liquid corn through the extruder until it exits through a die.
The die is basically a knife preprogrammed to cut and shape the corn.
Once it hits the atmosphere, poof! It explodes into The moisture they added helps the cornmeal through the extruder.
No one likes soggy corn puffs, so now we have to crisp these babies up.
We need to take that moisture out of the puff, and to do that, we run it through an oven.
The oven is a multi-pass oven.
And it's vertical For the perfect crunch, the puffs bake at 350 degrees as they rotate through.
They're just kind of stair-stepping down, for that whole 4 minutes.
So, now they look like corn puffs.
But we're making cheese puffs, so bring on the cheese.
We take the rice oil, and we mix in the cheese powder.
Snak King uses a powder made from real cheddar cheese.
The cheesy concoction is blended in a drum until it's warm and soupy.
Then it's time for the corn puffs to get a cheesy spray tan.
We're gonna spray it on in a giant tumbling drum, give it the flavor that everyone knows it for.
And this is no little drum.
It's a full Getting that perfect flavor clearly takes a little TLC total love of cheese.
The puffs enter the drum as a naked puff of corn and leave it as a full-flavored cheese puff.
Yep, all dressed up and ready to go into packaging.
As the conveyer pans deliver their goods, specialized scales weigh, sort, and distribute the cheese puffs into six-ounce bags.
And thanks to modern technology, Snak King can turn out 2,000 pounds of cheese puffs per hour, or 48,000 pounds a day.
We can produce about 12 million pounds a year of cheese puffs.
that's 6,000 tons of airy, cheesy, crunchy goodness.
And you know once you start snacking on these crispy, cheesy nuggets, it's hard to know when to stop.
If you don't have enough cheese on your fingertips to lick the cheese off, you haven't had enough cheese puffs.
Coming up, what cheesy chip is doing double duty? Even when it's just a topping, cheese can run away with the show.
And pair it with bacon and any kind of potato, and you've got the ultimate snack, especially if you can put it all on a single chip.
Like this cheddar-and-bacon potato-skin chip.
Potato skins have been around for decades, but it wasn't until Friday's put them on the menu in 1974 that they turned into a restaurant staple.
They eventually became so popular that Friday's teamed up with Indiana's Inventure Foods to create a more convenient, crunchier spin on the appetizer classic.
You'd think that making potato-skin chips would start with potatoes, but not in this case.
The first ingredient is actually corn.
We get whole dent corn, and we process the corn internally.
Yes, he said dent corn.
But don't let the name fool you.
Dent corn doesn't mean the corn is damaged.
It's actually a specific variety of corn that has more starch and less sugar than regular table corn.
These large, white silo bags hold up to 2,200 pounds each, and it's a good thing, too.
They go through 10,000 to 12,000 pounds of corn each day.
That's 2.
1 million pounds in a year.
The dried corn is then cooked and soaked and then ground before flowing into this giant hopper, 250 pounds at a time.
The massive hopper is hoisted up and dumped into a vertical stirring system specially designed for this process.
A mix of spices and starch and, of course, potato flakes, as well as water and oil, are added via a vacuum system.
And after a 90-second spin, this blending behemoth spits out a 900-pound batch of dough.
Holy cow.
That's the weight of acow.
To make the potato-skin chip look more like a potato skin, they actually create two separate batches of dough.
We have a light dough that will be the inside of the potato, as well as a dark dough, which will be the skin of the potato.
For the dark dough, we use similar ingredients as our light dough, but we do add caramel coloring to give the skin a potato look.
Now all they have to do is bring them together, and that happens in a big machine called a sheeter.
Once the dough is delivered to the sheeter, it comes together at the gauge roller, where the light and dark dough meet and become one dough.
The married dough is now pushed out as a flat sheet before entering three sets of rollers that will make it nearly as thin as a piece of paper.
The dough is now run through one final set of finishing rollers to create the proper thickness.
Now, here's where things really start coming together, where flat sheets of two-toned dough are transformed into potato skins.
To do this, a roller of potato-chip-shaped cutters is used.
But all potato chips aren't identical, so to make these little chips even more authentic, this unique cutter comes in three different sizes.
Now that everything is shaped up, our rows of perfect chips roll on towards the fryer.
But this is no ordinary fryer.
The enormous and super-speedy machine holds over 550 gallons of oil.
And at 350 degrees, each chip only takes about 45 seconds to get a perfect crisp.
But wait, what about the cheese and the bacon? After they come out of the fryer, they go on to the seasoning.
A little squirt of vegetable oil helps the oh-so-yummy blend of cheese and bacon flavoring stick.
Then these flavor-packed chips are tumbled around in a gigantic vat to distribute the coating evenly before reaching their next destination my stomach.
Oh, wait I got ahead of myself.
They go to their packing room, where the packing machines are able to pack anywhere from a 1-ounce bag all the way up to a 27-ounce bag.
Good thing these lightning-fast bagging machines have no trouble keeping up, 'cause these guys are capable of producing 20 million chips in a single day.
In fact, in one year alone, they typically pack over 110 million bags of chips.
If you laid these chips end-to-end, they would stretch from L.
A.
to New York six times.
Worth the trip, I'd say.
All right, this is the one.
Here we go.
Did he drive into the building? I just think you're all afraid of me, man.
Say something with some seriousness, y'all get scared.
Mmm! My favorite meal in the world.
And I know I'm not alone.