Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e09 Episode Script
Candy Critters
Hi.
I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" Our favorite snack foods come in all kinds of colors, flavors, and shapes.
But some of the most fun take their inspiration from the animal kingdom.
So, let's dig into some sweet butterflies, buttery bunnies, and, oh, so good gophers.
Whether it's some yummy gummies that make your heart flutter, a nutty sweet that pushes any candy lover out of their hole, or a holiday classic so good you want to tweet about them, not even a vegetarian can pass up taking a bite of these candy critters.
When it comes to the animal kingdom, these classic animal-themed treats are one of the best.
They're a celebration of springtime, and no Easter basket would be complete without them.
We're talking Peeps.
Peeps is the number-one candy that's put in an Easter basket, and that's what fans are always looking for.
It all started back in the 1950s when Bob Born of the Just Born company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, revolutionized his family business by mechanizing the creation of the company's quirky little candy birds that used to be made by hand.
Bob automated that process, mimicking that shape of woman actually squeezing marshmallow out of a tube.
The depositor machine Bob invented is a company secret so secret we can't even show it to you.
What we can reveal, though, is the basic DNA of what makes up these little, tasty treats.
Sugar, corn syrup, and then, of course, a little bit of gelatin to give it its form.
It's all mixed together in giant kettles until it boils.
Before long, it becomes creamy, delicious marshmallow.
Looks nothing like a Peep yet, though.
Once the hot marshmallow mixture reaches the perfect consistency, it gets two secret ingredients that make the Peeps extra special.
There's air that's pumped into it and then a little bit of love.
Love? Right there in the marshmallow? That must be why we can't stop eating them.
You may not be able to see the love being added, but the air is pumped in through giant aerators.
Now it's time to turn this stuff into adorable little birdies.
Here we enter the highly classified part of the operation.
The one secret we have here at Just Born is actually how we deposit the chick, and that's a family secret.
But if I had to describe it, as you can imagine, marshmallow does get squeezed out into that familiar chick shape onto a bed of sugar.
Whatever's happening in that depositor, we do know this It happens a lot.
On an average day, we make about 5 million Peeps.
That's over 2 billion Peeps every year.
Enough to circle the Earth twice.
I'll give you a moment to picture that.
Anyway, at this point, they're not Peeps just yet.
They still have to get their crunch on.
The trademark coating of brightly colored sugar that gives them their classic texture.
The sugar comes as white granulated sugar, and we'll color it one of the many favorite pastel colors.
Pink, yellow, purple, orange, blue, green.
Today's candy-coating color is pink, which means first red food coloring is diluted with water and then poured into huge rotating vats of sugar.
Just a few turns and, presto, our sugar is in the pink and ready to hit the showers.
The sugar showers, that is.
No, you're not dreaming.
We're really talking about actual showers of sweetness here.
That's where all the sugar gets blown around through tubes that blow air all over the sugar, and that's how they get covered.
When the marshmallows finally get out, they are totally covered in colorful crystals.
Looks pretty good, huh? But there's still something missing.
The one detail that makes every single solitary Peep unique.
They are still blind and they don't know where they're going.
So they make their way through the icing decorator.
They get imprinted with their unique little eye imprints.
And not one chick is ever the same.
And that's what gives them their Peepsonality.
Everyone loves a hot chick with a nice Peepsonality.
In fact, these chicks are so hot, they have to chill out for a bit on the cooling belt.
They're on this thing for quite a while.
The belt itself is over 300 feet long.
That's longer than a football field.
We have it that long so the product, the marshmallow itself, can cool enough so it doesn't stick to our packaging.
These crazy complicated assembly lines group the birds into boxes and then wrap them in that classic Peeps film before the chicks are shipped off for kids and adults alike to enjoy, though not always in the way you may think.
There's a fanatic following that uses them for dioramas, which basically, they create these little scenes with all the Peeps figures.
Sometimes, things even get a bit, well, explosive.
There's a strange phenomena around putting Peeps in the microwave.
And it runs the gamut from putting Peeps in just to watch them explode and then implode.
But I'm happy to report that most Peeps fans still enjoy the little birds the old-fashioned way, even if sometimes they may have, well, waited a little too long after Easter.
A lot of our fans, about 25% of them, like them stale.
We prefer to say, you know, aged like a fine wine.
Coming up an Easter treat that needs to be shaken and stirred.
And later some nutty treats with a furry name.
Hey Everybody knows bunnies are cute.
The big ears, their little noses.
But you know what's even better? Bunnies made out of chocolate.
The RM Palmer Company in Pennsylvania has been making Pastel Pals hollow chocolate rabbits since the 1940s.
And at one time, each and every rabbit was created by hand.
But today, it's a high-tech affair.
We think they're actually more colorful and more tasty today than they were when we first started them.
Usually, you'd start with a list of ingredients.
But in this case, they started with art and imagination.
Our first step, actually, is to hire an artist and a sculptor.
And we sculpt the bunny to what we feel it should look like.
RM Palmer's in-house engineers take it from there, bringing an artistic concept to life in the form of polycarbonate molds.
We create the molds and we create all the tooling to efficiently manufacture the product, depending if we're gonna color the ears pink or if we're gonna color the nose pink.
No detail is left undone.
The designers must have gotten something right because RM Palmer hasn't changed their bunny mold since 1997.
All right.
Enough about the empty molds.
Let's see how we're going to fill these babies up with some tasty chocolate.
This yummy bunny is actually built backwards from the outside in.
The white chocolate features that give the bunny's personality are added first.
Our Pastel Pals are manufactured with two different types of white chocolate.
There's white chocolate made with cocoa butter and there's a white chocolate made with a vegetable oil.
The cocoa butter chocolate is used to make white chocolate bunnies, while the thinner oil type is used for the bunnies' tiny features.
Color is added to the latter to create details like pink ears and blue eyes.
And then it's poured into a depositor that will distribute it into the molds.
We have four decorating depositors on our line.
Each one will deposit a different color.
So, when we sit down and we look at how we want to do it, obviously if the bunny has a blue pupil, you have to deposit that first.
And then you cool it.
And then if it has a yellow background on the eye, that will be deposited over the blue.
When all the decorations are finished, we properly cool them and then send them into the molding process where we deposit chocolate over top.
The amount of creamy chocolate poured into each mold must be perfect, within a thousandth of an ounce, to achieve that perfect bunny design.
Too little chocolate and the bunnies will be too thin and break.
Too much, and it won't become the hollow bunny we all know and love.
Now comes the most technical part of the process.
Each mold is capped and held together with small magnets.
The molds are then simultaneously cooled, vibrated, and spun.
This spin-molding machine shifts the chocolate to the outside of the mold, aiming to get each bunny's shell to a precise thickness.
We're looking for that So, there's a lot of engineering that goes into that.
Once they're the perfect thickness, there's one more step before these chocolate rabbits are ready to hop away a process called tempering.
When you're manufacturing chocolate, tempering gives it the stability where you can handle it without totally melting in your hand.
If the product snaps, that means it's been tempered properly.
The machines place the molds on a conveyor belt that runs through a cooler where the bunnies are chilled to 45 degrees before being removed from the mold.
It comes out the other end.
It's magical.
We have a hollow bunny.
Almost like they, I don't know, pulled it out of a hat.
You know the term "multiply like rabbits"? Well, it definitely happens here.
Our molding line basically is a continuous process where the molds are heated, decorated, deposited, cooled, and then starts back over again.
Think of it as a big merry-go-round where it goes back to zero every time around.
And around and around.
In fact, the company produces over 200,000 bunnies each day.
Let's see.
That works out to about a million pounds of chocolate a year.
That's a whole lot of chocolate bunnies.
Next, onto the packaging machine, which can wrap It may be as colorful as the bunnies themselves, but the packaging excels at function as well as form.
It's specifically designed to protect the delicate hollow candies so each bunny arrives in your Easter basket in one piece.
There's no tray, there's no other auxiliary packaging.
It's basically a flat board that we create and fold and tuck to make sure it captures that bunny, preventing it from breaking.
Although, let's face it, even broken bunnies are delicious.
Unless you want to disappoint your kid, you should get one of them or maybe two.
Coming up We'll check out a candy company that's just winging it.
Hey No one would ever think of eating butterflies.
Well, these butterflies might change your mind because they're made out of sweet, gooey gummies.
Chewy and bursting with flavor, these gummy butterflies are not your typical candy critter.
You look at the industry, the first shape you'll always see is bear, bear, bear.
The second most popular shape is gonna be a worm.
So, that's where the category really lacked innovation.
So, Indiana's Albanese Confectionery decided to reinvent gummy animals, and that meant not only different animals, but also an improved taste and texture.
Scott, my dad, is a great entrepreneur.
And he saw a really big void in the gummy market.
There was the gummies that have been around for years, and they were just not flavorful and they were rubbery and they were hard.
And the perfect taste and texture begins, not with sugar, but with the base of all gummy animals gelatin, large vats of it.
We first hydrate our gelatin with water.
After the gelatin's been hydrated, we pump it over into a large kettle where we also add corn syrup and then sugar.
Then flavors are added.
But not just any old flavors.
The candy makers at Albanese kicked it up a notch.
Some of the flavors are ornery orange, Concord grape, berry blue raspberry, Granny Smith apple, and wild cherry and fresh strawberry.
My personal favorite is ornery orange.
Flavor, color, and acid are all mixed together.
It might taste like a gummy butterfly at this point, but it sure doesn't look like one.
It then transfers down to our depositing line where the candy is injected into each mold.
But before that can happen, the tray molds are coated with a starch that keeps the gummies from sticking and helps them dry and solidify.
Then the gummy solution is injected into the butterfly molds by hundreds of tiny nozzles with alternating flavors.
Next, the filled trays are ejected from the depositor and make their way down a conveyor belt to a machine that stacks the trays into high towers.
At this point, the liquid butterflies look good enough to eat.
But it will be another day before these beauties take flight.
The gummies then get transferred into our curing rooms for 24 hours.
After a day where the gelatin firms to a solid state, the gummy butterflies are ready to break out of their cocoons.
We then take the starch trays with the candy that cured for 24 hours into our depositing line.
From here, they go into a tumbler where they are separated from the starch before making their way down a conveyor to another set of polishing tumblers.
Here, the gummies are tumbled with carnauba wax, an edible wax that keeps the butterflies from sticking together.
At this point, they can be hard to contain.
After the candy gets de-molded from the starch, the gummies transfer onto the conveyor belt, where we supply some of the employees with butterfly nets just in case some of them decide to fly away.
Well, they may not literally fly away.
But these butterflies do fly off the shelves.
We make over 30 million mini butterflies daily.
Wow! And they migrate to thousands of stores across the country.
While Albanese still makes the typical gummy bears and worms, it seems they really broke the mold here, because this tiny butterfly is now their most popular shape.
It appeals to little girls and also mothers and to even some little boys.
They're so delicious, they'll flutter right to your heart.
Nailed it.
Coming up What animal tastes best when covered in chocolate? Hey Now, there are the kinds of gophers that dig holes in your golf course.
Then there are the kind that get covered with chocolate and eaten by the handful.
Guess which kind we're gonna be talking about.
And no one knows these kind of gophers like the confectioners at Savannah's Candy Kitchen, who have been making the sweet, nutty treat for decades.
If you're in the candy business in the South, you need to be able to make a gopher.
So, what's a gopher? Well, a gopher is a regional name for a turtle.
No, not that kind of turtle.
This kind of turtle.
But what makes a gopher so delicious? It's the combination of textures and flavors crunchy and creamy, sweet and savory.
A gopher has three distinct tastes as you bite it.
The secret to these gophers' three-for-one flavor blast is simple loads of gooey caramel, luscious chocolate, and because they're made in Georgia, some serious nuts.
But let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
At Savannah's Candy Kitchen, whether partially or completely encased in cocoa, these gourmet gophers begin with homemade caramel made from butter, corn syrup, and sugar.
A process that starts here in the mixing room.
Once the caramel reaches a precise 238 degrees, it's time to bring on the cream.
Savannah's Candy Kitchen uses not just one, but two types of cream to create their caramel with just the right ultra-creamy consistency.
Actually getting the ratios of the eggs, cream, sugar, butter to what we wanted in our caramel took us a couple years.
We threw out many batches before we ever sold one.
Once that creamylicious perfection has been achieved, these buckets of caramel are carted into the next room where they get ready to meet gigantic sheet pans filled with thousands of Georgia's finest pecans.
With four nozzles, the pump creates evenly spaced gophers as just the right amount of warm caramel lands on top of those lovely toasted nuts before cooling in place.
On this tray table alone, Savannah's Candy Kitchen is using 90 pounds of pecans topped with 65 pounds of caramel.
All together, this batch will produce Of course, a gopher can't leave the factory if it's not fully dressed.
So, it's time for the perfect topper.
You have to take it to the chocolate room, and you can completely cover it to have an enrobed gopher.
As these perfect patties pass through a waterfall of warm, rich chocolate, they are completely covered before coming out the other side, where the excess chocolate is shaken off.
But not all gophers are totally enrobed in chocolate.
Savannah's Candy Kitchen makes a partially covered version of their gophers, as well.
The ones we sell the most of is just partially chocolate.
Then, depending on the type of batch, a little extra dressing of white or dark chocolate drizzle is applied by hand.
Of course, that could take a lot of hands.
We have the capability of making between 50,000 and 60,000 gophers a day.
before packaging.
And packaging is exactly where these little guys are headed next.
Using plastic guides to ensure proper spacing, this next conveyor feeds the completed confections through a high-tech wrapping machine.
This machine will both wrap and seal these sweet and crunchy critters to keep them that way.
Once they're wrapped, the gophers are shipped out to customers, with most making their way into homes during the winter holidays.
We start right after Thanksgiving.
We work seven days a week.
And for three weeks, it's nonstop.
And it's a good thing, 'cause once you take a bite of a gooey gopher, you're not gonna want to stop.
It's like no other piece of candy you've ever had.
This has got to be tried.
You know what's even be Do it again.
I feel something.
I feel I'm gonna let this one play.
I'm gonna let it play.
Like, "Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
" We just write songs to what we want to say.
Garth Brooks in the house
I'm Alfonso Ribeiro, and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" Our favorite snack foods come in all kinds of colors, flavors, and shapes.
But some of the most fun take their inspiration from the animal kingdom.
So, let's dig into some sweet butterflies, buttery bunnies, and, oh, so good gophers.
Whether it's some yummy gummies that make your heart flutter, a nutty sweet that pushes any candy lover out of their hole, or a holiday classic so good you want to tweet about them, not even a vegetarian can pass up taking a bite of these candy critters.
When it comes to the animal kingdom, these classic animal-themed treats are one of the best.
They're a celebration of springtime, and no Easter basket would be complete without them.
We're talking Peeps.
Peeps is the number-one candy that's put in an Easter basket, and that's what fans are always looking for.
It all started back in the 1950s when Bob Born of the Just Born company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, revolutionized his family business by mechanizing the creation of the company's quirky little candy birds that used to be made by hand.
Bob automated that process, mimicking that shape of woman actually squeezing marshmallow out of a tube.
The depositor machine Bob invented is a company secret so secret we can't even show it to you.
What we can reveal, though, is the basic DNA of what makes up these little, tasty treats.
Sugar, corn syrup, and then, of course, a little bit of gelatin to give it its form.
It's all mixed together in giant kettles until it boils.
Before long, it becomes creamy, delicious marshmallow.
Looks nothing like a Peep yet, though.
Once the hot marshmallow mixture reaches the perfect consistency, it gets two secret ingredients that make the Peeps extra special.
There's air that's pumped into it and then a little bit of love.
Love? Right there in the marshmallow? That must be why we can't stop eating them.
You may not be able to see the love being added, but the air is pumped in through giant aerators.
Now it's time to turn this stuff into adorable little birdies.
Here we enter the highly classified part of the operation.
The one secret we have here at Just Born is actually how we deposit the chick, and that's a family secret.
But if I had to describe it, as you can imagine, marshmallow does get squeezed out into that familiar chick shape onto a bed of sugar.
Whatever's happening in that depositor, we do know this It happens a lot.
On an average day, we make about 5 million Peeps.
That's over 2 billion Peeps every year.
Enough to circle the Earth twice.
I'll give you a moment to picture that.
Anyway, at this point, they're not Peeps just yet.
They still have to get their crunch on.
The trademark coating of brightly colored sugar that gives them their classic texture.
The sugar comes as white granulated sugar, and we'll color it one of the many favorite pastel colors.
Pink, yellow, purple, orange, blue, green.
Today's candy-coating color is pink, which means first red food coloring is diluted with water and then poured into huge rotating vats of sugar.
Just a few turns and, presto, our sugar is in the pink and ready to hit the showers.
The sugar showers, that is.
No, you're not dreaming.
We're really talking about actual showers of sweetness here.
That's where all the sugar gets blown around through tubes that blow air all over the sugar, and that's how they get covered.
When the marshmallows finally get out, they are totally covered in colorful crystals.
Looks pretty good, huh? But there's still something missing.
The one detail that makes every single solitary Peep unique.
They are still blind and they don't know where they're going.
So they make their way through the icing decorator.
They get imprinted with their unique little eye imprints.
And not one chick is ever the same.
And that's what gives them their Peepsonality.
Everyone loves a hot chick with a nice Peepsonality.
In fact, these chicks are so hot, they have to chill out for a bit on the cooling belt.
They're on this thing for quite a while.
The belt itself is over 300 feet long.
That's longer than a football field.
We have it that long so the product, the marshmallow itself, can cool enough so it doesn't stick to our packaging.
These crazy complicated assembly lines group the birds into boxes and then wrap them in that classic Peeps film before the chicks are shipped off for kids and adults alike to enjoy, though not always in the way you may think.
There's a fanatic following that uses them for dioramas, which basically, they create these little scenes with all the Peeps figures.
Sometimes, things even get a bit, well, explosive.
There's a strange phenomena around putting Peeps in the microwave.
And it runs the gamut from putting Peeps in just to watch them explode and then implode.
But I'm happy to report that most Peeps fans still enjoy the little birds the old-fashioned way, even if sometimes they may have, well, waited a little too long after Easter.
A lot of our fans, about 25% of them, like them stale.
We prefer to say, you know, aged like a fine wine.
Coming up an Easter treat that needs to be shaken and stirred.
And later some nutty treats with a furry name.
Hey Everybody knows bunnies are cute.
The big ears, their little noses.
But you know what's even better? Bunnies made out of chocolate.
The RM Palmer Company in Pennsylvania has been making Pastel Pals hollow chocolate rabbits since the 1940s.
And at one time, each and every rabbit was created by hand.
But today, it's a high-tech affair.
We think they're actually more colorful and more tasty today than they were when we first started them.
Usually, you'd start with a list of ingredients.
But in this case, they started with art and imagination.
Our first step, actually, is to hire an artist and a sculptor.
And we sculpt the bunny to what we feel it should look like.
RM Palmer's in-house engineers take it from there, bringing an artistic concept to life in the form of polycarbonate molds.
We create the molds and we create all the tooling to efficiently manufacture the product, depending if we're gonna color the ears pink or if we're gonna color the nose pink.
No detail is left undone.
The designers must have gotten something right because RM Palmer hasn't changed their bunny mold since 1997.
All right.
Enough about the empty molds.
Let's see how we're going to fill these babies up with some tasty chocolate.
This yummy bunny is actually built backwards from the outside in.
The white chocolate features that give the bunny's personality are added first.
Our Pastel Pals are manufactured with two different types of white chocolate.
There's white chocolate made with cocoa butter and there's a white chocolate made with a vegetable oil.
The cocoa butter chocolate is used to make white chocolate bunnies, while the thinner oil type is used for the bunnies' tiny features.
Color is added to the latter to create details like pink ears and blue eyes.
And then it's poured into a depositor that will distribute it into the molds.
We have four decorating depositors on our line.
Each one will deposit a different color.
So, when we sit down and we look at how we want to do it, obviously if the bunny has a blue pupil, you have to deposit that first.
And then you cool it.
And then if it has a yellow background on the eye, that will be deposited over the blue.
When all the decorations are finished, we properly cool them and then send them into the molding process where we deposit chocolate over top.
The amount of creamy chocolate poured into each mold must be perfect, within a thousandth of an ounce, to achieve that perfect bunny design.
Too little chocolate and the bunnies will be too thin and break.
Too much, and it won't become the hollow bunny we all know and love.
Now comes the most technical part of the process.
Each mold is capped and held together with small magnets.
The molds are then simultaneously cooled, vibrated, and spun.
This spin-molding machine shifts the chocolate to the outside of the mold, aiming to get each bunny's shell to a precise thickness.
We're looking for that So, there's a lot of engineering that goes into that.
Once they're the perfect thickness, there's one more step before these chocolate rabbits are ready to hop away a process called tempering.
When you're manufacturing chocolate, tempering gives it the stability where you can handle it without totally melting in your hand.
If the product snaps, that means it's been tempered properly.
The machines place the molds on a conveyor belt that runs through a cooler where the bunnies are chilled to 45 degrees before being removed from the mold.
It comes out the other end.
It's magical.
We have a hollow bunny.
Almost like they, I don't know, pulled it out of a hat.
You know the term "multiply like rabbits"? Well, it definitely happens here.
Our molding line basically is a continuous process where the molds are heated, decorated, deposited, cooled, and then starts back over again.
Think of it as a big merry-go-round where it goes back to zero every time around.
And around and around.
In fact, the company produces over 200,000 bunnies each day.
Let's see.
That works out to about a million pounds of chocolate a year.
That's a whole lot of chocolate bunnies.
Next, onto the packaging machine, which can wrap It may be as colorful as the bunnies themselves, but the packaging excels at function as well as form.
It's specifically designed to protect the delicate hollow candies so each bunny arrives in your Easter basket in one piece.
There's no tray, there's no other auxiliary packaging.
It's basically a flat board that we create and fold and tuck to make sure it captures that bunny, preventing it from breaking.
Although, let's face it, even broken bunnies are delicious.
Unless you want to disappoint your kid, you should get one of them or maybe two.
Coming up We'll check out a candy company that's just winging it.
Hey No one would ever think of eating butterflies.
Well, these butterflies might change your mind because they're made out of sweet, gooey gummies.
Chewy and bursting with flavor, these gummy butterflies are not your typical candy critter.
You look at the industry, the first shape you'll always see is bear, bear, bear.
The second most popular shape is gonna be a worm.
So, that's where the category really lacked innovation.
So, Indiana's Albanese Confectionery decided to reinvent gummy animals, and that meant not only different animals, but also an improved taste and texture.
Scott, my dad, is a great entrepreneur.
And he saw a really big void in the gummy market.
There was the gummies that have been around for years, and they were just not flavorful and they were rubbery and they were hard.
And the perfect taste and texture begins, not with sugar, but with the base of all gummy animals gelatin, large vats of it.
We first hydrate our gelatin with water.
After the gelatin's been hydrated, we pump it over into a large kettle where we also add corn syrup and then sugar.
Then flavors are added.
But not just any old flavors.
The candy makers at Albanese kicked it up a notch.
Some of the flavors are ornery orange, Concord grape, berry blue raspberry, Granny Smith apple, and wild cherry and fresh strawberry.
My personal favorite is ornery orange.
Flavor, color, and acid are all mixed together.
It might taste like a gummy butterfly at this point, but it sure doesn't look like one.
It then transfers down to our depositing line where the candy is injected into each mold.
But before that can happen, the tray molds are coated with a starch that keeps the gummies from sticking and helps them dry and solidify.
Then the gummy solution is injected into the butterfly molds by hundreds of tiny nozzles with alternating flavors.
Next, the filled trays are ejected from the depositor and make their way down a conveyor belt to a machine that stacks the trays into high towers.
At this point, the liquid butterflies look good enough to eat.
But it will be another day before these beauties take flight.
The gummies then get transferred into our curing rooms for 24 hours.
After a day where the gelatin firms to a solid state, the gummy butterflies are ready to break out of their cocoons.
We then take the starch trays with the candy that cured for 24 hours into our depositing line.
From here, they go into a tumbler where they are separated from the starch before making their way down a conveyor to another set of polishing tumblers.
Here, the gummies are tumbled with carnauba wax, an edible wax that keeps the butterflies from sticking together.
At this point, they can be hard to contain.
After the candy gets de-molded from the starch, the gummies transfer onto the conveyor belt, where we supply some of the employees with butterfly nets just in case some of them decide to fly away.
Well, they may not literally fly away.
But these butterflies do fly off the shelves.
We make over 30 million mini butterflies daily.
Wow! And they migrate to thousands of stores across the country.
While Albanese still makes the typical gummy bears and worms, it seems they really broke the mold here, because this tiny butterfly is now their most popular shape.
It appeals to little girls and also mothers and to even some little boys.
They're so delicious, they'll flutter right to your heart.
Nailed it.
Coming up What animal tastes best when covered in chocolate? Hey Now, there are the kinds of gophers that dig holes in your golf course.
Then there are the kind that get covered with chocolate and eaten by the handful.
Guess which kind we're gonna be talking about.
And no one knows these kind of gophers like the confectioners at Savannah's Candy Kitchen, who have been making the sweet, nutty treat for decades.
If you're in the candy business in the South, you need to be able to make a gopher.
So, what's a gopher? Well, a gopher is a regional name for a turtle.
No, not that kind of turtle.
This kind of turtle.
But what makes a gopher so delicious? It's the combination of textures and flavors crunchy and creamy, sweet and savory.
A gopher has three distinct tastes as you bite it.
The secret to these gophers' three-for-one flavor blast is simple loads of gooey caramel, luscious chocolate, and because they're made in Georgia, some serious nuts.
But let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
At Savannah's Candy Kitchen, whether partially or completely encased in cocoa, these gourmet gophers begin with homemade caramel made from butter, corn syrup, and sugar.
A process that starts here in the mixing room.
Once the caramel reaches a precise 238 degrees, it's time to bring on the cream.
Savannah's Candy Kitchen uses not just one, but two types of cream to create their caramel with just the right ultra-creamy consistency.
Actually getting the ratios of the eggs, cream, sugar, butter to what we wanted in our caramel took us a couple years.
We threw out many batches before we ever sold one.
Once that creamylicious perfection has been achieved, these buckets of caramel are carted into the next room where they get ready to meet gigantic sheet pans filled with thousands of Georgia's finest pecans.
With four nozzles, the pump creates evenly spaced gophers as just the right amount of warm caramel lands on top of those lovely toasted nuts before cooling in place.
On this tray table alone, Savannah's Candy Kitchen is using 90 pounds of pecans topped with 65 pounds of caramel.
All together, this batch will produce Of course, a gopher can't leave the factory if it's not fully dressed.
So, it's time for the perfect topper.
You have to take it to the chocolate room, and you can completely cover it to have an enrobed gopher.
As these perfect patties pass through a waterfall of warm, rich chocolate, they are completely covered before coming out the other side, where the excess chocolate is shaken off.
But not all gophers are totally enrobed in chocolate.
Savannah's Candy Kitchen makes a partially covered version of their gophers, as well.
The ones we sell the most of is just partially chocolate.
Then, depending on the type of batch, a little extra dressing of white or dark chocolate drizzle is applied by hand.
Of course, that could take a lot of hands.
We have the capability of making between 50,000 and 60,000 gophers a day.
before packaging.
And packaging is exactly where these little guys are headed next.
Using plastic guides to ensure proper spacing, this next conveyor feeds the completed confections through a high-tech wrapping machine.
This machine will both wrap and seal these sweet and crunchy critters to keep them that way.
Once they're wrapped, the gophers are shipped out to customers, with most making their way into homes during the winter holidays.
We start right after Thanksgiving.
We work seven days a week.
And for three weeks, it's nonstop.
And it's a good thing, 'cause once you take a bite of a gooey gopher, you're not gonna want to stop.
It's like no other piece of candy you've ever had.
This has got to be tried.
You know what's even be Do it again.
I feel something.
I feel I'm gonna let this one play.
I'm gonna let it play.
Like, "Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
" We just write songs to what we want to say.
Garth Brooks in the house