Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s01e12 Episode Script

Fruits and Veggies

Hi, I'm Alfonso Ribeiro and this is "Unwrapped 2.
0.
" My parents said it to me and I'm sure yours said it to you: "Eat your fruits and vegetables," but some folks are taking fruits and veggies and transforming them into some truly tasty snacks.
So come on, time to chow down on your fruits and veggies.
Whether it's a sinfully delicious way to enjoy carrots, a chip classic with a tangy twist, or a very adult take on a timeless fall beverage, these fruits and veggies will have you askin' for more.
I love potatoes.
Whether mashed, with butter; baked and topped with sour cream; or grabbed on the go with a burger, nothing quite hits the spot like a potato and there's no better way to serve up a spud than a chip.
One of the most iconic chip brands is Pennsylvania's Wise Foods.
They've been making the snack since 1921, when grocer Earl Wise found that he had an abundance of potatoes that weren't selling.
He actually took them home, fried them in his kitchen, took 'em back to the store.
They sold really well, so he started a side business.
Almost a century later, you can still buy those same crispy chips at markets across the country, and they now come in a variety of flavors, including one of Wise's biggest crowd-pleasers, Honey BBQ.
What makes Wise Honey BBQ potato chips so unique is this combination of savory and sweet.
But before we get to those special seasonings that make the Honey BBQ chips so distinctive, we'll need to start with potatoes millions of them.
Every week, Wise uses anywhere from 3 to 4 million pounds of potatoes.
And not just any potatoes will do.
Each potato must meet stringent standards to be transformed into Wise potato chips.
The selection process begins when the trucks pull up to the factory each day.
But before Wise unloads the potatoes, it carefully inspects them for texture, moisture content, and overall quality.
We'll take the 100-pound samples and take 'em to our quality assurance department, that will score the potatoes and make sure that they meet the grade that we're asking for.
And here's the cool part.
Once they pass inspection, a hydraulic ramp lifts the whole truck up in the air and dumps the potatoes into huge bins.
We unload 12 to 15 trailers of potatoes a day.
Each of those trailers will hold That's up to 750,000 pounds of potatoes every day.
First up for them, once they're in the factory? They've got to lose their skin.
When I do this at home, I use a regular old peeler, but hand-peeling nearly 350 tons of potatoes would take forever, so, instead, the folks at Wise came up with another way.
The potatoes move through a machine equipped with a series of bristles that literally brush off the peel.
Once they're freshly shorn, they need to head to the slicer, but they don't travel down a typical conveyor belt.
Since potatoes are they float, so Wise built water flumes to move them through the factory.
The flume transports the potatoes to a circular slicer.
The blades on the inside of the rotating cylinder slice the potatoes to an incredibly thin The slices then continue on down the flume, where they drop into a water bath, to remove some, but not all, of the starch.
When you overwash your potatoes and remove too much starch, you get a really white-looking potato chip and it loses flavor.
After a quick blow-dry, the chips are off to the fryers, and they're not fooling around.
Wise has three different fryers, with the largest able to cook in an hour.
They spend between in each of the fryers, at a temperature of 360°.
Even though the chips have made it this far, it doesn't mean they've earned the title of a Wise potato chip quite yet.
After being fried, each chip gets scanned with an optical sensor to detect imperfections.
The OptiSorter is a really unique part of the chip-making process.
It basically has a camera that identifies and spits out all the defect potato chips.
The machine looks for brown or black spots that might've formed during the frying process.
No flawed chip gets past this eagle-eyed scanner.
There is 128 air jets across the front of that machine and it will turn on a signal to that jet and it will blow that defect chip out of the product stream.
Chips that pass the test make their way into bins that travel down the line to the seasoning tumblers.
The seasoning consists of onion and garlic and paprika, but then, also, we add a little bit of honey, to give it that sweetness, a great combination.
We will go through between of that seasoning every 8 hours in the plant.
That's a lot of seasoning.
But, then, Wise makes a lot of potato chips.
Every year, Wise produces about 187 million bags of potato chips.
And, speaking of bags, how's that work? The machine will form that bag.
It comes as a Rollstock, almost like a roll of paper towels.
It'll make a tube structure, then, the chips will fill into it, and it'll make a bottom and a top seal.
Then, the puffed-up potato chip bags make their way down a conveyor, where works pick them up and pack them into boxes that can be shipped out and enjoyed nationwide.
Wise launched the Honey BBQ potato chip in 2001 and it quickly became our number-1 seasoned potato chip.
Coming up what vegetable can do double duty as an appetizer and a dessert? And, later a sweet veggie that'll satisfy your salt craving.
Hey! There aren't that many vegetables that are great in a salad and a cake, but carrots seem to be able to do both.
Now, imagine if you could somehow put that same sweet, moist taste into a cookie.
There's more than one way to get in your servings of vegetables, and this carrot-cake cookie might just be my favorite.
And, apparently, I'm not alone.
Like a lot of our best ideas, this idea actually originated from one of our customers.
A mother-daughter business located in San Lorenzo, California, since 1998, Too Good Gourmet created the carrot-cake cookie when a grocery store chain approached them about turning the popular dessert into an on-the-go snack.
The main reason behind this cookie was actually to replicate the success of the carrot cake.
And you can't make quality carrot-cake cookies without the star ingredient: fresh carrots.
And, here at Too Good Gourmet, they don't just use a few dozen, they go through over 100 pounds of carrots in just one hour and over 3/4 of a ton every day.
Once we determine how many batches we're going to make, we gather the appropriate ingredients in our food aisle in the plant and scale them for the batches.
Just like how my grandma made her carrot cake, but on a mammoth scale.
We add 'em to the mixer in a certain order and we start with the liquids.
And that's where these huge blenders come in.
They're capable of mixing Liquid sugar goes in first.
When the dough starts out really moist, you end up with a very moist cookie and the liquid sugar is really what keeps the cookie moist over time.
Butter, vanilla, and molasses round out the liquids.
After a few minutes of mixing, it's time for the dry ingredients.
First, the flour and the spices, including nutmeg and cinnamon; and then, carrots are added.
Once everything is properly blended, they transfer the dough into supersized, crane-lifted bowls and move them over to a hopper, where the workers feed the dough in by hand.
It's a wire-cut hopper and we have set it to portion these cookies to be 1-ounce each.
Too Good Gourmet goes through about 14,000 pounds of cookie dough a day, and just one batch of dough makes over 19,000 carrot-cake cookies.
The fresh-cut cookies are deposited 12 across and, from here, it's a short trip to a very long oven: After 9.
5 minutes at 360°, the cookies exit the oven fully baked, but still moist and chewy.
Following a 15-minute loop on a cooling belt, these moist cookie cakes smell so good, you just want to take a bite.
But hold on.
What's carrot cake without the frosting? We found that the customers really like that extra sweetness that comes, in a real carrot cake, from the cream-cheese topping, and we recreated that by using the white-chocolate bottom, which we can do automatically on our machinery.
The machinery she's talking about creates a liquid pool of sweet white-chocolate icing for our cookies to float across.
As the bottom of each is coated in the creamy confection, the finished carrot-cake cookies drip dry before getting a serious cooldown.
They travel through a cooling tunnel, which is about 32 feet long, and we keep it about 45° for this product.
After 8 minutes in the cooling tunnel, stacks of 12 are quickly gathered by hand and loaded into plastic containers as the perfect cookies turn the corner to enter the wrap machine.
The cookies go into trays and then, those trays actually go into what's called the horizontal wrapper.
The horizontal wrapper wraps the trays in a clear cello and keeps them fresh.
It all comes together to be this perfect carrot-cake experience.
Mmm-mmm! Now, that's what I call a proper serving of vegetables.
Oh! Coming up a fruity beverage so refreshing, you'll be glad you can't share it with the kids.
Hey! As a kid, I loved apple cider.
Now, there's a cider that doesn't use apples and definitely isn't for kids, but is definitely delicious.
Sonoma Cider's Pitchfork pear hard cider is a supertasty adult beverage with the surprisingly sweet and tangy taste of pears.
Owner David Cordtz definitely knows his cider.
My history in cider goes back to the early 1990s, where I was selling an imported brand back when nobody knew what hard cider was.
When he decided to start his own brand, he brought together a team that cares as much about cider as he does.
It's a nice group of about 25 people that believe in our vision of creating the best cider in America.
But just how do you make the best pear cider in America? Well, turns out, before Pitchfork pear cider can become pear cider, it has to start out, as all ciders do, with apples.
I did experiment with producing a pear cider made strictly from pears.
It didn't really have the brightness that I was looking for.
Sonoma starts with its own proprietary blend of apples from California and Washington State.
They're picked by hand and they are put into these bins and they're transported to a cold storage unit.
The juice is pressed off-site before being transported to the Sonoma factory ASAP.
We'll place an order for apple juice.
They'll press it one day, we get it the next day, and we start the fermentation the day after that.
When the juice arrives, it goes into giant tanks.
But, before Sonoma can start the fermentation process that turns juice into alcohol, they test the juice's sugar and acidity levels, to make sure it's right for cider.
We have specs that tell how much sugar we want in the juice and, that way, we get consistent alcohol through the fermentation.
Once the juice has gotten the seal of approval, they warm it up to over 100° before pouring it into smaller buckets.
We just found it makes the fermentation more successful, if we warm it up, first.
Then, they pour all that juice and yeast into a fermenting tank.
We just close the tank and wait for 2 weeks and let the yeast do the work.
It eats all the sugar and turns it all into alcohol.
After those 2 weeks, the cider is between 6.
5% and 7% alcohol, just a little stronger than your average beer, but something else happens during that fermentation process, too: the juice no longer tastes like apples.
At that point, the cider tastes, basically, like a dry wine, like a dry white wine.
When you have a dry cider, that can be a bit tart and a little bitter.
But not for long.
Next, it's poured into these But they're not making wine; they're making cider.
So, bring on the pears.
In this case, in highly concentrated form.
We add our pear essence, which is a proprietary essence.
It's derived from organic pears.
It's sort of a reduction of the pear juice and then, when I was developing it, I wasn't quite happy with the final result, until I added a little pinch of organic Madagascar vanilla.
Now, it tastes the way it's supposed to, but there's still something missing.
After it's blended, it doesn't have any carbonation; there's no bubbles.
This is a job for the It's got a bunch of plates in it that run refrigerant through it and that cools the cider down, and then, it also has CO2 being injected into it.
This process takes about 5 minutes and, once it's done, it's on to the bottles.
After being quickly washed and dried, the glass bottles march down the line, where they are filled, at quite a fast pace.
The filler has and 8 tapping heads and, when it's running just right, it can run at about That's 15,000 an hour.
But it's the first one that's most important.
We always take the first bottle off the line, pop it open, and make sure it tastes just right.
How do I get that job? But there's still one more step.
This organic cider has no preservatives, so it's got to be pasteurized for safety.
The pasteurizer's basically just a big, giant car wash with different zones of hot water spraying on the outside of the bottles.
But, because each bottle has to start out cold during filling, pasteurization takes some time: an hour and a half.
We fill it under 40° and then, we have to heat it up over 145° and so we have to do that really slowly, or we'll just break all the bottles.
Each bottle gets a label before making its way into boxes to be shipped out to cider-lovers across the country.
It's a pretty simple process, really.
I've always found that, in making beverages all my life, the simple things were usually the best.
Oh! Coming up a sweet and savory snack that's, well, a bit of a stretch.
Hey! Just the smell of a roasting sweet potato can make my mouth water, which is why it's great to know that, now, I can get that get that delicious sweet-potato taste right out of the bag.
This savory snack is a new twist on an American classic.
Served up with sandwiches, burgers, or just simply to munch on, no matter how you eat them, your whole plate just gets much sweeter.
Over the past 20 years, the number of sweet potatoes that Americans eat have actually doubled, so we had thought "Why not take this great product that you're seeing in restaurants and make it into a fun, crunchy snack?" And, in 2012, Boulder Canyon Foods in Boulder, Colorado, did just that.
They created the first ready-to-eat sweet-potato snack of its kind, made with real sweet potatoes.
It's because it's this perfect combination of sweet and savory.
You have the natural sweetness of the sweet potato baked right into the snack.
And this dry storage room is where it all begins.
Boulder Canyon uses 160 pounds of dehydrated sweet potatoes and 200 pounds of cornmeal per batch.
First, the workers dump the bags of sweet potatoes and cornmeal into the hoppers.
Next, they take the dry ingredients up to gargantuan mixers, where they measure them and blend them together.
At any given time, we could be running up to a half a million pounds.
That means one day's worth of sweet potato sticks would weigh more than Once the dry goods are mixed, the base ingredients travel along another conveyor to the top of an extruder.
Here, they add water, to create the dough, and then, things begin to get a little stringy.
It goes into the extruder and, at that point, it's a combination of high heat and high pressure, which, essentially, partially bakes the sweet-potato fries and then extrudes them out into long, spaghetti-like strands.
strands, to be exact.
Next, it's time to cut these fries down to size.
A blade slices through the strings, dropping the freshly cut fries on to a conveyor belt.
At this point, they may look like sweet-potato fries, but they're still a little soggy.
Of course, nobody likes soggy fries, so we need to take it through the next step of baking.
So it goes into this very large oven and it actually brings the moisture from 8% all the way down to 2%, for the extra crispiness.
As the fries come out of the oven, they're now the right texture, but they still haven't achieved the perfect taste.
That's where the superspecial seasoning comes in.
Boulder Canyon uses a secret mix involving molasses and sea salt to create the perfect sweet-and-salty blend.
As the sweet-potato fries go into the seasoning tumbler, they're sprayed with just a little bit of oil.
That little bit of oil helps the seasoning to stick.
Now that these snack sticks have been fully dressed, it's time to hop on another series of conveyors, to catch a ride over to packaging.
Arriving in the bagging area, these little fries are ready to weigh in.
The scales actually measure the sweet-potato fries and they drop down into the packing machine, which heat-seals the bottom and the top of the package.
So, just how many sweet-potato fries does Boulder Canyon produce? We make over 25 million sweet-potato fries in a single day.
in just one day.
Sweet.
I can get that great sp sw right out of a bag.
Send it back.
Just the smell of a roasting sweet potato Why you playin'? Less volume, a little slower, a little smoother.
Andshut down.

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