Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s02e12 Episode Script
Global Goodies!
On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we're walking the line between spicy and sweet.
First, bite into the mallow bar that made TV history.
Crunch down on a rolled-up treat that'll take you South of the border.
Then, kick it up a bunch with a chili hot sauce that's a household staple.
Your taste buds won't know which way to turn.
Not every candy maker can claim to be part of television history.
But when Lucille Ball stopped by Edelweiss Chocolate in Beverly Hills to pick up some sweets, a classic scene was born.
Lucille Ball was one of our customers.
And one day, as she was walking through the factory, she noticed a problem on the belt.
The chocolates were coming out far too fast.
Lucille Ball's visit inspired one of television's most iconic moments and turned this little candy shop into a Beverly Hills icon.
And after 70 years of serving up sweet stuff to Hollywood A-listers, they're still going strong.
And it's their famous Toffeemallow that keeps them coming.
It's a chocolate marshmallow dipped in dark chocolate, rolled in buttery toffee crumbles and topped off perfectly by chocolate sprinkles.
Wow, is it hot in here, or is it just me? We've been making the Toffeemallow for 73 years.
It's one of the original recipes.
And that recipe starts with homemade toffee, processed much like they did in the good ol' days.
The toffee starts out in this giant copper kettle by first boiling butter sugar a bit of vanilla and some special proprietary ingredients.
Then, continuously stirred and stirred and stirred for a little over an hour.
Once the mixture is ready, it's carried over to this large marble table where this 240-degree mix is poured out to cool and set.
It needs to drop down about 50 degrees before it is cut into strips.
Once the strips are cool and cut, they are fed through a grinder to create fresh toffee chips.
Next, we we make the marshmallow.
In another copper kettle, sugar and water are boiled to make a simple syrup, while a smaller pot of glucose warms on a burner nearby.
After a few minutes, the two pots are combined into a large mixer and allowed to churn for additional 3 to 4 minutes before gelatin is added.
Egg whites are blended in as the speed of the mixer is gradually increased over the next 8 minutes, or until the mix has just the right amount of frothiness.
But what really gives these mallows their chocolaty richness is the cacao liquor, which is added right at the end of the mixing process.
Now it's time to cool things down and let our marshmallows firm up.
Back at the marble table, a mold is set in place.
That hot mallow mix is poured out leveled, and left to set overnight.
The next day, the hardened 'mallow is dusted with cornstarch.
The sides of the molds are removed.
And now it's time to cut things down to size.
The cut candy is hand-separated and placed in the sifter to remove any excess cornstarch.
The finished marshmallows are then placed on a tray and delivered next door to the dipping room.
Now it's time for the ultimate chocolate climax.
The sweet toffee chips are blended into the pure dark chocolate.
And each marshmallow piece is coated by hand and set on wax paper to dry.
The grand finale is a beautifully executed topping of delicate chocolate sprinkles.
Once dry, these beauties are ready for packaging.
And you don't have to wait for a special order to show up at your door.
Drop by the shop and grab a fresh treat right off the tray.
I'll be stopping by on my way home.
When we come back, it's time to discover how a classic mint can just disappear.
Hey! Nothing tops off a spicy meal like a minty treat.
And when it's covered in sweet chocolate and melts in your mouth, forget about it.
Fannie May Chocolates of Canton, Ohio, has done all that and more in their Mint Meltaways.
They've been hugely popular from the moment they were introduced back in the 1950s.
It's still made the same way as it was almost 60 years ago.
But how do they get smooth, creamy, minty confection to do that meltaway magic? It all starts with the minty chocolate center.
We've had this blend for decades and decades.
That comes delivered to us in liquid form.
Fannie May brings chocolate in by the truckload, both luscious milk chocolate and semisweet dark chocolate.
These chocolate delights are portioned through pipes into a huge melting tank where over 3,000 pounds of chocolate is slowly heated and stirred for about 45 minutes.
For all the cocoa butter to be totally melted, generally we want the chocolate at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, it's time for the special guest to join the chocolate party.
Coconut oil and the peppermint extract.
Coconut oil brings the richness and nuttiness to the chocolate.
And the peppermint? Well, they don't call them Mint Meltaways for nothing.
Once they're thoroughly mixed together, the creamy, delicious mixture is pumped over to the tempering unit.
Tempering is all about the crystallization of the cocoa butter in the chocolate.
Those crystals can't be too big or the chocolate will be grainy without that perfect shine and snap.
Once tempered, the milk chocolate mixture is piped into a hopper, which then shoots some of that goodness into a 80-cavity plastic mold tray, each about the size of a sugar cube.
About 8 grams of chocolate getting injected into each cavity.
The first 80 get filled.
Then, onto the next 80, and then the next.
Each mint-filled mold travels over a vibrating plate, which shakes out any air bubbles and settles the mint chocolate centers so they lie flat.
And then it's onto the multi-level cooling tunnel, a carousel-like conveyor belt where the centers will solidify for about 15 minutes.
It doesn't need to be frozen, right? It only needs to go down to 55 degrees.
Then it contracts a tiny little bit.
The contraction makes each mint chocolate center pop right out of the molds with a little help from a tap underneath.
You'd think these bite-sized minty morsels are ready to go.
I mean, I'd eat a dozen of them right now, but I'd be missing the best part.
The creamy centers are rolled down a conveyor belt to get a nice, warm bath of rich, oozing chocolate.
So why is this chocolate green? Because it's actually white chocolate tinted with minty green.
The centers travel through an actual minty waterfall.
They're drowning in minty goodness.
A puff of air and vibrating belt combine to remove any excess coating.
Then the Meltaways get a special trademark drizzled on top.
I think the tapping is is the piece that people are most impressed by 'cause it literally is a production facility tapping each piece to create that hand-crafted look.
It's a signature.
Then it's on to another cooling tunnel for about 20 minutes or so to solidify the outer layer.
When they're set, they're ready for packaging, all according to old, traditional methods.
It adds up to a whole lot of sweet, refreshing mint chocolate, in fact.
For those without calculators, it's over about 60 million pieces a year.
Each one ready to grab and pop in your mouth for that incomparable Mint Meltaway experience.
Between the flavor that mintiness and the melting properties of the Meltaway, those sort of work together to create a unique eating experience.
Up next, what happens when a classic Mexican dish gets a crispy twist? Find out when "Unwrapped 2.
0" returns.
Hey! Who doesn't love Mexican food? Go ahead.
Raise your hand.
Yeah.
That's what I thought.
So let's see.
You've got your tacos, your burritos, your enchiladas.
But there's one Mexican dish that doesn't get enough respect in my opinion the deep-fried burrito known as the chimichanga.
This spicy treat has its roots in northern Mexico.
Legend tells of a cook accidentally dropping a burrito into a fryer and yelling, "Chimichanga," which I think means "thingamajig.
" But one thing's for sure it was no accident when Camino Real Foods in Los Angeles created Tina's Chimichangas, a modern take on the traditional recipe.
We want the customers to taste the authentic tortilla, the real ingredients of our filling.
And just like the traditional chimichanga, Tina's Chimichangas start with a homemade fresh tortilla.
Massive portions of flour, salt and baking powder are dumped into a supersized mixer, followed by water and vegetable oil to create the tortilla dough.
After about 25 minutes, this crazy-big dough ball, weighing in 1,000 pounds, is removed from the vat onto a cart, where workers will divide it into more manageable 35-pound chunks.
These smaller dough hunks hitch a ride up the conveyor toward a press to put the squeeze on.
And then will get pressed into 3/4-inch lines and be set up for the final pressing.
These turning wheels spin-cut the tortillas into a precise 91/4-inch around.
As the circular cut-outs move onto the baking belt in perfect rows of three, air is pumped in underneath the doughy circles.
This keeps them from sticking or burning and gives them the perfect tortilla texture.
Each tasty tortilla will make three passes inside this special oven.
At each turn, the product drops to a lower belt and a lower temperature.
As a raw product, it goes through there at 335 degrees.
It will then drop down to the second belt at 220 degrees.
It then goes through the third belt at that same 220 and comes out the other end.
Once out the other end of the oven, the tortillas are still too hot to handle.
So they zig-zag back and forth on these grates for a cool-down.
Then, a quick spritz keep them pliable.
Now that we have the perfect shell, it's time to make the filling.
The filling is the actual part of the chimichanga that will have everything that we love the fresh ground beef, the farm-grown pinto beans, and all the spices.
Camino Real Foods purchases these beans in 2,000-pound bulk bags.
The first thing they do is go for a swim.
After their waterfall rinse and a little sifting to get rid of unwanted debris, they take a ride in these elevators up to the boiler.
The beans boil all by their lonesome in these ginormous kettles for about an hour before the fresh ground beef is added.
Forty-five minutes later, the secret spices are blended in.
Cook it all for one more hour in this supersized boiler, and we are literally ready to roll.
The filling is transferred to a hopper that doles out exactly 4 ounces of filling for each tortilla.
Here's where the real artistry begins.
We hand-fold over 1 million burritos per day, and it's probably the part of the process that we're most proud of.
That's a lot of chimichangas.
With three lines of workers rolling 400 tortillas each every minute, that means these workers fold over 1,200 burritos every 60 seconds.
We have about per line running at all times, pulling the tortillas freshly-filled off of the line, folded and then put back on top of one of the belts.
Many of our burrito folders have been with us since the late '80s.
Some of them, almost 30 years.
Like a finely oiled machine, they fold and place, fold and place.
A conveyor slides these neatly rolled treats to the next step, a step that separates the burritos from the chimichangas the fryer.
They're double-checked for quality and straightened by hand before taking the plunge in the 375-degree bubbling deep-fryer.
As they exit, drip-dry, and begin to cool, a final quality check is done.
Once the chimichangas come out of the fryer and onto the conveyor, they'll go into our blast freezer, which is set at 33 degrees below zero.
After 18 to 20 minutes, the chimichangas are completely frozen through and ready for packaging.
The workers feed the finished product into Tina's signature blue wrapping.
And once sealed, they are boxed, palletized, and ready to hit the road.
Up next, an iconic hot sauce that can turn any food into a spicy treat.
Hey! I've always enjoyed a little kick to my food.
And nothing gives me a kick quite like this little red bottle.
The Sriracha sauce recipe is based on a traditional Thai sauce called srirachi.
But this version has a twist.
It all started in Vietnam back in the '70s, when founder David Tran had more peppers than he could eat.
His brother gave him field of chili.
And he just thought, "What could I do with it?" The answer make sauce.
Today, Huy Fong Foods in Irwindale, California is making thousands of sauce-filled bottles a day.
And it all starts with chili peppers.
But these aren't your everyday, run-of-the-mill chili peppers.
These are a special jalapeno hybrid that gives this sauce its incomparable flavor.
The color, the taste, the heat it's very natural.
The seasonally varied pepper crop is shipped right to the plant.
Right now, we're getting about 40 to 50 truckloads a day.
That's about 1,000 tons of fresh chili peppers every day.
Each truck sidles up to the sideways unloading dock and immediately dumps the peppers into a giant steel vat built right into the side of the building.
A conveyor belt moves the peppers from deep down in the vat up and through the walls of the factory, where their first stop is to get sorted and washed.
The spruced up chilis are dropped down into the grinder where they are chopped up and combined with the other basic hot sauce ingredients, like vinegar and salt, plus a few other secrets.
The vinegar is piped in, while the dry ingredients are poured into smaller containers on the floor, which shoots the mixture up and into the grinder.
From here, the ground chili concoction gets pumped over to one of several mixers that line the walls of the factory, where it gets a nice, thorough churning.
It's in the mixer for about maybe an 1ý hours to 2 hours.
This chili slurry is then sent to filler machines, where it's pumped into giant, Each drum is capped and rolled down a conveyor belt into the warehouse, which bursts at the seams with over 200,000 drums.
That may sound like a lot of chili mix, and it is.
But here's the thing they have to stockpile as much of this base ingredient as possible because the pepper supply is limited.
The harvest is only And then we use that inventory that we've lined for the rest of the year for filling.
So when store shelves get low on sauce, they bring the drums out of storage and get busy turning the ground chilis into tongue-tingling Sriracha.
That's achieved by adding all the other ingredients into the mixing hopper.
The ones you can really taste are the garlic and the sugar, which gives the sauce its sweet tang.
Those final ingredients are mixed with the pepper slurry, and then it's off to another machine that purees the batch.
Then, through these overhead pipes, the final mix is sent to the bottling area.
Which reminds me oh, yeah, they make their own bottles too.
They take hundreds of little test-tube-shaped plastic preforms and turn them into the familiar full-size Sriracha bottle.
They're put into the blow molder and it's heated.
That heat makes the bottle soft and flexible so they expand like a balloon when hit with a blast of air.
The bottles fresh from the blower are ratcheted into place to get that signature label the trademark Huy Fong rooster logo.
The label is applied to each bottle with a special silk-screening process, which is pretty cool.
And now the bottles are ready to be filled with hot Sriracha.
Through a hanging carousel, the bottles swing in empty and roll out full of that spicy goodness.
Now that's some quick-draw bottle.
And at that same lightning speed, each filled bottle is capped, sealed, sent on down the line to be packed into boxes, shipped out to eagerly awaiting customers.
Even going at full speed, it's hard to keep up with how popular Huy Fong Sriracha has become these days.
And it's not just foodies who love it.
Sriracha is still a hit with the man who created it.
Forget about it.
Ay.
There's one Mexican dish that doesn't get enough respect, in my opinion.
That's right.
Deep fried burrito known as the chimichanga.
0," we're walking the line between spicy and sweet.
First, bite into the mallow bar that made TV history.
Crunch down on a rolled-up treat that'll take you South of the border.
Then, kick it up a bunch with a chili hot sauce that's a household staple.
Your taste buds won't know which way to turn.
Not every candy maker can claim to be part of television history.
But when Lucille Ball stopped by Edelweiss Chocolate in Beverly Hills to pick up some sweets, a classic scene was born.
Lucille Ball was one of our customers.
And one day, as she was walking through the factory, she noticed a problem on the belt.
The chocolates were coming out far too fast.
Lucille Ball's visit inspired one of television's most iconic moments and turned this little candy shop into a Beverly Hills icon.
And after 70 years of serving up sweet stuff to Hollywood A-listers, they're still going strong.
And it's their famous Toffeemallow that keeps them coming.
It's a chocolate marshmallow dipped in dark chocolate, rolled in buttery toffee crumbles and topped off perfectly by chocolate sprinkles.
Wow, is it hot in here, or is it just me? We've been making the Toffeemallow for 73 years.
It's one of the original recipes.
And that recipe starts with homemade toffee, processed much like they did in the good ol' days.
The toffee starts out in this giant copper kettle by first boiling butter sugar a bit of vanilla and some special proprietary ingredients.
Then, continuously stirred and stirred and stirred for a little over an hour.
Once the mixture is ready, it's carried over to this large marble table where this 240-degree mix is poured out to cool and set.
It needs to drop down about 50 degrees before it is cut into strips.
Once the strips are cool and cut, they are fed through a grinder to create fresh toffee chips.
Next, we we make the marshmallow.
In another copper kettle, sugar and water are boiled to make a simple syrup, while a smaller pot of glucose warms on a burner nearby.
After a few minutes, the two pots are combined into a large mixer and allowed to churn for additional 3 to 4 minutes before gelatin is added.
Egg whites are blended in as the speed of the mixer is gradually increased over the next 8 minutes, or until the mix has just the right amount of frothiness.
But what really gives these mallows their chocolaty richness is the cacao liquor, which is added right at the end of the mixing process.
Now it's time to cool things down and let our marshmallows firm up.
Back at the marble table, a mold is set in place.
That hot mallow mix is poured out leveled, and left to set overnight.
The next day, the hardened 'mallow is dusted with cornstarch.
The sides of the molds are removed.
And now it's time to cut things down to size.
The cut candy is hand-separated and placed in the sifter to remove any excess cornstarch.
The finished marshmallows are then placed on a tray and delivered next door to the dipping room.
Now it's time for the ultimate chocolate climax.
The sweet toffee chips are blended into the pure dark chocolate.
And each marshmallow piece is coated by hand and set on wax paper to dry.
The grand finale is a beautifully executed topping of delicate chocolate sprinkles.
Once dry, these beauties are ready for packaging.
And you don't have to wait for a special order to show up at your door.
Drop by the shop and grab a fresh treat right off the tray.
I'll be stopping by on my way home.
When we come back, it's time to discover how a classic mint can just disappear.
Hey! Nothing tops off a spicy meal like a minty treat.
And when it's covered in sweet chocolate and melts in your mouth, forget about it.
Fannie May Chocolates of Canton, Ohio, has done all that and more in their Mint Meltaways.
They've been hugely popular from the moment they were introduced back in the 1950s.
It's still made the same way as it was almost 60 years ago.
But how do they get smooth, creamy, minty confection to do that meltaway magic? It all starts with the minty chocolate center.
We've had this blend for decades and decades.
That comes delivered to us in liquid form.
Fannie May brings chocolate in by the truckload, both luscious milk chocolate and semisweet dark chocolate.
These chocolate delights are portioned through pipes into a huge melting tank where over 3,000 pounds of chocolate is slowly heated and stirred for about 45 minutes.
For all the cocoa butter to be totally melted, generally we want the chocolate at about 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Now, it's time for the special guest to join the chocolate party.
Coconut oil and the peppermint extract.
Coconut oil brings the richness and nuttiness to the chocolate.
And the peppermint? Well, they don't call them Mint Meltaways for nothing.
Once they're thoroughly mixed together, the creamy, delicious mixture is pumped over to the tempering unit.
Tempering is all about the crystallization of the cocoa butter in the chocolate.
Those crystals can't be too big or the chocolate will be grainy without that perfect shine and snap.
Once tempered, the milk chocolate mixture is piped into a hopper, which then shoots some of that goodness into a 80-cavity plastic mold tray, each about the size of a sugar cube.
About 8 grams of chocolate getting injected into each cavity.
The first 80 get filled.
Then, onto the next 80, and then the next.
Each mint-filled mold travels over a vibrating plate, which shakes out any air bubbles and settles the mint chocolate centers so they lie flat.
And then it's onto the multi-level cooling tunnel, a carousel-like conveyor belt where the centers will solidify for about 15 minutes.
It doesn't need to be frozen, right? It only needs to go down to 55 degrees.
Then it contracts a tiny little bit.
The contraction makes each mint chocolate center pop right out of the molds with a little help from a tap underneath.
You'd think these bite-sized minty morsels are ready to go.
I mean, I'd eat a dozen of them right now, but I'd be missing the best part.
The creamy centers are rolled down a conveyor belt to get a nice, warm bath of rich, oozing chocolate.
So why is this chocolate green? Because it's actually white chocolate tinted with minty green.
The centers travel through an actual minty waterfall.
They're drowning in minty goodness.
A puff of air and vibrating belt combine to remove any excess coating.
Then the Meltaways get a special trademark drizzled on top.
I think the tapping is is the piece that people are most impressed by 'cause it literally is a production facility tapping each piece to create that hand-crafted look.
It's a signature.
Then it's on to another cooling tunnel for about 20 minutes or so to solidify the outer layer.
When they're set, they're ready for packaging, all according to old, traditional methods.
It adds up to a whole lot of sweet, refreshing mint chocolate, in fact.
For those without calculators, it's over about 60 million pieces a year.
Each one ready to grab and pop in your mouth for that incomparable Mint Meltaway experience.
Between the flavor that mintiness and the melting properties of the Meltaway, those sort of work together to create a unique eating experience.
Up next, what happens when a classic Mexican dish gets a crispy twist? Find out when "Unwrapped 2.
0" returns.
Hey! Who doesn't love Mexican food? Go ahead.
Raise your hand.
Yeah.
That's what I thought.
So let's see.
You've got your tacos, your burritos, your enchiladas.
But there's one Mexican dish that doesn't get enough respect in my opinion the deep-fried burrito known as the chimichanga.
This spicy treat has its roots in northern Mexico.
Legend tells of a cook accidentally dropping a burrito into a fryer and yelling, "Chimichanga," which I think means "thingamajig.
" But one thing's for sure it was no accident when Camino Real Foods in Los Angeles created Tina's Chimichangas, a modern take on the traditional recipe.
We want the customers to taste the authentic tortilla, the real ingredients of our filling.
And just like the traditional chimichanga, Tina's Chimichangas start with a homemade fresh tortilla.
Massive portions of flour, salt and baking powder are dumped into a supersized mixer, followed by water and vegetable oil to create the tortilla dough.
After about 25 minutes, this crazy-big dough ball, weighing in 1,000 pounds, is removed from the vat onto a cart, where workers will divide it into more manageable 35-pound chunks.
These smaller dough hunks hitch a ride up the conveyor toward a press to put the squeeze on.
And then will get pressed into 3/4-inch lines and be set up for the final pressing.
These turning wheels spin-cut the tortillas into a precise 91/4-inch around.
As the circular cut-outs move onto the baking belt in perfect rows of three, air is pumped in underneath the doughy circles.
This keeps them from sticking or burning and gives them the perfect tortilla texture.
Each tasty tortilla will make three passes inside this special oven.
At each turn, the product drops to a lower belt and a lower temperature.
As a raw product, it goes through there at 335 degrees.
It will then drop down to the second belt at 220 degrees.
It then goes through the third belt at that same 220 and comes out the other end.
Once out the other end of the oven, the tortillas are still too hot to handle.
So they zig-zag back and forth on these grates for a cool-down.
Then, a quick spritz keep them pliable.
Now that we have the perfect shell, it's time to make the filling.
The filling is the actual part of the chimichanga that will have everything that we love the fresh ground beef, the farm-grown pinto beans, and all the spices.
Camino Real Foods purchases these beans in 2,000-pound bulk bags.
The first thing they do is go for a swim.
After their waterfall rinse and a little sifting to get rid of unwanted debris, they take a ride in these elevators up to the boiler.
The beans boil all by their lonesome in these ginormous kettles for about an hour before the fresh ground beef is added.
Forty-five minutes later, the secret spices are blended in.
Cook it all for one more hour in this supersized boiler, and we are literally ready to roll.
The filling is transferred to a hopper that doles out exactly 4 ounces of filling for each tortilla.
Here's where the real artistry begins.
We hand-fold over 1 million burritos per day, and it's probably the part of the process that we're most proud of.
That's a lot of chimichangas.
With three lines of workers rolling 400 tortillas each every minute, that means these workers fold over 1,200 burritos every 60 seconds.
We have about per line running at all times, pulling the tortillas freshly-filled off of the line, folded and then put back on top of one of the belts.
Many of our burrito folders have been with us since the late '80s.
Some of them, almost 30 years.
Like a finely oiled machine, they fold and place, fold and place.
A conveyor slides these neatly rolled treats to the next step, a step that separates the burritos from the chimichangas the fryer.
They're double-checked for quality and straightened by hand before taking the plunge in the 375-degree bubbling deep-fryer.
As they exit, drip-dry, and begin to cool, a final quality check is done.
Once the chimichangas come out of the fryer and onto the conveyor, they'll go into our blast freezer, which is set at 33 degrees below zero.
After 18 to 20 minutes, the chimichangas are completely frozen through and ready for packaging.
The workers feed the finished product into Tina's signature blue wrapping.
And once sealed, they are boxed, palletized, and ready to hit the road.
Up next, an iconic hot sauce that can turn any food into a spicy treat.
Hey! I've always enjoyed a little kick to my food.
And nothing gives me a kick quite like this little red bottle.
The Sriracha sauce recipe is based on a traditional Thai sauce called srirachi.
But this version has a twist.
It all started in Vietnam back in the '70s, when founder David Tran had more peppers than he could eat.
His brother gave him field of chili.
And he just thought, "What could I do with it?" The answer make sauce.
Today, Huy Fong Foods in Irwindale, California is making thousands of sauce-filled bottles a day.
And it all starts with chili peppers.
But these aren't your everyday, run-of-the-mill chili peppers.
These are a special jalapeno hybrid that gives this sauce its incomparable flavor.
The color, the taste, the heat it's very natural.
The seasonally varied pepper crop is shipped right to the plant.
Right now, we're getting about 40 to 50 truckloads a day.
That's about 1,000 tons of fresh chili peppers every day.
Each truck sidles up to the sideways unloading dock and immediately dumps the peppers into a giant steel vat built right into the side of the building.
A conveyor belt moves the peppers from deep down in the vat up and through the walls of the factory, where their first stop is to get sorted and washed.
The spruced up chilis are dropped down into the grinder where they are chopped up and combined with the other basic hot sauce ingredients, like vinegar and salt, plus a few other secrets.
The vinegar is piped in, while the dry ingredients are poured into smaller containers on the floor, which shoots the mixture up and into the grinder.
From here, the ground chili concoction gets pumped over to one of several mixers that line the walls of the factory, where it gets a nice, thorough churning.
It's in the mixer for about maybe an 1ý hours to 2 hours.
This chili slurry is then sent to filler machines, where it's pumped into giant, Each drum is capped and rolled down a conveyor belt into the warehouse, which bursts at the seams with over 200,000 drums.
That may sound like a lot of chili mix, and it is.
But here's the thing they have to stockpile as much of this base ingredient as possible because the pepper supply is limited.
The harvest is only And then we use that inventory that we've lined for the rest of the year for filling.
So when store shelves get low on sauce, they bring the drums out of storage and get busy turning the ground chilis into tongue-tingling Sriracha.
That's achieved by adding all the other ingredients into the mixing hopper.
The ones you can really taste are the garlic and the sugar, which gives the sauce its sweet tang.
Those final ingredients are mixed with the pepper slurry, and then it's off to another machine that purees the batch.
Then, through these overhead pipes, the final mix is sent to the bottling area.
Which reminds me oh, yeah, they make their own bottles too.
They take hundreds of little test-tube-shaped plastic preforms and turn them into the familiar full-size Sriracha bottle.
They're put into the blow molder and it's heated.
That heat makes the bottle soft and flexible so they expand like a balloon when hit with a blast of air.
The bottles fresh from the blower are ratcheted into place to get that signature label the trademark Huy Fong rooster logo.
The label is applied to each bottle with a special silk-screening process, which is pretty cool.
And now the bottles are ready to be filled with hot Sriracha.
Through a hanging carousel, the bottles swing in empty and roll out full of that spicy goodness.
Now that's some quick-draw bottle.
And at that same lightning speed, each filled bottle is capped, sealed, sent on down the line to be packed into boxes, shipped out to eagerly awaiting customers.
Even going at full speed, it's hard to keep up with how popular Huy Fong Sriracha has become these days.
And it's not just foodies who love it.
Sriracha is still a hit with the man who created it.
Forget about it.
Ay.
There's one Mexican dish that doesn't get enough respect, in my opinion.
That's right.
Deep fried burrito known as the chimichanga.