Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s03e04 Episode Script

Layers of Flavors

On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we will show you treats with inner and outer beauty.
From a chocolate bar with a sugary coconutty surprise to puffed up pasta hiding a fresh cheesy filling to a caramel-coated treat covering a tart and tangy taffy, these goodies are bursting with layers of flavors.
Chocolate has always been my go-to treat.
And when I was a kid I always just liked it straight up.
No nuts, no nothing, but now, well, now I like my chocolate to be a little more sophisticated.
And no one layers on the flavors like the folks at Bissinger's.
We have been making caramel for 350 years, but this one is a little different because it's going to be deposited as the center of a chocolate bar.
And what a beautiful marriage it is.
That classic caramel recipe got an extra boost of scrumptious sweetness when it met our next ingredient.
You guessed it, chocolate.
We started out with a 38% cocoa mass milk chocolate, our proprietary chocolate.
If they sold candy bars this size at a grocery store, the world would be a better place.
These colossal chocolate chunks are heated in a melter and quickly become a velvety pool of cocoa.
Once it reaches the perfect consistency, the chocolate is pumped into smaller portable buckets while it waits for the caramel to cook.
Speaking of caramel.
It starts with cream and milk and cane sugar and rice syrup, and then it has all those other ingredients that it might need to make it special.
Special doesn't begin to describe it.
They keep their process old school by using a copper kettle and slowly adding the ingredients.
Once we have reached a certain state of caramelization, we can start adding cream and milk and some of the other components in order to create a level of complexity.
An agitator keeps the liquid caramel moving and prevents burning.
You say "ca-rah-mel," I say "carmel.
" Either way, it's delicious.
Once the caramel is cooked, it's time for the workers to do a little heavy lifting.
They tilt the kettle and pour the candy into a large bucket.
Then it's on the move to a cold room, where the caramel is chilled from 225 degrees down to 90 degrees.
Here's a little secret.
That is the same temperature as its chocolate counterpart.
They have to be the same temperature, so you don't ruin the conditioning of chocolate.
Okay, so we got chocolate and we got caramel, but how do we get one of them inside the other.
The answer, this thing.
My favorite piece of equipment we have in the building is called a one shot depositor.
This allows us to put a soft caramel inside a chocolate.
First they fill it two hoppers One with chocolate and other with caramel.
Both feed into two nozzles, but it's a bit sneaky because you can't see the smaller caramel nozzle.
It's actually nestled inside the larger chocolate bar.
In the blink of an eye pistons release chocolate, then a touch of caramel and then finish it off with some more chocolate.
It is an amazing piece of equipment to watch because you really don't see all that magic happening, but when you have the finished product, it's something that is really cool.
Every minute, 32 bars are deposited into these molds.
Filled to the brim with chocolate and caramel, the bars exit the depositor onto a conveyor belt so they can get a quick massage.
The belt lightly vibrates the chocolate molds to level the chocolate and shake out any bubbles.
Silky smooth.
It is time for these bars to head into my favorite part of the process, coconut station.
Coconut flakes are hand sprinkled onto each and every bar to give them that extra little sweetness and nuttiness.
We can have machines doing it, but it doesn't have the nice artisan feel and texture that we get by hand-applying the coconut.
Plus, if you're lucky, you'll find the bar with that extra sprinkle of coconut shreds.
Next, the chocolate bars take a chilly trip for 45 minutes down a 60-foot cooling tunnel.
The cooling tunnel has doors all along each side so we can see the progress.
The frosty molds filled with chocolate bars are then flipped by hand upside down to pop out of the molds.
One by one they are placed onto a conveyor heading towards the foil wrap machines.
Shiny foil encases the caramel coconut chocolate in a long continuous strand before a rotating blade cuts and seals the bars.
Every day, Bissinger's produces caramel chocolate bars.
When someone eats this bar, they really enjoy the combination of our chocolate with that sweet salty coconut-influenced caramel.
I think that's pretty cool.
Coming up, learn how this pasta gets its fill.
And later, discover how a fall favorite inspired a one-of-a-kind lollipop.
I'm a serious pasta junky fat, skinny, twisted, or curls.
So, pasta stuffed with meat and cheese yes, please! And at Parla's Pasta they had been stuffing their tortellini full of the good stuff for more than 30 years.
We came up with the word "parla," which in Italian means "to speak," and that is our passion to speak pasta.
Today's passion project Parla's Asiago Tortellini.
All great pasta starts with the perfect dough.
Inside a giant mixer, they blend a 50-pound bag of flour with several dozen eggs and a splash of water for 20 minutes.
Soon, the mishmash of ingredients turns into a 140-pound batch of pasta dough.
After the pasta is mixed, we dump it out and we take it to the station where the tortellini is produced.
Workers move the dough into a machine called the sheeter, and it does what you think it would do creates sheets of dough.
The dough begins as a 1/4-inch thick sheet, but as the sheet moves along, it's flattened by a series of rollers until it reaches almost 1/20th of an inch thickness.
The rollers also knead the dough and activate the gluten to give the pasta its stretch and something else.
It helps give the pasta that extra bite.
The dough then rolls toward the forming mechanism where the cheese filling is about to join the party.
In this case Asiago, Parmesan, Romano, Ricotta are blended together to make the filling.
And I may not speak Italian, but I do speak cheese fluently.
Creamy, tangy, salty cheese.
After the cheeses are added, they are mixed with breadcrumbs, salt and a sprinkle of nutmeg.
As it's blending, it's taken the different cheeses which all look a little different in the beginning, but when you take those and you blend together for that 5 to 10 minutes you see a very uniform color and consistent product.
Once mixed, the 120-pound batch is poured into the forming station.
Now this is the fun part.
As the dough makes its way into the former, it is cut into individual pieces by a specially shaped die.
Eight pistons quickly move back-and-forth, and though you can't see it, the pistons are putting savory pockets of cheese into each round of dough.
Once the cheese is inside, these rocker arms pinch and fold the pasta around the cheese to make the classic tortellini shape.
Let's see it in slow motion.
We are making over and that comes out to 500,000 in a day.
By the end of the week, there is enough tortellini to feed all of Chicago.
Cut, stuffed, and sealed, the cheesy tortellini are on the move the dryer.
Fans will be gently blowing air over them which dry the surface to help keep the product from sticking together.
The tortellini then roll down the conveyor into a tote that is dumped into the cooker.
We do an additional step in our production which is par cooking.
It is not as fancy as it sounds.
Par cooking is just short for partial cooking.
It seals in the freshness and protects the pasta for shelf life.
The tortellini is shuffled into a closed cooker filled with boiling water for three minutes before making their way through a series of cool water jets.
The cold shower drops the temperature of the tortellini down to 80 degrees, then it's back to fans.
We are drying the product as well as we're cooling it and that prepares the product to go into our freeze tunnel.
To retain the fresh from the pasta maker taste, the tortellini passes through a unique freezing system.
We use an air system that is somewhat proprietary, but it freezes it very quickly.
A river of cheese-filled pasta pockets glide through the -25 degree frosty freezer for 10 minutes.
It is making my teeth chatter just looking at it.
Finally they are off to packaging where the tortellini gets vacuum sealed into 20-ounce containers before heading across the country to freezer sections everywhere.
My favorite part is eating the tortellini.
Pesto, marinara, or just a little butter.
I don't care what kind of sauce they are in.
They never get comfortable in my freezer because I eat them as soon as I buy them.
Coming up, learn which tart fruit flavor is hidden under a mountain of caramel.
Later, find out why the cherry on top of this roll is actually hidden on the inside.
Do you remember your first county fair? I remember mine, and what sticks out the most for me is the iconic caramel apple.
Thanks to Tootsie's Caramel Apple Pops, I can carry one wherever I go.
Just like no two apples are exactly the same, each Tootsie's Caramel Apple Pop is truly one of a kind.
It is going to be misshapen a little bit and we did that on purpose to try to show that hand touch.
The first step in making the perfect not-so-prefect treat, the perfect apple candy.
The main ingredients of that candy are sweets mix.
Now this is an ingredient I can give a hop a blend of liquid sugar and corn syrup.
The sweets mix is pumped into a cooker and heated to a boiling 232 degrees.
As that candy exits the cooker, it flows into a mixing pot.
Inside that mixing pot is where we add the acid, the color, and the flavor to give it that real apple taste.
It is already starting to look like a Granny Smith apple.
All those ingredients are churned together until they're thoroughly mixed.
Now the perfect consistency, the green gooey liquid slowly drips out of the mixer onto a stainless steel belt in two continuous lines creating a molten river of apple candy.
That sweet apple river is over 40 feet long.
That is a lot of candy.
It has to be cooled to be able to form it into a lollipop.
So we use a long stainless steel cooling conveyor to texture that candy.
The liquid line runs through a series of formers that change its shape to cool the candy.
As the apple candy continues to cool, it's time to start thinking about the caramel.
You thought I forgot about it, didn't you? That sweet sticky glorious golden topping.
I'd never forget.
The fresh caramel topping starts by mixing three basic ingredients corn syrup, milk, and liquid sugar.
This batch isn't for topping your ice cream.
By the time the ingredients are added, this kettle tips the scales at over 800 pounds.
These propeller looking blades churn the concoction to make sure all the lumps and bumps are whipped out of the candy.
Now you see it, now you don't.
The silky smooth caramel may have vanished out of this mixing kettle, but it hasn't traveled very far.
It's just moved down to the surge kettle, which boils the batch at 260 degrees.
Scorching hot, the caramel is ready for the caramelizing kettle.
We are able to control how the milk proteins and the sugar proteins are broken down, and that's what gives it the deep, rich almost smoky caramel flavor.
With the cooking complete, it is cooled down on this gigantic stainless steel wheel.
This stream of sticky caramel is pumped onto a tray and flows onto a six-foot wide wheel.
By the time it spins around, the caramel is the perfect temperature and consistency.
Sweet, nectar waterfall.
As the layers of caramel drape over one another, workers stand by to fold and cut the candy into a slab before sliding it into a roller that presses it into uniform sheets.
Now is the moment we've all been waiting for Caramel, meet apple.
As the sugary strands of apple candy descend into the batch roller, the caramel is hand-delivered by workers.
Our people cradle the sheet to take it to the batch roller.
I like to think of caramel as a warm blanket for apple candy.
The batch roller squeezes the tart apple candy as it is surrounded by the sticky caramel coating.
The machine massages the melted caramel apple candy over 4 feet until it reaches a series of metal rollers that squeeze it down even further, if you can believe that.
By the time they are through, the long snake-like rope measures only 2 inches in diameter.
Ever wonder how lollipops get their shape, well it's thanks to this guy, the forming machine.
In the blink of an eye it molds the candy from a long rope into the classic lollipop shape, inserts a stick, and even inserts the pops into their wrappers.
Uh-oh.
I blinked.
Let's see that again in slow motion.
There is still additional cooling we have to do before we send it to our packaging department.
That cooling happens on a futuristic-looking gigantic spiral conveyor belt.
Round and round they go.
Where they stop, nobody knows.
Actually, I do know.
the hardened pops reach the top and fall onto a conveyor that takes them to the packaging area.
Every day Charms produces one million caramel apple lollipops.
Those pops are boxed up and shipped out to customers around the globe.
Our product is even better than a real caramel apple.
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
Mmm! When we come back, a waterfall of icing lays it on thick on an oh-so tasty treat.
Behold! A sweet and chewy roll with hypnotic concentric circles and a little something extra on the inside.
The cherry sweet roll from Tastykake.
The cherry sweet roll is the first product in the line of our seasonal sweet roll flavors.
It's like a bite of springtime if spring was made of warm dough, tart cherry filling, and sugary sweet icing.
My favorite part about the sweet roll is its chewy goodness.
So it is the sweet cherry.
It is the right balance of not too dry and not too moist, and that icing is just fantastic.
But before all that gooey icing can be slathered on top, we have to start with the dough, a lot of dough.
In fact, they pump in 8,000 pounds of bread flour every day into a silo at Tastykake's Crossville, Tennessee, factory.
When the recipe is made, that flour then is pumped into a sifter room.
So it goes through a sifter just like you would make it at home with a hand sifter.
The sifter breaks up any lumps in the flour before it is metered into this massive hopper where the dough is blended.
There it meets some other super secret ingredients for an exciting seven minutes of mixing.
It mixes about and it is moved over to the production line, so it can be hoisted up into a hopper above line.
The dough falls from the hopper onto a pre-floured conveyor belt where it will be sheeted.
A roller scores the dough to keep it from sticking to the conveyor belt and to allow any air underneath the dough to escape.
While the dough is being sheeted, a big barrel of mashed cherries and plenty more sugar arrives.
It is made off-site, and once the dough is ready, the cherry filling is ready to load.
The cherry filling is pumped onto the line into nice even droplets.
And those droplets are rolled out flat, so we got a nice even consistency across the top of the dough.
That ooey, gooey, chewy center with that sweet cherry filling in it is the best.
The moist and succulent cherry-covered dough then passes through a series of slicers that cuts it into four even strips and removes any excess from the sides.
Now, this part is cool.
Two specially shaped rollers peel the dough off the conveyor and twist it into a very long version of a sweet roll.
That's too long for even my breakfast sweet tooth.
Which means it's time for the guillotine chopper.
The long tubes of cherry roll slide into the chopper and come out neatly sliced into 2-1/2 inch pieces.
The guillotine is just a horizontal knife.
It's just like the term would imply.
It cuts it horizontally into sections.
At the same time that the guillotine cuts the dough, paper liners travel down a conveyor belt below the dough line to catch the freshly cut sweet rolls as they exit the cutter.
Pretty sweet.
Each tray holds six sweet rolls, and six trays travel together along the conveyor belt into the proofer.
The proofer which is set at 100 degrees activates the yeast and these sweet rolls start to rise.
Once they go through the proofer, the sweet rolls grow to fill the entire paper liner.
So you have nice double-the-size growth of the sweet roll.
Now it's time to make my nose happy The fresh baked smell of cherry rolls.
These beauties will bake for 12 minutes in a 350-degree oven.
They enter about seven trays at a time.
And so at any one time, there is about 5,000 sweet rolls in the oven.
When the sweet rolls exit the oven, the paper liner is separated from the pans by a suction machine that lifts the rolls out and deposits them and the liner back on the belt.
At this point the temperature of the rolls is about 200 degrees, which is too hot for the icing.
So they take a 15-minute trip on a spiral cooling belt before traveling through the icing station.
The icing is made in a high-speed mixer.
It's really just sugar, water, and flavorings.
That's mixed for about six or seven minutes.
The high-speed mixer heats the icing to a nice warm 125 degrees so it will flow perfectly onto the roll.
It goes through a waterfall applicator, which makes that delicious coating that you have when you bite into that sweet roll.
Now all that sugary sweetness is mingled with the cherry filling and the soft dough, the rolls take another on a spiral conveyor in order to set the icing before they head to packaging.
Each package of six rolls receives a plastic overwrap before being placed into a classic Tastykake box.
We do about 4,000 individual sweet roll boxes in an hour, which really means that we are packing about six packets of sweet rolls every second.
That's a lot of cherry sweet rolls.
And every one of those rolls gets shipped out to consumers where they can eat them with jam, heat them in a microwave, or even top them with ice-cream.
I'm a purist.
I eat my sweet roll right out of the box.
I make joke Only, not really! you no listen.
Okay.
Bit, bit sweet.
Nec, nec, nec nectar.
Waterfall!
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