Unwrapped 2.0 (2015) s03e08 Episode Script

Freaky Flavors

On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0," we fill up on treats with freaky flavors.
From a creepy crawler that'll make you mouth pucker to a chocolate confection straight out of the smokehouse, to colorful beans that'll keep you guessing, to a bacon-flavored dish without the bacon, these goodies are all packed with surprises.
You ever get dared to eat a worm? I did.
But I always chickened out.
That is, until I got a mouthful of these freaky treats.
Mmm.
They might make you squirm, but it's the punch in your pucker that'll keep you coming back.
I'm talking about Trolli Sour Brite Crawlers.
Back in the 1980s, the German candy company Trolli thought they might get some attention for their traditional gummy candies if they could just make them a little freaky.
Trolli said, "We want to have a product that might have a little bit of what parents would say, a 'ick' factor.
" And they thought, "What a better thing than kids eating worms?" But it wasn't just a look.
They gave their candy worms a crazy sour flavor.
these tasty creepy critters are still so popular that they have to bring ingredients in daily by the truckload.
We bring our corn syrup in via tanker trucks, We bring in our sugar on 200,000-pound rail cars.
And that's just a one-day supply.
The sugar and corn syrup are stored in a silo, which hold up to 650,000 pounds.
The first step in the process is blending the ingredients together.
See these? These are pretty sweet.
Large, stainless steel cones weigh the sugar, water, and corn syrup before being gravity-fed into the cooker.
But to make this liquid into a gummy snack, this slurry needs one more ingredient.
Gelatin is going to thicken the candy, and then when you bite into it, kind of give it that gummy chew.
Now that we've blended all the essentials into one big 1,500-pound batch, it's time to start cooking.
We use a steam cooker, and as it travels, we're blasting the outside with steam.
Within a few minutes, the candy is fully cooked.
The slurry of fully cooked candy then enters a vacuum chamber, where the temperature is brought down to 200 degrees.
But what good is a candy without any color? That's where the color-flavor additive deck comes.
Each pod is filled with a slurry, and then flavoring and color are added.
Bright colors are what are important.
And so, we have six electrifying colors.
We've got cherry-lemon, strawberry-grape, and orange-lime.
These flavors and colors are about to turn into some colorful crawlers.
We just open the valve.
The candy drops down.
We close the valve, and we repeat the process.
Here, the colored and flavored candy is distributed into individual hoppers of the depositor.
But before this batch takes its wormy shape, we need the molds.
That happens at a machine called the mogul.
We take a tray and we fill it with cornstarch.
We level it off and we press the impression of the worm into the starch.
When the print board is removed, the impression stays in the starch, ready and waiting for the liquid candy.
The molding tray is passed underneath a set of nozzles that deposit two colors into each worm mold.
Each tray has 660 worm impressions, with three different flavor combinations.
Look at all these worms! I'll never have to dig through dirt again to find any.
Now the trays full of multi-colored worms are stacked onto hand trucks and rolled into the cure room.
Here, they'll sit for 24 hours at precisely 80 degrees so the candy transforms from goo to gummy.
After the candy is fully cured, we're going to take the trucks out of the dry room and then separate the candy from the starch.
Get this the mogul doesn't just fill the gummy-filled worm trays.
It unearths the worms, too.
The trays are flipped end over end, releasing the creepy crawlers by the thousands every minute.
All those chewy worms wiggle down a conveyer before falling onto a machine equipped with fans that help dust off the cornstarch.
I never thought I'd say this, but that's one tasty-looking worm.
These crawlies may look good enough to eat, but they still need to get covered with their iconic sour flavor.
The candies head toward the steamer machine, which will blast the bites with a bit of moisture.
It's a pretty important step, because this little bit of water will ensure that the sour coating sticks.
And that sour stickiness comes in here, inside these large sanding drums.
The drums whirl the worms around in a sugar and citric acid blend to cover the candy and give the worms that tongue-tingling sour taste.
Thousands and thousands of wiggly worms exit the sour drums and slither along a conveyer belt that leads to the packaging area.
This scale uses vibrating fingers to separate the pieces onto small-weight hoppers.
As soon as the hopper hits the right weight for a package, the bottom opens up and it's down the chute.
The candy drops out of the scale down to the next floor below, where it goes through a forming tube that the film is wrapped around.
Almost instantly, the bags are filled with sugary worms and sealed.
It all happens so fast, you just might miss it.
This bagger is filling and sealing 130 bags every 60 seconds.
That's over 24 million every day.
If you put those end to end, that would be over Now, that is freaky.
Coming up, find out why it smells like a backyard barbecue when you open this chocolaty treat.
And later, learn why these jelly beans can either be a delicious treat or a shocking trick.
Hey I love chocolate and I love barbecue.
And I never thought the two could come together.
But you know what's freaky? It works.
Take Olive & Sinclair's Smoked Nib Brittle.
It may look like peanut brittle, but take a bite and you are in for one smoky surprise.
This is just a sweet, savory, salty, peppery it really runs the gambit of your palate.
It takes you on a ride.
They started with chocolate bars in 2010.
But when a friend said he'd like to smoke some chocolate nibs, a whole new product was born.
You could smell the smokiness emanating from the box.
The idea hit me to do a brittle out of smoked nib.
And that's where this smoky brittle starts with the nib.
But if you're wondering what the nib is, you're not alone.
The nib is just a fragment of a cacao bean, and the beans come from the inside of a cacao pod.
When fresh, they're about the size of a pineapple.
Vibrant colors, and they contain about 60 to 75 beans per pod.
The beans for the smoked nib brittle come from Ghana in burlap bags.
After they're hand sorted, they are put into a roaster, kind of like a coffee roaster.
In its raw state, it's called cacao.
And then after it's roasted and processed, it's called cocoa.
The exact roasting temperature is a company secret, but once the beans are roasted to perfection, they're poured into buckets and sucked up into this machine, the winnower.
This winnower cracks the bean for us, removes the lighter particle, just yielding a beautiful nib.
Then those beautiful nibs are split up into two groups.
Half the nibs get sent off to be smoked, but we'll come back to that.
The other half? Well, they're destined to become chocolate.
There are lots of different ways to make chocolate, some of them really high tech.
But in Olive & Sinclair, they prefer to keep things old school.
We wanted to stone-grind chocolate.
So they turn to an antique French mélange, which is a fancy name for cocoa grinder.
Inside the mélange are two 1,200-pound stones that grind the beans to a fine paste.
They start with about and continue to add more throughout the grinding process.
Every hour on the hour, we'll add about 10 more pounds.
It will spin overnight in this mélange for another 12 to 14 hours, and then the following morning, we will add the brown sugar.
Brown sugar and chocolate? Can I just eat it right out of this machine? We've got our chocolate, but we still need to make that surprisingly smoky taste these bars are known for.
Remember when we split the nibs in half earlier? Well, this half has gone to Benton's Bacon, where it'll be smoked in these mesh sacks right beside the bacon.
Once the nibs are hanging in the smoker, they fire up the wood stove to create a wall of smoke inside, infusing the nibs with genuine smoke flavor.
Ahh, that smell gets me every time.
These smoked nibs are ready, but this is just one part of the brittle.
Next, they have to make the candy part.
We first start off with 3 pounds of butter, some glucose, a little bit of water, and some cane sugar.
Typically, you'd add peanuts at this point, but this isn't peanut brittle.
It's smoked nib brittle.
So, bring on those smoked nibs.
We incorporate some fresh cracked pepper and some salt, and it just wonderfully perfumes that brittle.
It all blends together in the mixer for about 55 minutes to reach the perfect consistency.
Then it's spread out on the trays and cooled.
You may think it couldn't get better than this, but you would be wrong.
Deliciously wrong.
Remember that pure-cane brown sugar and stone-ground chocolate we were making earlier? I definitely do.
Well, the last step is to spread that on top of the brittle.
Mm, mm, mm.
A little rest in the fridge to set, and it's ready to be packaged.
Inside the packaging room, workers break apart sections of the nib brittle by hand and place the chunks into individual bags before sealing the tops and stuffing them into boxes for chocolate and barbecue lovers alike.
Chocolate is, without question, a labor of love.
By the end of the day, even on a bad day, you're still making chocolate.
So, a bad day's a pretty dang good day.
Coming up, find out why these colorful jelly beans can be a little misleading.
Hey Stinky socks, rotten eggs, grass clippings sound freaky? That's the idea.
They're actually some of the flavors in this daring game.
Rest assured, not all the flavors are freaky.
There's coconut, buttered popcorn, and lime, to name just a few.
Say hello to Jelly Belly's Bean Boozled.
Bean Boozled is a game of 10 pairs of look-alike jelly beans, and among each pair, you can either have a good flavor or an intentionally bad flavor.
And the only way to tell the difference is to eat them.
That's because all the beans for Bean Boozled, whether sweet or freaky, are made exactly the same way.
We start making jelly beans by creating a candy slurry.
Gigantic silos outside the factory house the four main slurry ingredients water, sugar, corn syrup, and starch.
When it's time to start a batch, all four are pumped inside into a massive kettle.
And this is where the magic happens flavor magic, that is.
Flavorings are all artificial.
It's not like we take a bucket, put rotten eggs to a side, let 'em ferment, and then throw 'em into a mixture.
That's a relief.
The bean flavor and color gets poured into the slurry and mixed 45 minutes, during which the flavor and smell continues to build.
Once mixing is complete, the warm, flavored slurry is gravity-fed through pipes in the floor to this bad boy, the mogul machine.
Just like the sour worms, the mogul feeds cornstarch molds of the Jelly Belly bean shape and feeds the trays underneath a series of nozzles that deposits the slurry mix.
We use cornstarch to mold, 'cause it allows the liquid candy to maintain the shape.
When each tray is full, they're stacked 45-high in racks before traveling to a heated drying room.
In case you were wondering, when this dry room is full, it holds All the flavors of Bean Boozled sit for 24 hours to harden and set.
After their overnight snooze, the hardened beans return to the mogul where it's time to come out of the cornstarch molds.
One by one, the trays are flipped upside-down and the beans cascade into a tumbler.
Inside, thousands of beans twirl up, down, and all around to gently massage away any excess starch.
Once they're nice and smooth, they tumble out of the tumbler and straight into the steamer.
They need the steam for the sugar to stick.
And then once they go into the sugar shower, that keeps them separate so they don't stick together.
A massage, steam, and a shower? It's their version of a little spa day.
But let me tell you, this shower is a whole lot sweeter than anything I've ever seen.
A sugar shower is just a wall of sugar, and the beans shoot across it, and then they tumble and then they just get coated with sugar really nice.
We're just getting started with these sweet, bite-size beans.
The sugar-coated candies are actually just the inside of the beans you find in the box.
They still need their hard outer shells.
So it's off to the panning process.
The jelly bean centers are loaded into giant pans, and they're tumbled around.
And candy makers will alternate between a wet ingredient, which is a syrup, and a dry ingredient, which is sugar.
Each 200-pound batch tumbles for 2 hours until the centers are covered with a hard outer shell.
Just as the jelly bean centers are flavored, the syrup on the outside of the shell is flavored, too.
So when you bite into that bean, you're getting flavor on the inside and the outside.
And thanks to their expert candy makers, each flavor has a look all its own.
It's definitely an art.
All the beans match the name.
The beans get another overnight rest to firm up before going into a set of polishing pans for two hours.
Here, the beans are tumbled to smooth out any imperfection while beeswax and glaze are added for shine.
Once they're done polishing, they're actually finished.
They look beautiful.
They may look beautiful, but they still need their official stamp of approval the iconic Jelly Belly logo.
To get it, the beans move under a roller coated with white food coloring that stamps the logo on each bean.
Now that the jelly beans are complete, it's time to mix them all together, creating the confusion that makes the Bean Boozled game so exciting.
The jelly beans are mixed together on a 90-foot conveyor belt that heads into a gigantic tumbler.
As we're adding a tutti-fruiti, we're adding a stinky socks.
So once it gets into that mix, you never know what you're getting.
It's a kaleidoscope of crazy candy.
The mixed-up Bean Boozled beans come in a variety of packaging, including a board game and purple cylindrical containers that release one bean at a time.
As you twist the bottom and push it up, one individual bean pops up.
So you actually never know.
You could get Bean Boozled four or five times in a row.
So, why would anyone put themselves through this? Simple.
Bean Boozled is about risk.
It's a game, and ultimately, it's a social experience.
It's fun, especially when other people are getting Bean Boozled.
Coming up, discover why this vegan staple has a bacon shape.
Hey Bacon it just makes everything better.
But sometimes I wish I could get that baconey flavor without all the meat.
Well, surprise.
Now you can.
Uptons Naturals Bacon Seitan it may not come straight from the pig, but it sure looks and tastes like it does.
But what exactly is seitan? Seitan is made By rinsing away all the starch and wheat flour, so what you have left is very high in protein and it's somewhat meat-like in texture.
And Uptons Naturals sells more bacon seitan than anything else.
It starts with the main ingredient in all seitans wheat gluten.
For every batch, they cut open a 50-pound sack and dump it into the mixing bowl.
Then they add a blend of spices that you'd find in just about every kitchen.
A dried blend of onion, paprika, and sugar go into the bowl, and it's all mixed together for three to five minutes.
But I'm guessing you're asking yourself, "How do they make smoky bacon-flavored seitan without the bacon?" Well, I've got the answer natural hickory smoke concentrate.
When they mix the concentrated soy sauce, it gives the seitan batter that irresistible, smoky, salty, baconey taste.
And that is a taste I definitely love, with or without the pig.
They top off the mix with a few gallons of water and let everything churn together for 20 minutes.
You can tell that it's done, because the wet and dry ingredients have been integrated together and also you now have a thick, heavy dough.
The dough-filled vat is then rolled into the next room, where it's time for the workers to get hands-on.
As the batch is portioned out into smaller 5-pound dough balls, a team of employees knead them by hand.
The dough is kneaded to take out any air pockets, so that in the final product, you don't have a lot of holes or rips.
After its massage, the dough is ready to be baked.
But this cooking step is so secret that it has to stay behind closed oven doors.
We can't talk about all the details about how it's made, but we have developed a process that we think makes a really unique and delicious product.
Well, whatever goes on in those cook rooms, minutes later, the perfectly brown loafs of seitan appear at the other end.
Then it's off to my favorite machine in the factory the puma.
A worker stacks loads of seitan inside the puma, and then its blades get to work.
The whirling knife carves up the seitan into strips that, well, look a lot like bacon.
The slicer is very fast.
It can crank out about Maybe I'll start ordering my burgers with a couple strips of seitan.
The thinly sliced seitan strips are then stacked in trays and moved to packaging.
Workers weigh the seitan by hand and then place it into their 5-ounce package.
A conveyor belt moves the clear pouches down to a vacuum sealer before heading out to a store near you.
It's very easy to prepare.
It's precooked and pretty much ready to eat.
All you need to do is panfry it with a little bit of oil for a few minutes, and it's ready to go.
Delicious.
On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.
0" Oops! Something was incredibly wrong in the background.
I'm kind of freaky.
That is freaky.
Don't know why.
That was the right level of freak.
We want to shred.

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