On this episode of "Unwrapped 2.0,"
it's time for a cookout.
From mouth-watering barbecue at the ready,
to an iconic condiment,
to a melt-in-your-mouth chocolate treat,
you'll find everything you need for a backyard cookout.
Here's what summer tastes like to me...
smoky, slow-cooked and fallin' off the bone.
You know what I'm talkin' about. You know.
Come on, you can almost taste it right now,
that's right, barbecue.
But all the hard work's done for you here.
Just heat and eat.
At Tennessee's Farm Rich Barbecue,
they make some of the best barbecue in the south.
In 2014, Farm Rich launched their Smokehouse brand,
which included several varieties of prepackaged frozen barbecue
that comes picnic ready.
We've done the hard work.
And all they have to do is heat and serve it up at home.
The mad scientist behind this barbecue
goodness is actually a doctor.
I have a PhD in food science
from the University of Georgia.
I work for a barbecue company.
So I put two and two together and came up with Dr. BBQ.
Everyone knows one of the secrets
to great barbecue starts with the sauce.
And it's no different here at Farm Rich.
The barbecue sauce we make every year is enough
to fill up seven Olympic-size swimming pools.
You heard that right,
seven Olympic-size swimming pools.
I'd take a dip in that pool any time.
On the menu for today,
their traditional ketchup-based Smokehouse sauce.
The Smokehouse sauce is made up of brown sugar, ketchup,
mustard, molasses and vinegar.
We use about 4 million pounds of ketchup
every year to make our barbecue sauces.
Brown sugar, molasses and ketchup?
I already put ketchup on everything.
Can it get any better?
While all those delicious ingredients
are being blended together in these vats,
the meat is arriving next door.
In a week, we're probably talkin' 40,000 pounds a day.
At Farm Rich, they use two very specific cuts of pork
for their Smokehouse barbecue.
We use fresh picnics and also fresh Boston butt.
Did he just say Boston butt?
It's not what you think.
The butt is actually a shoulder cut of meat
and refers to the type of barrel
it was stored in back before refrigeration.
Once the meat is racked and ready, buckets of salt
and pepper rub are hand tossed onto each cut of meat.
This imparts a natural flavor into the product.
Then, into the oven it goes.
We use state-of-the-art smokehouses.
These generate air and smoke that are blended together
and used to cook the meat.
This is where each piece of pork's
gonna get cooked evenly.
It's gonna get smoked evenly.
And that smoke gets piped in
from this wood-fire stove.
Being from Tennessee, Farm Rich uses real hickory logs.
Using hickory wood is a Tennessee tradition
for making great-tasting barbecue.
The key to great-tasting barbecue
is cooking it low and slow,
which requires a lot of patience.
Farm House cooks their meat
between 200 and 250 degrees for 10 hours.
No wonder my backyard barbecue
isn't as juicy or mouth-watering as theirs.
The meat is left smoking in the oven overnight.
And the next morning, out it comes.
Barbecue's different than cooking meat.
Most meat that you cook, you just cook it
to a degree of done-ness.
When you're making barbecue,
you're cookin' it to a tenderness.
We have trained cooks in our cook department that know
when that magic power is.
You actually take your thumb.
And you insert it into the muscle
to make sure it's tender.
That's how we know that the barbecue
is ready to be pulled.
When it's deemed properly tender,
it's wheeled over to a scale
where it's weighed to make sure it meets USDA standards
for barbecue manufacturers.
If they make true, authentic barbecue,
they have to lose 30 percent of the original weight
in order to be able to call it barbecue.
It's finally time to pull this true blue barbecue.
We hand-pull every bit of the barbecue.
It's not mechanically pulled.
It's hand pulled, the old traditional way.
I'd just like to spend a day
at the end of the line with a fork in hand.
Now, it's ready for the sauce.
And the mixing is handled just as delicately as the pulling.
We take a lot of time and effort to make tender,
good-tasting barbecue.
After it's fully mixed together,
it's off to packaging where it's portioned into trays,
covered in cellophane and prepped for shipping.
Annually, this plant's gonna produce
between 61/2, 7 million packages
of great-tastin' barbecue.
The Farm Rich brand packaging is pretty bulletproof.
You can microwave it.
You can, uh, cook it in the oven.
And it's pretty easy.
All you have to do is heat it up.
Oh, yeah. Easiest barbecue ever.
Coming up, discover how this ancient fruit
has become a backyard cookout staple.
And later learn how this tangy spread
gets its vibrant color.
Crispy, crunchy, salty, little green slices
that make your backyard cookout crackle.
You know what I'm talkin' about, pickles.
And Mt. Olive has been perfecting pickles
for almost a century.
The people at the North Carolina-based company
have been in the pickle biz since 1926.
And today, they sell over 80 kinds,
including my personal favorite, bread and butter.
But one thing I've always wondered,
why do they call it bread and butter?
In Sweden, a smorgasbord
is a table of pickled items
and breads and butter.
Whether in Sweden or in the States,
these crispy pickle chips
get their sweet start like any pickle does,
with the cucumber.
Two thousand pounds of cucumbers make their way to
the Mt. Olive factory daily.
And after that long journey from the farm,
the first thing they're gonna need is a refreshing bath.
After soaking for a few minutes, they still need to scrub down.
So it's off to the wet hopper machine.
Here, a set of brushes wash the cucumber
so they're nice and clean.
After their bath, they travel down
a long conveyer belt
that evenly distributes the cucumbers
as they head towards the slicer.
Aw, poor little guys never stood a chance.
But in the face of impending doom,
they were as cool as cucumbers.
One cucumber at a time goes through the slicer.
But they're going at a very high speed
of several hundred a minute.
The corrugated blade slices through the cucumbers
in a rotating motion,
creating the classic pickle chip ridges.
Freshly sliced, the pickles travel
through a vibrating belt
that ensures the stems are removed before they climb
a series of conveyors toward the blancher.
The blancher introduces steam,
water and salt to soften
and make the chip more flexible to go into the jar.
The saltwater in the blancher is 110 degrees.
And the chips spend about 31/2 minutes in the steam
until they're just the right texture.
There are two ways to make pickles,
fresh packed and barrel brined,
aka fermented pickles.
Barrel brined pickles are fermented
in a salt brine
and result in, yes, a saltier pickle.
The bread and butter pickle chips are fresh packed.
Which means they marinate in jars
with a vinegar-based brine.
With the addition of sugar and seasoning,
the result is a sweeter pickle.
The seasoning is a mix of mustard seed,
celery seed and onion flakes.
And 3 grams of that mix is sifted
into the bottom of each jar.
They're put in first so that
when the liquid part of the brine is added,
all of the flavors will rise to the top.
With the spices in place,
it's time for the pickles to tumble into the jars.
You can just see the quality of the cucumber,
the color, the clarity of each chip.
The pickle chips fall into the jars.
And they're packed in tight with a little help from the workers.
They manage to pound in about five cucumbers
or an average of 96 chips in every jar.
They actually use rubber mallets
to push the cucumbers
down into the jar
and add cucumbers if needed.
And finally, the liquid brine.
Every 400-gallon batch of the stuff consists
of liquid sugar, water, vinegar, turmeric
and a few secret ingredients.
It's all mixed together for 10 minutes
before being transferred over
to the briner that deposits the liquid into the jars.
It's a sweet waterfall that flows over the product.
The briner is approximately 6-feet long.
And it fills each jar until it overflows
to make sure each one is filled completely.
Out of the briner, the jars head off to get their top.
And then it's off to a 100- foot-long pasteurizer machine.
Pasteurization is important for shelf stability
and shelf life of the product.
The jars move through the pasteurizer
at a rate of 130 jars a minute,
which is about 1,000 jars an hour.
After pasteurization,
the bread butter chips pass through a conveyer
to what we call an unscrambler.
The unscrambler is really an inspection person
who is checking each lid
to ensure that the jars are sealed.
And there is no quality defects with the caps.
From cucumber to jar,
these little guys have traveled a total of 600 feet
or two football fields.
Mt. Olive produces millions
of jars of pickles each year.
And that's a good thing because these pickles make
every cookout a little sweeter.
My favorite way to eat a bread and butter chip is
on a really hot day
when the chips are really cold out of the refrigerator.
It's just heaven.
Coming up, I hope you saved room for dessert
because these little brownies have not one,
not two but three types of chocolate.
And later, we'll visit a factory
whose signature spread certainly cuts the mustard.
Burgers, dogs and beans
were all a part of my childhood cookouts.
But so was dessert.
And one of my faves was a soft, chewy,
chocolaty brownie.
Sure wish we had had Christie's
triple-chocolate brownies back then.
Christie Cookies was founded in Nashville, Tennessee,
in 1983.
You may know them for their scrumptious chocolate
chip cookies in hotels around the country.
But their brownies have become just as popular.
A lot of other brownies might be cake based.
Ours is more deep rich chocolate with lots of butter.
It all starts here in the processing area.
We are not a big factory
where you see lots of silos
of sugar and flour pouring into the building,
and somebody pulling a lever.
No levers here.
Instead, every ingredient is measured out by hand.
Their triple-chocolate brownies start with,
you guessed it, three types of the good stuff.
Time out. Think about that,
three types of chocolate?
I mean, should I say them again or just run the show backwards?
Semi-sweet chocolate chip morsels,
milk chocolate, and powdered cocoa.
Of course, there is more to a brownie than just chocolate.
We have three different scale stations
where the different types of ingredients are measured up.
While the first station is chocolate only,
the second station weighs
and mixes eggs and vanilla in large containers.
The final weigh station is for two types of sugar
and, of course, butter, lots of it,
a whopping 37.8 pounds, to be exact.
We're very specific on our butter temperature.
It has to be between 48 and 58 degrees
to get the best consistency.
Oh, and there's one more ingredient
that you may not expect.
We also add toffee to our chocolate brownies.
It adds a little bit more of a texture,
kind of a surprise to it.
It also means even more butter and sugar
since toffee is simply sugar and butter that's mixed,
boiled and hardened until it's crunchy.
These are the ingredients
that have been working for this company since 1983.
Now that everything has been precisely
measured for perfection,
the entire batch is rolled out on a single pallet
as it heads off for the mixing station.
It will be poured into the mixing bowl
in a very specific and precise sequence.
First, they mix the base of the brownie ingredients.
Then they add the chocolaty bites to the batch...
Before the mixing paddles spin again and again and again.
I'm calling it now, dibs on licking the bottom of the bowl.
After 45 seconds spinning in the mixing bowl,
the brownie batter is the perfect consistency.
So it's off to the forming machine.
Steel rotating blades cut the massive ball
of batter into smaller chunks.
At the batter exits the forming machine,
it's stamped into 8-inch by 12-inch rectangles.
From there, the brownies take a quick ride
on a conveyer belt to workers
that transfer the chocolate goodies
into cardboard baking trays
and transfer them onto large holding racks.
There is 72 brownie trays to a rack.
On a typical brownie day,
there's about 30 mixes.
Okay. So 30 batches a day,
and each batch makes 1,025 brownies,
that's over 30,000 brownies a day.
But we're not done with these brownies yet.
Not only does this brownie give you
a toffee crunch inside
but also a nutty crunch on the outside.
Another layer of goodness
is added when they pass under
the appropriately named walnut topper.
Bits and pieces of walnut sprinkle the trays of brownies
until the top is smothered with crunchy nuts.
Now, the brownie batter bits are
finally ready to be baked.
That happens here in these massive walk-in ovens.
It spins around.
They usually bake for 34 minutes.
Ah, the sweet smell of freshly-baked brownies.
After baking to perfection,
the trays are rolled down to the cooling area
where they chill out for about an hour and a half.
And from the cooling process,
they're rolled into the fulfillment area
for the cutting process.
This cutter turns the three larger
brownies into 15 regular-sized brownies.
Once they're cut,
they're hand packaged into Christie's
distinctive tins.
We'll box 'em up.
And we ship those within 24 hours.
Which means you won't have to wait long
for the perfect end for the perfect backyard cookout.
I love chocolate. And it's full of chocolate.
Literally, it oozes when you pull it apart.
Coming up, how did this
100-year-old salad dressing become backyard
cookout's number one colorful condiment?
I grew up in New York. And if you ask any corner
hot dog vendor from Harlem to Canal Street,
there's only one condiment to put on your hot dog, mustard.
Yeah.
Mustard has been around since the fourth century.
But it didn't become a backyard barbecue staple
until 1904 when French's unveiled its classic
yellow mustard at the World's Fair
in St. Louis, Missouri.
It was called French's Cream Salad Brand Mustard.
They've since dropped the cream salad brand from their name.
But the perfect combination of spices and vinegars
that made French's the number-one
mustard in America hasn't changed a bit.
Mustard primarily consists of mustard seed.
So we bring that into the factory in rail cars
all the way from Canada.
Each day, 175,000 pounds of mustard seed
makes its way into gigantic holding tanks
before getting air pumped into the cleaning process room.
The cleaning process for mustard seed consists
of passing the seed through a series of fine meshes.
And at each stage,
we remove any particulates
or any uneven or small-size mustard seeds.
And at the end, the seeds are bright yellow,
just like the mustard they are about to become.
These pipe vacuum the seeds over to the batch mixing area
where they are ground down to a fine powder
before being mixed with the special secret spice blend.
If I told you what was in the spice blend,
I'm afraid I'd have to kill you.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're cool, man.
We're cool.
We can't reveal everything in the spice blend.
But we can tell you that garlic,
paprika and turmeric
are all essential ingredients.
Next, all those spices, secret and otherwise,
go into a gigantic, 1,000-pound drum.
It rotates so that, uh, all of the mixture
is perfectly consistent throughout.
After 15 minutes of tumbling,
the spice mix is dropped into super sacks
weighing in at 2,000 pounds.
Cranes lift the spice-filled super sacks
into these huge tanks.
Inside, the dry ingredients
are mixed with water and vinegar,
which gives the mustard its classic tanginess.
These giant blades thoroughly blend everything together,
creating a mustard slurry.
Ah, now it's looking like the mustard
we all know and love.
Then the mustard slurry is transferred to a mill
that grinds it to a super-smooth consistency.
Every 30 minutes, we do quality checks
just to make sure that the color's right.
And the consistency is good.
And the product is perfectly smooth.
And that's done by spreading a little bit
onto this Plexiglass blade,
what they call slicking.
And we're just checkin' the grind quality,
makin' sure that it's perfectly smooth
and consistent throughout.
The mustard has now reached the right consistency
and taste but is still too hot to package.
So it must travel through a heat exchanger
that cools the mustard to 70 degrees.
We cool it down.
And then we feed it into a storage tank.
Each day, the storage tanks,
referred to as the mustard farm,
hold all 100,000 pounds of mustard before it is pumped
through steel pipes over to packaging.
The three packaging lines run 24 hours a day,
7 days a week
and fill the yellow squeeze bottles
at the rate of 300 bottles
per minute. Wow.
That's nearly 500 million a year.
That's a whole lot of mustard.
And I am the world's number-one mustard fan.
No backyard cookout would be complete without it.
Burgers, dogs and...
Hey, man.
Easiest BBQ ever. Let's do it again.
Ever, ever, ever.
Cut.