What's the difference between chips and oven chips?
Have they been coated in something? My wife normally burns these ones.
You can't beat a bit of pub grub every now and then.
These days, supermarkets are selling typical pub food for you to cook at home.
But how do they make it on an industrial scale?
Why do you reckon you'd have to X-ray a peanut?
How do you turn one of these into one of these?
Perhaps they inject into the chicken breast. Mince it up.
Mince it up? Did you hear that?
I'm going to reveal the secrets of the pub menu...Food Factory style.
Have you ever wondered what goes into making your favourite pub food?
I'm going to find out because I'm setting up my own food factory inside this barn.
It may look as though it's full of junk, but this barn has got
everything I need to discover the secrets of supermarket food.
Steak and chips, fish and chips, and burger and chips.
It seems almost all pub meals come with chips!
So that's where I'm going to start.
Pubs tend to use deep-fat fryers, but these days, when you're cooking chips at home,
the traditional chip pan often stays on the shelf, in favour of a baking tray and a bag of frozen oven chips.
But if you stick raw potatoes in the oven you don't end up with crispy chips.
So what does the factory do to create the crunch?
Here in the barn, I'm going to try to make my own oven chip shop.
And every chippie needs a potato peeler.
My mum'll go mad when she sees what I've done with her graters.
I'll spin these spuds in the bottom of this bucket.
It's a bit like the commercial potato peelers in real chip factories.
One potato in every four dug out of the British soil ends up in one of these.
Right, let's see if this works.
It looks like I've been savaged by my dog, but it's working.
Think I'd better stop, cos my potatoes are getting smaller and smaller, but look at that.
It's a bit battered, but I think you can call it peeled.
The next step is to make these ugly spuds all chip shape and Bristol fashion.
In the factory they use a slicing machine called a hydro-cutter,
which involves firing a potato down a pipe, through what they call a knife block,
that slices the potato into chip shapes.
Sounds dangerous.
Instead of sharp knives, I'll be using a gun to fire my potatoes at a tennis racket.
I was rubbish at tennis anyway.
I'm restringing my racket with cheese wire.
Don't try this at Wimbledon!
Not too fiddly, this, is it?
Right, that's that done - now, what could be better to fire my potatoes through the slicer than a spud gun?
In the factory, they propel the potato using a water jet.
But my spud gun is powered by a gas explosion.
It all goes off in this chamber at the end of the barrel. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about.
Pull the electrical trigger, sets off an explosion and fires the potato out,
through my slicer. And hopefully, chip-shaped potatoes come through.
But before I try slicing, I need to see if my potato gun can actually shoot a spud.
Little bit nervous.
Right, three, two, one.
Ohhh! Oh, my god, look at this!
The potato has totally obliterated...
Look, it's knocked a whole in the side of the shed.
That is the only piece of potato I could find.
I'm not sure that tennis racket is going to be up to it.
There's only one way to find out.
I've got my spud gun. That's going to fire the potato, which is going to hit my slicing device.
The potato will pass through, looking a bit more chip-like.
And be captured...
in here.
Right, all set to make oven chips.
Oh!
I think I blew my bag off!
There's bits of chip all round the back of the barn.
That's a very excitable spud gun.
Oo-hoo-hoo!
Look at that!
Right, I've got an idea to slow the potato down.
If I put a tea towel over here, as the potato passes through here,
it should be captured, and slow its speed down.
That's the idea - right, let's see if it works.
Ohh!
Well, the tea towel's gone. Let's see.
Let's see, let's see.
Ta-dah! Look at that!
Chips - it works, just got to make more of them now.
Ohh!
I'm getting quite good at this.
See - when you put your mind to it, nothing is impossible!
Later, I'm going to try to turn these into frozen oven chips.
It'll be crunch time.
A nice bit of sirloin steak. Where do you reckon it comes from?
There. Haven't got a clue! Here.
Just down a bit there. Its bum. The bum?
Down a bit...back, back. There?
Why would you say there? The chunkiest bit.
It's on the leg. The leg...yeah.
I'm totally wrong, aren't I?
So it's a mystery - anywhere from the neck to the leg!
In fact, the sirloin steak comes from the loin area, so it's along here.
Sirloin...of course! The great British steak!
No-one likes a tough one.
But how do you make sure every one is mouthwatering?
One farm boss who reckons he knows the answer is Richard Phelps.
He produces 480,000 sirloin steaks a year,
and supplies a major UK supermarket.
So Richard, what makes the perfect steak?
The perfect steak has got to be tender, juicy, tasty and consistent.
So if you have it in a restaurant and it's delicious,
you go back next week you want it to be the same, don't you?
That's right - the problem we have is because so many different farmers
do different systems, different ages, different breeds, that we get inconsistency in the steaks.
Richard has 16,000 cattle spread across many farms.
So, to make sure every steak tastes the same, all his animals are brought up the same way.
So your secret is to get the farmers to do exactly the same thing, wherever their farm is?
That's right - using the same feed, the same health systems,
so every animal is the same that comes through our process.
And it starts before they're born.
Paul Westaway is one of Richard's cattle breeders.
If good genes produce good offspring, then this is your man.
No, not Paul - meet Goliath.
He's smashing, but what makes him such a great animal?
From a steak point of view, he's really fantastic between his shoulders and his hook bone.
So from a butcher's point of view there'll be lots of steaks there.
But the important thing about Goliath here is we're not going to
turn him into steaks, it's what he can do for his offspring, isn't it?
That's right. His job is to sire sons and daughters that will go into the beef chain.
So he's like a stamp that he can put all the good qualities onto his next generation.
Absolutely, he's been specially selected and bred to make sure he sires perfect steaks every time.
Goliath could father some 200,000 beef calves and Paul reckons he's worth around 50 grand.
If only he could play football too!
He loves us talking about him. We've said nothing but praise!
He's a bit of a superstar. There's a bit of an ego going on!
Good breeding is just the start - at around a week old, the calves are sent to a different farm.
Nigel and David Maidment specialise in a kind of nursery school for young cattle.
They need to make sure all their pupils grow at the same rate and get the same amount to eat.
When I was at school, there was always someone who distracted you,
you had the greedy one. How do you stop the greedy one getting too fat in here?
Basically, this mixes the milk powder, it's a replacement for the cow's udder, effectively.
So that's almost like a mechanical mum, it's a computerised cow.
It's exactly that, exactly that.
How does she know that number two's coming in for its second feed and it shouldn't be?
They all have a little tag that we put in their ear. Every tag is different,
so every calf is different to the machine.
I've got you, so if number two comes in and happens to be a greedy calf,
the tag will get beeped, and then mechanical mum won't give you any milk. Yes.
That's some mum, isn't it? She looks after them well.
When the calves are weaned off mechanical mum, they move farms again.
For this bunch, it's back to human dad Paul Westaway. What are you doing here now, then?
We're trying to make sure that the cattle grow at a very level rate every day that they're here.
We're looking for them to average about 1.1 kilos a day,
so the steaks develop properly and they stay really nice and healthy.
And it seems to work.
Look at these calves - they're the same height and size.
I wish I'd brought my spirit level!
Tall and well-built, just like yourself.
Thank you, Jimmy. Pleasure.
Paul checks how fast they grow by weighing them.
What is she?
About 410, 415.
Not bad. Spot on.
That's dead on. That's just what you want, isn't it? All exactly the same.
Come on, lovelies! Here they come.
So according to Richard, good breeding and a strict upbringing
are the key to a consistently great steak. But does it really work?
To find out, Richard's invited me to lunch.
So tell me, what's the test for tenderness?
A good tender steak, when you cut it, you should
be able to cut with a standard cutlery knife, not a steak knife.
So will I be able to tell the difference between a mid-range steak and one of Richard's?
I'm going to have to saw through that one.
Wow, that just went straight through.
So after what you've said, I'd say that is probably your steak
because it was easier to cut. Let's have a look.
There we are. Now, you sure you didn't swap them over?
Right, I'm going to polish these two steaks off. Are you that hungry? I feel like Desperate Dan.
Back at the barn, to go with that steak, I'm making my own frozen oven chips from scratch.
I've built a high-speed spud gun, which did a great job slicing my potatoes.
That's the most fun I've ever had making chips.
Now I need to work out how the factory get their oven chips all crispy and golden brown.
Look at those... fresh out the fryer.
Now, apart from the golden colour and the delicious flavour,
what really makes a chip a chip is the crunch.
CRUNCH
I can't find my mouth.
That crunch is what my oven chips need.
It comes from the crispy outer skin that forms on the chip when it's fried.
The trouble is, you can't create that crispy skin in the oven from just raw potato.
So the oven chip makers have to create that crispy skin for you in the factory.
The key is starch - it's the milky stuff
that leaks out of a potato when you slice it.
Starch is what the potato plant uses to store the energy it needs to grow.
And these little gritty bits in the potato juice are actually tiny little grains of starch.
On their own, these gritty bits won't provide the crispy skin that you look for in a chip.
They need a bit of encouragement.
The factory take the sliced up potato and they soak them in really hot water - they blanch them.
Blanching for around 40 minutes makes the starch grains swell up and go softer.
This makes the chip fluffier on the inside.
Now the top layers of starch have gone slimy, almost pasty-like, and it's the layers of starch
on the top of this slice that eventually will give us that nice crisp texture to the chip.
I just need to dry the slices, leaving behind that starchy skin coating.
Here we go. All ready for Saturday night now.
FAT SIZZLES
That's a great sound, isn't it?
You might not have realised oven chips are pre-fried.
The hot oil makes the starchy skin go brittle and crispy.
Timing is everything - you don't want to completely cook them. That's what your oven will do.
All I want to do is add that layer of crispy "chippiness".
Oh, getting hungry!
Now you can see the effect the blanching has had
on those slices of potatoes, because they've gone sort of
fluffy round the outside, and that's allowed them to get really crispy in that hot oil - look at that.
You can see them bubbling away.
The starchy skin gives the chip its crunch.
It also stops the chip from soaking up too much oil.
And because they spend less time in the fryer than the ones from your local chippy,
they have a third less fat.
Looks like they're done. One last thing to do, and that's to freeze them.
In the factory, they use an icy gust of air,
at minus 29 degrees centigrade, to freeze the oven chips.
I'm using a leaf blower to push air through this tube and across dry ice - frozen carbon dioxide.
And hey presto...
a cold-air blaster!
Chilly chips!
Right.
Let's test those chips!
SOLID TAPPING
That sounds frozen to me.
The weird thing is, it can take the factory about an hour and a half from start to finish.
Way longer than it'd take you to make normal chips.
Let's have a look at these beauties.
Well, they look like the real deal. Look how amazing and how clean the edges are.
And that's really good, if you think I fired it through a tennis racket.
But the real test, has it got that crunch?
CRUNCH
Oh! Really "chippy" crunchiness about them.
Do you know what?
I think...
you can't really tell the difference between my oven chips and the ones from the supermarket.
They're really good.
Oh! Fantastic!
There we go. My very own oven chips.
Brilliant!
But don't to take my word for it. Later on, we made another batch to the same recipe.
When it came to the crunch, would my oven chips be a hit down on the farm?
Here's my version of oven chips - want you to taste them.
They are... Very crispy.
Yeah, they are very crispy. A lot better than normal oven chips.
And they're not greasy at all.
Nice taste. Slightly dry.
I might have overcooked them!
Peanuts are a favourite pub nibble.
But do you know how they grow?
Any ideas how peanuts grow?
No idea. Like that.
Like this, on a bush? More like a tree.
Bigger, you think? Yeah. What about that?
No. On the ground.
Oh, around a bush?
Looks pretty convincing to me.
They look stuck on, but I've got no idea how they grow.
Stuck on! Now, you might think peanuts grow on bushes like this, but I can reveal this is a fake...
I made this. This is how peanuts grow...
Look at that!
Oh my word! They're great!
Underground!
Just like spuds. I'm shocked, I didn't realise.
They look...like potatoes! Weird!
Now, as peanuts grow underground, when they're harvested so are many things that we're not that keen on.
So how do you detect imposters trying to smuggle themselves inside your pack of peanuts?
To find out, I've decided to turn detective and join the peanut police.
Michelle Wake and Jon Sweeting have to stop any shady characters
that might sneak from the soil into your packet of peanuts.
This is what they want to avoid ...
If you dig them out of the ground, you'll get all sorts of debris.
I've got some funny little nut there, I've got some twigs, I've got a sweet wrapper, bit of sweet corn.
You're going to take up anything that happens to be lying around in the ground.
The nuts are cleaned and shelled before they arrive here at the factory.
But there could still be all sorts of dodgy things lurking in the shadows.
So the detective work starts with an x-ray machine.
So you x-ray every single peanut, I can see them going through here.
Every nut and peanut that comes through this factory gets x-rayed.
So this will detect any metal or foreign objects?
Metal, stone, glass, stalk.
If the machine spots anything like that, it's rejected.
That should have dealt with any unwanted intruders, but the peanuts are still under strict surveillance.
So Jon, what does this machine do?
It's actually an optical colour sorter.
It takes a picture of the peanut on both sides
so we get 360 degrees coverage of the peanut.
And if it's different from the known colour, we reject it.
It's like a peanut identity parade.
It is, yeah. And they're firing through like bullets, aren't they?
They are, there's a picture taken every three milliseconds. That is incredible.
By travelling so fast, any "iffy" peanut might think they've got away with it.
But Peanut CCTV can sort out the good guys from the bad guys and can
take out that reject peanut with just one blast of compressed air.
You're nicked!
This factory produces nearly two million bags of peanuts a week.
That's a lot of nuts to keep an eye on. And the job isn't finished yet.
So Michelle, what's going on here, then?
This is where our peanuts are fried.
You can smell them, that real sort of nutty aroma.
But they're still not ready for the packet.
A peanut isn't a peanut without a coating of salt.
To make sure every nut gets just the right amount, they have an ingenious test.
Peanut technician John Christie, first mixes them with water.
So in that water should be all the salt from the nuts?
That's right yes, all dissolved. John passes an electrical current through the solution to see how salty it is.
So from this test here then you can say, right, our peanuts need
a little bit more salt, or cut back on the salt... Yes, that's right.
And this has to go on all the time? It does yes, every 30 minutes.
How long have you been doing this, then, John?
This particular job, I'm still training and I'm passing out this week.
How long have you been here? I've been here 17 years.
17 years and still training? Yes. You're doing a very good job.
The peanuts are ready to be packaged and sent off to the pubs and supermarkets.
Thanks to all these detection devices,
we can be sure there's nothing untoward lurking in our packets of peanuts.
The peanut police have the place locked down.
My work here is done.
Back at the barn, I'm going to get my hands dirty with a retro classic.
No, not the car!
This isn't Top Gear, it's Food Factory.
Remember the 1970s?
Then you'll remember prawn cocktail,
black forest gateau and chicken kiev.
Popular then and we're still eating them now!
When I was a kid, chicken kievs were a real treat!
Nowadays they're a familiar sight on pub menus
and you're just as likely to see them in the chill cabinet at the supermarket.
But there's a huge price variation, from around
a fiver for two premium chicken kievs
down to around a pound for two economy ones.
But how's it possible to make them so cheaply?
Well, to find out, I'm going to make my own.
Your top-end chicken kiev is made from chicken breast with garlic butter.
But inside your cheap and cheerful one,
you'll find a knob of garlic-flavoured margarine
and this stuff.
It really doesn't look like it's come off a prime chicken breast.
It almost looks like some sort of...chicken toothpaste.
So my first step to try to create my own kiev will be making this weird meaty stuff.
And you might well ask, which part of the chicken it comes from.
Well, the breasts, wings and thighs are generally used
for more expensive products, or premium kievs.
Now I've taken all the prime cuts off, I'm left with a carcass.
There's still quite a lot of meat left on here.
But if you multiply this by millions of chickens,
that's a huge amount of meat.
So what are we going to do with it? Throw it away? Well, of course not.
What I'm after is a machine that'll strip off any meat that's left on the carcass.
If a supermarket wants to sell kievs for just 50p each,
they can't afford to chuck a single scrap.
There we go, that's really solid, spot on.
How it's going to work is that I'm going to place my chicken carcass
here between these two rotating wheels.
And the pressure of the tyre pushing against this perforated cylinder should strip the meat off.
Now they obviously don't use old car tyres
and pieces of junk in the factory, but the principle is the same.
Inside the factory, all this is subject to very strict temperature controls.
So my chicken carcass is just out of the fridge and will go back in straight away.
Right, let's get this cranking.
It's like some medieval torture equipment.
SQUELCH Aww, listen to that!
Ha...it looks disgusting!
Through you go again.
Now you might have heard of "mechanically recovered meat".
It's the kind of thing you see on the packs of ingredients
of cheap, processed food, like tinned hot dogs.
Mechanically recovered meat is stripped from the carcass using very high-pressure machinery.
That process destroys the structure of the meat.
Look at that, it's pretty gross, looks a bit like a horror film.
I'm not using such high pressure to squash out the meat,
and there's a good reason for that.
I've got two microscope pictures here.
The first is of normal minced chicken and if you look,
you can really see the meat cell structure quite clearly.
The second picture is of old-school mechanically recovered meat.
To be honest, it's a bit of a mess because you can't see any of that structure of the meat cells at all.
Let's look at the meat from my machine.
I'm hoping that the meat I'm making won't need to be labelled
as mechanically recovered, even though I'm using a machine.
There we go, look at that. You can really see the structures of the meat fibres here.
Even though it's gone through my machine, they've come out pretty well.
So, in theory, I could label this on the ingredients as meat.
Factories that use a method of squashing the carcass like this
don't have to call their meat "mechanically recovered".
That's because you can still see the meat fibres.
It's not what I would call meat, but I suppose it's using an ingredient that would otherwise be wasted.
This puree is too gloopy to make a kiev, so I'm adding minced chicken like the factory would.
To keep costs down, I can't put more than 50% chicken in my economy kievs.
So to make up the other half, I'm adding cheap veggie mince - soya protein.
I'll mix that all in together and it's starting to take on the consistency of burger mince,
which is a good thing because an economy chicken kiev
is basically two burgers with a filling.
I don't want it too thick.
This hamburger press should give me the shape I need.
There we go, perfect. Number one.
Now a chicken kiev isn't a kiev without the filling, so that goes in next.
I'm adding garlic-flavoured margarine.
Ooh! Nearly lost all my hard work then!
Look at that, it looks like a big fat burger, doesn't it? More than a chicken kiev.
Next, I need to coat my kiev in batter and roll it in breadcrumbs
before popping it in hot oil.
Now I've got to do this really quickly because
I don't want to cook the chicken and I don't want to melt the inside of it.
Otherwise, when I bake it in the oven for my dinner, all the marge will soak into the kiev.
There we go, that is now ready for the shops.
But it's not ready for tasting yet.
I have to bake it.
I can't believe I'm going to eat pulverised chicken that's been scraped off a car tyre.
Right, moment of truth...
Looks a little bit flat, but lovely colour, nice and golden and looks really crispy.
Let's pop it on a plate. Here we go.
Now for me, a really good chicken kiev, when you cut it open, the inside should be nice and soft
and really ooze out, so let's see if that's going to happen.
Great crunch.
It's empty, ha!
I think what's happened, through the cooking all that garlic-y margarine has been absorbed
by the meat, because look, it's just like an empty pocket. Let's have a go, let's see what it tastes like.
Can't always go on looks.
Smells nice.
Mmm, it tastes like...
it's been going round a tyre.
Reminds me a bit of school dinners.
Well, you know, I tried.
It looks good, it could taste a bit better.
My very own, very cheap chicken kiev.
Like the car, it's a '70s retro classic.
Fire up the kiev!
I've seen a school for steaks, seen the processing behind
a cheap chicken kiev and made explosive oven chips.
I had no idea pub grub held so many secrets.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd