How do you think you get the perfect cuppa every time?
You know what it's like when you're late for work and trying to get the kids to school.
Do any of us have time to think about what's gone into our breakfast?
Which one of these produces yoghurt?
Don't know. The sheep. What about that one? Why not?
It's no uglier than any of the others. Bit hairy.
How much butter is in peanut butter?
90%. 90% butter.
I'm going to reveal the secrets behind breakfast by making it Food Factory style.
There are thousands of products to choose from in the supermarket
but most of us wouldn't have a clue about what goes into making them,
so I've set up my own Food Factory inside this barn
to find out what they're doing with our food.
It may look as though it's full of junk, but in here
there's everything I need to discover the secrets of supermarket food.
First on my breakfast menu is peanut butter.
Lovely on a bit of toast, packed full of energy,
but how much energy and how many calories is in it?
How many peanuts do you think it's taken to make a jar of peanut butter?
45. 500.
Thousands. 2,000. 2,000?
150. 150?
How much butter do you reckon's in it?
Probably about 20%.
A block of butter. Not much.
What is in peanut butter?
To find out, I'm going to make my own.
And it all starts with these.
Monkey nuts. And inside...
are peanuts.
First job is to shell loads of nuts.
I could hire some monkeys, but they'd eat the lot,
so I'm putting together my very own peanut sheller, using two flowerpots.
Nothing like cutting your bottom off.
This ingenious invention is based on a design used in African villages,
but I'm adding my own pedal power upgrade.
Now, how this contraption works is that I'm going to drop some nuts in between the two flowerpots.
And as the pedals turn, they rotate the flowerpot
and because they're made of rough clay, they should crack the shells.
Hear that cracking.
Here we go.
Look at that.
First off, safety.
Right, got to protect my nut.
Here we go. Don't want to look silly.
It's a good thing I don't look ridiculous.
It may look nutty, but in the factory they use a similar principle to crack all kinds of nuts.
It worked brilliantly.
The only problem is, I've now got to pick the nuts up.
Bit of a design fault.
But I've got the perfect answer.
A leaf blower - set to suck.
It's my very own mega vacuum cleaner.
Right, next job for the nuts is to roast them.
I could do them in the oven, but I prefer using boys' toys.
Roasting brings out the flavour
and removes water that would allow bacteria to grow in the peanut butter.
That's my peanuts roasted.
All I've got to do now is get their coats off.
This method is very similar to what they do in a factory,
but the way I'm doing it is a little bit more cobbled together.
I'm using a car mat and a hot water bottle.
# Hey hey, we're the Monkeys... #
There you go. Nice and warm.
# We're too busy singing... #
It's working.
Now, as well as getting rid of the skin of the peanut,
this process also removes the germ.
A peanut is in fact a seed.
Let's pop that down.
And this tiny bit here is the part that sprouts into a new plant,
but it tastes bitter so they take it out.
So you end up with a nice clean peanut like that.
Well, there we go.
That's not bad for a car mat and hot water bottle. Look at that.
Beautiful clean peanuts.
All I need to do now is blend up my peanuts.
Now, if I used a domestic blender, I reckon it would break, so I've got
Brenda, she is the mother of all blenders and she doesn't mess around.
Get in there, Brenda!
Wow, look at that!
You certainly realise just how much oil is in peanuts, I mean, look.
Almost forming a dough.
What's happening is the solid of the peanut is mixing
with the oil of the peanut and that's basically peanut butter.
There is no butter in peanut butter.
Looking at a peanut, you'd never guess that half of it is oil.
Now, under the microscope I've got a very thin slice of peanut.
If we look at it here, you can make out the cells within the peanuts,
and within those cells, are tiny, tiny little drops of oil.
That oil is high in good oils.
Mono and polyunsaturates.
So peanut butter isn't as unhealthy as all that oil might make you think.
But how much oil do you think there is in a pub size packet of peanuts?
Well, to find out, let's burn some.
I'm going to set fire to these peanuts with the help of some liquid oxygen.
It will help ignite the fat in this handful of peanuts.
Right, I've got this lighter. Let's see what happens.
Look at that.
Ooh! I should have brought some sausages.
Just think how much oil is in your packet of pub peanuts.
That's what's caused my peanut pyrotechnics.
That's what you call nuked nuts.
Would you believe that a raw peanut contains about three-and-a-half calories?
So weight for weight, peanuts have more calories than chocolate or sugar.
There's definitely loads of energy packed into my puree,
but it's not quite peanut butter yet.
Now, if I was to leave this, what would probably happen is
the oil would separate from the solid and it would come to the surface.
To stop that happening, I'm going to add something.
This, it's called palm oil. It's a vegetable fat.
If I blend that in, that will stop any peanut oil
from separating from the solid.
Right, come on Brenda.
# Brenda, my love I keep on telling you
# Brenda, my love
# Brenda, my love. #
Right, this is really, really coming together. Look at this lovely peanut butter texture.
All it needs now, a bit of salt.
And that's all there is to it.
Basically, a lot of peanuts and no butter.
Job done.
Now, out of all the things I've made, I reckon this stuff is spot on
because it looks just like the stuff in the supermarket.
But looks aren't everything. It could taste awful.
That is spot on.
It sticks to your mouth just like real peanut butter.
It's packed full of peanut flavour
and nice little bits of crunch to it as well. I'm going to have some more.
There we go, my very own peanut butter. Brilliant!
Later on, we made up another batch to the same recipe.
Would it spread a little happiness down on my farm?
Big peanut butter eaters? I've never tried it. You've never tried peanut butter?
You're in for a treat.
Try that and tell me what you think.
That's lovely. You like that, do you?
Your first experience of peanut butter and it's MY peanut butter. What do you think?
It's like really quite gloopy, but I like that it's got bits in it.
Very good. Yeah. You're pleased with that?
Will you have it again? Yeah.
It's really, really good. I think I've been converted.
Brilliant job.
We drink 165 million cups of tea a day.
I can't do anything in the morning without my cuppa and nor can these guys.
Hi, guys. How do you like your tea?
Milk with one, please. Milk, no sugars. Do you want them strong or weak? Medium to weak.
I thought you'd all have nice builders' tea, really strong.
Nice cup of tea for you.
Biscuit with that, Jimmy, have you? Seeing the standard of your work, you're not getting any biscuits.
Everyone knows how they like their cuppa and once you've found a brand
that you like, you want every cup of tea to taste the same.
And that's not down to luck, it's a lot of hard work.
Meet Ian Brabbin. His job affects millions of people every morning,
yet you'd never think it to look at him.
So what could he possibly do that's so important?
Hi, Ian, how you doing? Hi, Jimmy. Fancy a cup of tea?
Lovely. So what's your job then?
Well, I'm chief tea taster.
So you're telling me you get paid to drink tea?
That's the ideal job, that's a dream job. I drink ten, 15 cups a day.
I love it too, but I taste 500 a day.
That's not really a job, is it? It's more like a big skive.
But Ian assures me drinking tea IS a proper job.
And to prove it, he's taken me to this tea factory in Yorkshire.
Now Yorkshire doesn't exactly have the weather for growing tea plants,
but this is how every cuppa starts out.
What makes the flavour different then in tea?
Basically, in every country, the soil, the altitude, the climate all affect the taste of the tea.
What will these produce? Obviously green, so will they be green tea? No. This bush produces black tea,
green tea, white tea, there's a selection here. All come from the same tea bush.
It's just they're manufactured differently on the tea factory.
It's the way the leaves are dried and processed after they're picked that creates the different types of tea.
Now, our supermarket cuppa, that's black tea, isn't it?
It is. And that could be from seven different countries, blended to produce a consistent taste.
# I like a nice cup of tea in the morning... #
Ian makes sure every cuppa tastes the same when you boil the kettle,
but with as many as 20 different teas in every teabag, getting the blend just right is tough.
# I like a nice cup of tea... #
But I might be good at it.
My granddad was actually a tea taster, so I reckon it'll be second nature to me.
Wow, look at this! This is our tasting room
where we taste all the teas, select the best ones for the blends.
It's like being in a tea sweet shop. It is. Do you have to drink the lot?
We taste the lot, but we spit into this spittoon so we don't have to swallow it.
Can I have a taste? Course you can.
This is very dark. It looks like gravy.
Don't slurp it up as hard as that cos you might choke.
That went up my nose. You have to suck it in really fast?
Yeah. Spray as much on your palate.
You've got 10,000 taste buds on your tongue.
Oh, that's quite bitter. Yes. If we have a taste of this one...
Well, yeah, that's a bit more body to it, a bit more strength.
And the flavour develops once it's on your tongue. It does.
That's the sign of a really good quality tea.
Now, no two teas taste the same.
And even where you live can change the brew.
In the South and South-East, the water's quite hard
whereas in Scotland and the North of England, the water tends to be a lot softer.
So hard water contains minerals and that reacts with the compounds in tea
and creates this film on top of the cup that you can see there. Right.
What we do here is we counteract the effects of the water
by changing the blend to suit the areas that we sell the tea into.
So you make tea to suit my type of water.
Yeah. Well!
Ian's top of the range tea is tweaked to suit where you live.
The tea they make for Glasgow is a slightly different blend to the tea for London,
so even though the water's different, when the tea's brewed up, it'll taste the same to you or me.
Clever.
Right, time for a taste challenge.
Let's see who can blend the best brew.
Ian's the expert, but with a tea taster in the family, I might be in with a chance.
I should be good at this cos my granddad was a tea taster.
Did he? See how you go. It might be in the genes.
Ian doesn't seem particularly impressed, but let's see how I do.
It's a bit like a tea pick and mix.
I see why they've got a spittoon
because if I was to drink all this tea, I'd be going to the toilet all the time.
That should do the job.
There is my magic blend.
Once the kettle's boiled, it's time for the taste test.
OK, Ian, it's the moment of truth.
That's quite nice. It's not bad.
It's got some good tea flavour. Shall we try this one?
I really like that one, Jimmy.
I'm getting a lot of really nice flavour.
That's yours.
It's mine.
So that means that's mine. OK.
So mine's, I suppose, quite bland in that respect.
Yours a bit more punchy, a lot more flavours going on.
You have to make a blend that suits everyone's tastes,
which is a hard job to do, isn't it? Yeah.
We've got to come up with something that everybody really likes.
Week in, week out, he makes sure the tea you enjoy tastes the same.
And don't worry, these machines are working to Ian's blend, not mine.
When it comes to how we get up and go, there's one thing in the UK
we all have in common, and that's breakfast cereal.
Over 95% of us have a box of it in our cupboard.
But you can forget that cereal starts as grains like these wheat grains,
because by the time they reach your breakfast bowl, they don't look much like it.
Would you have had this in your breakfast cereal? Corn on the cob, I'd have thought not.
That's what goes into your cornflakes.
Really? Yeah. Now what about wheat?
Shredded. Puffed wheat. Puffed wheat.
Do you know what this plant is?
No idea. This is rice.
Now, how do you reckon it ends up as a cereal?
Crunch it up. Toast it.
Puffing it. Puffing it.
Yeah. Puffed rice.
Top marks, young man.
But when it comes to making rice cereal, how does the factory puff up the volume?
To find out, I'm going to make my own.
Ho-ho!
The secret behind turning these hard-as-heck little grains into light, aerated, crunchy things
is something you'd have come across before, maybe even in your own kitchen.
Popcorn. I love it.
Kernels of corn you heat up in a pan and eat in the cinema.
Nothing happens. All of a sudden, doop-doop-doop, it's everywhere.
Popcorn has a tight casing like a jacket.
When you heat it, moisture trapped inside tries to expand.
The pressure and heat builds up until the jacket pops,
revealing the tasty treat inside.
I've got food fireworks!
But we don't eat popcorn for breakfast unless we're students.
So how do food factories make crispy puffed rice that tastes great with a splash of milk?
It all starts with rice like this.
First job is to cook it.
Spoonful of sugar. Pinch of salt.
Some of this stuff, which is malt extract, cos to be honest,
quite on its own, it can be a bit boring.
But many breakfast cereals have some surprising added extras.
Iron, yep, that's right, real iron.
We can't live without it, and it's added to loads of breakfast cereals.
Food grain, of course, but to prove it's real iron...check this.
It's magnetic.
In the factory, they cook the rice for an hour.
Next, they slowly dry it out. That can take as long as 24 hours.
The rice then needs to be flattened.
This creates the crack in the jacket of the grain that makes it puff up.
The factory call it bumping.
There we go. That's what we want. Slightly flattened grains.
They've now got to be dried out again.
Imagine doing this every time you want breakfast. You'd have to start
two days before you got up.
So next step is 15 hours in the oven.
Yes, 15 hours.
It takes so long because they have to get rid of the tiniest amount of water that may be left.
If it's not dry, it won't puff up.
Finally, my rice is ready for one last, very hot blast of heat.
Look at this! It's like they're alive.
They're starting to ping and spin round.
Now that spinning and movement is actually the rice popping, just like popcorn.
Right, here we go.
Now, they've definitely changed shape.
They're sort of all puffed out. If I pick one up...
look at that.
That's worked. That's not bad.
Result. I've managed to puff the rice.
Many food factories use this slow oven process, but some prefer a quicker, more explosive way.
It's time to unveil my rice puffing gun.
When I say gun, I mean more of a cannon.
This thing fires with such force that I've had to have it specially made.
Later, I'm going to use this cannon
to try to explode hard grains of rice into puffed rice cereal.
Stand well back.
Ho-ho-ho-ho!
If cereal's not your thing, there's another breakfast staple that's just as quick and easy.
Yoghurt. But what is yoghurt?
I want you to tell me which of these animals you can get yoghurt from.
First up, cow. Yes.
Yoghurt from a camel. Might be bit lumpy.
This, the horse. No. Definitely not? No.
Have you ever had Mongolian yak yoghurt?
No. It'd be quite nice, I'd imagine.
In fact, you can make yoghurt from all of these animals cos they all produce milk.
So next week, you'll see horse yoghurt there. Will you buy it?
Only if the wife likes it.
In the UK, we prefer our yoghurt to come from cows' milk
and we eat over 100 million pots of the stuff every week,
but how do you get it from these guys to the pot?
It starts off with raw milk straight from the farm.
Turning it into a breakfast yoghurt is factory boss, Nigel Tunnicliffe.
If I wanted to make a low-fat fruit yoghurt, is that easy?
Very easy. Grab a bag. Right, OK. Bit of work then. One of these?
Yeah. A bag of skimmed-milk powder.
OK. Where are we going? Over here.
And can this just go in willy-nilly?
It's important the recipe is made exactly to plan. If you don't get the recipe right,
it can make the difference between a low-fat yoghurt and a Greek-style yoghurt.
So I've got to be really precise. You have. This is fairly precise.
Is there room for a little bit of error? We can lose a bit of dust here and there, not a problem.
Next, sugar and milk protein hit the mix, then the whole lot is heated to kill bacteria.
Nigel's doing a good job here,
but it looks as though he's pretty much on his own, yoghurt-making wise.
In fact, Nigel employs a huge army of workers
who work away for nothing and get nothing in return. So where are they?
I can't wait to meet this workforce. They sound a right bargain. I'll introduce you. All right.
They're all in these vats, millions upon millions of bacteria,
working their cells off to make yoghurt.
There are a trillion bacteria in your hand there. It'll take me a lifetime to count them. Probably.
You take a lot of time and trouble getting all the bacteria out of the milk. Why are you putting it back in?
Because we want to remove the bacteria that we don't want
to allow the good bacteria to grow in the milk.
Who have we got in here? Four types of bacteria. We've got...
I wouldn't want to play you at Scrabble, would I? Probably not.
This is what some of those bacteria look like close up when they're in your yoghurt pot.
Not very appetising, I'll give you that.
But without them, we wouldn't be able to make yoghurt.
So what does this miracle bacteria workforce do for you? How does it actually make yoghurt?
Well, the bacteria eat the natural milk sugars present in the milk and turn them into acid.
And the more acidic the mix gets, the thicker it gets.
# Whistle while you work... #
Left to their own devices, these busy busy bacteria do the job in a few hours.
Right, Jim, here's a vat of finished yoghurt for you to have a look at.
Let's have a look. Can't wait.
Look at that. It's amazing. It looks like custard, doesn't it?
It's a lot thicker than it was. Can I have a taste? You certainly can.
Lovely. You wouldn't want to fall in there, you'd never be seen again!
Mm! Well, that's delicious, isn't it?
And it's got that tangy sort of classic natural yoghurt flavour.
What gives it that flavour?
The bacteria producing lactic acid and various other chemicals when they're growing
give the typical acidic yoghurty flavour.
That's how plain yoghurt is made,
but today is strawberry yoghurt day.
First lot of strawberry.
Nigel's strawberry mix contains a deep-purple natural colouring.
It's the same stuff that gives strawberries, raspberries and blackberries their colour.
But there's so little of it in strawberries that Nigel has to add a bit more.
It's gone in my eye.
It spits a bit, doesn't it? It does.
Do you reckon it's a good idea to wear a white coat? No, pink would have been better.
Nigel gets all the credit for our breakfast yoghurt,
but the real heroes are these brilliant bacteria.
# Whistle while you work! #
Back at the barn, I've made crispy puffed rice in an oven,
using the same principle that makes popcorn pop.
But it's a bit dull.
It's time to try the other method of puffing with the puffing cannon.
That's more like it.
This cannon is a high pressure chamber, based on the machine they use in the factory.
I'm going to put my rice inside the cylinder here,
then close this lid very tightly, securing it with this latch.
Then I'm going to turn on the heat.
The heat is going to increase the pressure in the cylinder to ten times that of atmospheric pressure.
Then I'm going to hit it with a sledge hammer.
This will fly open, releasing the pressure.
The compressed moisture inside the rice will expand, turning it to steam,
making the rice puff up with a massive bang.
Can't be too cautious.
So stand well back. OK.
In with the rice.
Now for the water.
Right, gas on.
I need to keep turning the cannon so the rice inside doesn't burn and stick to the bottom.
Once the pressure is high enough, something's going to go bang.
It feels like I'm spinning a time bomb.
Right, I'm up to pressure.
Think we're ready for the big bang.
Ho-ho-ho-ho!
The rice is under so much pressure,
it's blasted from the cylinder at over 100mph.
It looks too much like fun,
but using high pressure is how they do it in the factory.
Look at this!
But they don't have to pick it all up off the ground.
Get this bit of rice out here.
That WAS a rice grain.
As you can imagine, under all that pressure, the moisture inside
turns to steam, expands and puffs this rice up.
Not bad for a first attempt.
Let's have another go with my new improved mark two cannon.
This one sports a handy basket to catch my flying breakfast.
Wow!
Wow! Look at that.
What I've got here is puffed rice.
Oh! Tastes just like the real thing. Heaps of it.
All clumped together. Absolutely incredible.
Later, I took some of my puffed rice to my farm to see if it would make people's taste buds go pop.
Have a taste. Imagine having this for breakfast. So, how do they taste?
I can tell what it's meant to be. Right. Yeah.
Not good. No. It's horrible. Horrible. What, is it burnt? What is it? Yeah. Burnt.
I wouldn't say burnt. Smoky. Smoky.
Smoky. So out of ten, what would you give me? Six. Six out of ten.
One. One. Three.
There's no way you'd get kids to eat these.
But I'd bet they'd love making them.
From blending the perfect cuppa to making cereal go with a bang,
I thought breakfast was the simplest meal of the day, but I've found out it's not.
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