We are a nation of cheese lovers.
Working our way through nearly 2,000 tonnes of it every day.
And it all starts off with milk.
It takes 700 tankers like this to feed our daily habit.
With around 2,000 types to choose from,
everyone has their favourite.
I love a bit of the squeezy stuff.
We're in the right place, then,
because this factory makes processed cheese!
I'm Gregg Wallace.
That's a massive fondue, isn't it?
It is.
Big cheesy smell!
I'm learning the fon-dos - and don'ts - of this ultra modern
and deeply traditional food.
Blessed be the cheese makers. Blessed be the cheese makers.
I'm Cherry Healey
and I'll be sniffing out the secrets of smelly cheese.
And finding out how to perfect...
Mm. Mm-hm.
..my favourite comfort food.
You've taken a household staple to a new level.
Historian Ruth Goodman
helps uncover the 100-year-old recipe...
Ugh, that's horrible.
..for the first convenience cheese product.
Over the next 24 hours,
this factory will squeeze out over 115,000 tubes of processed cheese.
That should "brie" good.
CHERRY CHUCKLES
Welcome to Inside the Factory.
This is the Primula cheese factory in Gateshead near Newcastle.
This three-acre site produces over 3,000 tonnes of spreadable cheese products every year.
As well as creamy spreaders and liquid dippers,
they make seven different flavours of their best selling spreadable cheese.
And this time, we're following production of their hot jalapeno chilli variety.
But before we put the squeeze into our cheese,
first, we have to make cheddar.
This hard cheese is our most important ingredient,
and it's made 178 miles southwest on the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales.
Wow. What a location for a factory.
So pretty.
South Caernarfon Creameries make 36 tonnes of traditional cheddar every day.
The dairy's owned cooperatively by the farmers who supply it with milk.
Their tankers come into the intake area 20 times a day.
Mark Edwards is in charge of production.
Mark!
How are you? Pleased to meet you. Gregg Wallace.
You are the top man, right?
Le Grand Fromage? Yes. Excuse me.
Obvious questions - how much milk is on there?
There's about 28,000 litres on there.
How many in one of your silos?
About 100,000 litres. Whoa!
How many will you go through in a day, do you reckon?
We'll go through about four silos a day.
That's enough milk to fill 5,000 baths.
Are they all from the same breed of cow?
Yes, Friesian.
Are you? Put a jumper on!
GREGG CHUCKLES
Milk is nearly 90% water.
The rest is natural sugar known as lactose,
plus fat and protein.
The driver will take a sample
and we'll test it for the quality, fats and protein.
If we've got high levels, that will get us a good yield of cheese.
Well, it looks like that one's past.
That's right. That's ready to go now.
We're ready to tip into our silos.
Our squeezy cheese production line begins.
The milk pours along this 600 metre pipe...
..and into the creamery's 629 square metre cheese making room.
The first job is to pasteurise the milk
by blasting it with heat for 25 seconds.
This destroys any unwanted bacteria -
the kind that might cause infection.
Right, Gregg. There's our pasteurised milk going into our vat.
And it's gushing in as well!
Now we need to add our starter culture to the milk.
Starter culture is a mix of specially selected good bacteria.
Tip that in now.
Oh! It's in little balls. Yeah.
These frozen cultures begin the cheese making process
by feeding on the lactose in the milk and changing it to lactic acid.
They also create the building blocks for taste and texture.
Mate, this little sachet cannot be making a difference
to a swimming pool full of milk!
It certainly is.
The exact mix of bacteria is top secret.
But to work properly they need to stay at a cosy 39 degrees Celsius
for 25 minutes.
So, what cheddar are we making for our squeezy cheese?
We're making a mature cheddar.
So if I wanted a mild cheddar
would I need a different type of culture?
A different culture, yes, would give you a different flavour.
Today cheddar is manufactured all over the world
but it started in a little village in the west of England.
So, how can a cheese from Somerset go global?
Over to Ruth.
I'm deep inside Cheddar Gorge,
in one of the caves that local cheese makers
are reputed to have stored and matured their cheese
for nigh-on a thousand years.
By the 17th century, cheddar was a highly sought after
and expensive regional variety.
It was one of hundreds of different cheeses
being made on farms across Britain.
And historically, any type of cheese making was more of an art
rather than a science.
Recipes were often closely guarded secrets.
Working with the variables of milk and bacteria
and without sterilisation, meant results could be rather hit and miss.
But all that changed in 1860, thanks to a Somerset cheese maker.
I'm meeting modern dairyman, John Spencer...
Oh, I love this curds and whey stage.
..who's introducing me to this local hero -
the father of modern cheese making.
This is Joseph Harding.
He was a dairyman and cheese maker
and published in 1860 this pamphlet
called Recent Improvements in Dairy Practice.
One of the main ones was hygiene.
OK.
So, before, you would have people maybe coming in from the cow shed
into the dairy.
He stopped all that.
As well as cleanliness,
Harding also insisted on scientific precision.
I noticed that Sean's got a probe for measuring the temperature here.
I mean, in the mid 19th century,
thermometers were a relatively new thing.
So before thermometers, people are just guessing?
Well, I think more than guessing,
but two people would make very different judgments,
I'm fairly sure.
So, when Harding is talking about being more accurate
with his temperatures, what he's saying is you can standardise it.
Absolutely.
Another innovation was strict timekeeping.
Sean has really got his eye on the clock.
It needs to stay in the water for 60 seconds.
Not 55 or 65. OK.
It makes a big difference. Oh, right.
And again, this is the sort of thing that he documented and insisted on,
and has influenced us right down to today.
Joseph Harding's improvements
meant cheddar could be reliably produced to the same standard
day after day...
..which positioned it for popularity beyond its home county.
Glyn!
Ha-ha, Ruth!
Hello. Marvellous to see you again.
I've got you a cheese sandwich. Oh, good.
A cheddar cheese sandwich.
Oh, excellent.
Food historian Glyn Hughes is going to tell me what happened next.
I understand the process by which Joseph Harding
was making this cheese into something much more...
organised. Mm-hm?
But how did it take off?
Well, his family became really quite evangelical about it -
not just him, but his son Henry and his wife -
and they went all over the region trying to persuade people
to take up this new simplified and better method of cheese making.
But they weren't totally interested.
The local farmers in Somerset - "No, we've always done it that way."
You know people what are like. Yeah. They wouldn't change.
And then this fella came along,
an American with the most astonishing name
of Xerxes A Willard.
Oh, dear! Poor man.
What a name.
Xerxes A Willard was a small time farmer.
He'd got a small dairy farm,
but he was also a journalist and food writer.
He arrived in Cheddar
and he found this absolutely superb cheese being made here,
and he became very friendly with Joseph
and he went back to the United States
and spread the idea of this Cheddar cheese.
Willard transported Harding's methods
into new American cheese factories
and because it was cheddar that he liked so much,
that's the kind of cheese they manufactured.
And that's why, within no time at all,
cheddar has most of the market for cheese in North America.
Extraordinary.
Mmm. Yep.
This is rather good actually, isn't it? Mmm.
GREGG: In the North Wales creamery,
we're also following Harding's cheese making rules
and the bacteria developing our cheddar flavour
is doing its job,
converting the lactose in our 22,000 litres of milk into
lactic acid.
Now what?
Our vat's nearly full of milk.
Now we need to add our rennet to our milk. Right.
Can I? Yeah.
Right. Put that in there.
What is rennet?
It's a natural enzyme and reacts with the milk proteins to set them.
So, the culture
raises the acidity? Yes.
The rennet is then acting on that acidity? That's right.
And between the culture and the rennet,
it's going to turn the milk into something solid. That's right.
So, we press this button here,
add rennet,
and that's it.
That's now dispersing all and rennet into the vat.
We've got to wait now fo 40 minutes for that to set.
Right. We'll go and put the kettle on. Yeah.
Got any milk? Plenty of milk. Loads of milk!
Can I have a latte?
Yeah!
Almost two hours after the fresh milk arrived,
it looks completely different.
There you can see...
So, what's happening there,
all the milk proteins now are joining together like a big jelly.
It actually looks like it's going off. No, that's fine.
Let me smell.
Yeah. If that was in my fridge, that's going in the bin.
The protein and fat are clumping into what's known as curds
and are starting to separate from the watery part of the milk
called the whey.
That is definitely thickening up.
Am I going to meet an enormous spider?
No, I don't think so. We're not allowed them in here.
I'm no Little Miss Muffet,
and to me it's not looking too promising just yet.
It actually it's like yoghurt, doesn't it?
Yes, it does, yeah.
Serrated blades cut up the thickening curds,
helping to separate them from the whey.
An hour later and it's all poured into what looks like a bathtub
for someone with very long legs.
There are four of them, each 12 metres long.
You can see now, there's our curd solid.
You know that rubbish scrambled egg you get on an aeroplane?
That just looks like that, yeah! That is it, isn't it?!
It's sweet.
Quite sweet, yeah.
Oh, that's really nice!
So, what you want is all the liquid gone
and just the curds. That's right. No way?! No, no whey!
Three hours into making our cheddar,
and we've drained off a staggering 12,000 litres of whey.
It used to be thrown away
but these days it's turned into a powdered supplement
popular with body-builders.
The object of the game now
is to get the remainder of this liquid out of here.
So, what we need to do now is stir these curds,
and the whey will continue to drain off.
We need to press these buttons here, the two green,
and that'll stir the curds.
The more whey that's removed,
the firmer the cheese will end up
and our cheddar needs to be solid.
Now we need to add salt to our cheese.
There's the salt.
We need to spread evenly
all the way up, following those stirrers.
All right.
What is the salt doing, apart from obviously adding flavour.
It's slowing the activity of those cultures
that we put in earlier on.
It's also driving out any more moisture that's in the curds.
Right, OK. So it's drying it.
It's adding to the flavour.
It's stopping the cultures developing,
and is it helping to preserve it as well?
It is obviously a preservative, yes.
So it'll stop the cheese from spoiling.
You're a fully fledged cheese maker now, Gregg.
Blessed be the cheese makers.
After ten more minutes of stirring
we've removed almost 60% of the milk's original water content.
Our curds are now fully formed and ready to be shaped.
They travel to the pressing area...
..where they've blown ten metres up to the top of these metal columns.
These are our cheddar towers.
The cheese is filled right to the top.
Cheese on top of cheese,
squashes it down. The pressure of the cheese then forms a block.
So there's no weight up in those towers pushing them?
The weight is simply more cheese? Yeah.
The chimneys are kept constantly topped up
with one and a half tonnes of cheddar.
It's the equivalent of two dairy cows lying on top
and squashing it down.
And the only technology is an enormous metal chimney.
It's a metal chimney
with a blade at the bottom that cuts the blocks off.
Amazing.
Years ago we used to put our cheese into moulds and press them by hand.
It'd take about 24 hours to create a block of cheese.
Now, with this modern technique that we've got here now.
you'll get a block within 45 minutes.
That is spongy! That's still spongy.
That then will go off into our cold store for maturity,
and that's where it'll all firm up and become harder.
This spongy thing will turn into a block of cheddar?
Nice hard block of cheddar cheese.
And how long's that take?
Between three months and 12 months.
Between three months and a year?! Yeah.
Maturing the cheese gives the bacteria inside
time to develop the flavour.
The longer it rests, the stronger it'll taste.
It's taken five hours and ten minutes
to make nearly 2,400 kilos of cheddar.
Now it's vacuum-packed and sent to the chiller.
All cheeses start the same way, as milk and bacteria.
But they can end up looking, tasting and smelling very different.
Cherry is checking out the microbiology
behind this mind boggling variety.
Choosing my favourite cheese is like choosing my favourite child.
It's not possible.
I love them all equally.
But how come there are so many types of cheese?
And where does that smell come from?
I've come to Somerset
to learn from award winning cheese maker Roger Longman.
Hi, Roger.
Hi. Good to see you. So, what are you making?
So, this is going to become a brie.
I love cheese, so this is like Disneyland for me.
The right place to be.
Soft, squishy brie packs a smelly punch.
But at the extreme end of the cheese-ometer...
Holy Moley!
..is this goat's cheese.
Wow. That is a very intense smell,
to be polite.
So this is a washed rind cheese.
We wash the cheese every single day to grow a rind on it
that is made from bacteria.
So, the offensive smell... The perfect aroma.
..is caused by the bacteria?
It is, absolutely.
It's given off by the bacteria as it grows.
It's a very similar bacteria that can grow in people's feet.
Because if I smell that in my trainers, they are going in the bin.
And yet with this, I can't wait to eat it.
It's very odd.
It is, but on a cheese, it's absolutely what you're looking for.
The smell is only one of the things the bacteria are producing.
They're also altering the taste and texture of the cheese.
Now, I never thought I would say this,
but can I help you wash your cheeses?
You can absolutely help me wash my cheeses. Yes.
This is so weird!
The bacteria we're encouraging to grow are already in the air
which makes them unique to this location.
Ten miles down the road there'll be a different bacteria
which will create perhaps a different colour
and also a different flavour.
I can only make this particular cheese, this particular taste, here.
That's smell explained.
Oh, yes! A cheese board.
Now there's another mystery I want to solve.
Why are there holes in Swiss cheese?
Again that's caused by bacteria.
What we get in Swiss cheese,
you get little spores of hay dust in the milk.
It's perfectly safe.
There's no harm from it.
That just happens to be the perfect breeding ground
for the bacteria to grow on.
The bacteria's eating some of the cheese
and it's producing carbon dioxide.
There's big holes! Yeah, they do cause this a pocket of air
but it can't escape out of the cheese so it just keeps growing,
and then you end up with this bubble inside the cheese.
It's pretty amazing. That's absolutely incredible.
So far, bacteria seem to be the answer
to all my cheesy questions.
What is the blue in Stilton?
So, the blue is not a bacteria.
It's not? It's a mould.
But we do add it with the starter cultures at the start
when we make the cheese.
Mould is a microscopic fungus.
On bread that's gone off, it can be harmful,
but most cheese moulds don't produce the same toxins.
But it's perfectly safe for people to eat.
It has a tremendous flavour.
Not made in Somerset, unfortunately.
We're not allowed to make Stilton,
but it's one of the best blue cheeses around.
Like champagne and Parma ham,
Stilton has protected status of origin.
So this is Stilton as well.
How come they look so completely different? Where's the mould?
OK. This is a young Stilton before it's developed the blue mould.
You'll see very fine cracks in it.
And that's where the blue mould will grow at a later stage.
So the spores are already in there.
They just haven't grown yet.
Why haven't they grown?
Why are they being so lazy?
They can't breathe.
They need oxygen. There's no oxygen in that cheese at the moment,
so the mould can't grow on the inside.
So how do you get the oxygen in?
We get the oxygen in by using a stainless steel needle.
It's a technique developed at least 200 years ago.
And we just basically push it in the cheese at an angle,
all the way in...
Thar she blows!
So that is like opening the windows. That is opening the window.
So that the lovely spores can have enough fuel...
Absolutely. ..to start growing. Yep.
When it's about four weeks old,
a Stilton is pierced around 100 times,
which allows the mould spores to spread
creating its blue veins and distinctive tang.
It is very artistic.
It's probably like a snowflake.
You could cut it and every time it would be a different pattern.
It's beautiful.
So there we have it.
The huge variety of cheeses that we enjoy
are all thanks to mould and bacteria.
They are the unlikely heroes of the cheese board.
MUSIC: Rather Be by Clean Bandit
Thanks to our bacteria and three months of maturing, the cheddar
for our processed cheese is ready.
And a new delivery is made every week to the factory in Gateshead.
The company, run by a charity,
has been making cheesy products since 1924,
and they all start in the preparation room.
There's 200 kilos of cheddar waiting for me and new products officer
Sharon Cunningham to begin turning it into spreadable cheese.
Here? Yeah, just there.
Right. How do you get that into a little, squeezy tube?
Now, you're going to cut it in half.
Like this? Yeah, yeah.
Crying out loud!
The cheddar's in 20 kilo blocks,
and we need to chop them up so the factory's machines can cope
with this very dense cheese.
Do you know what? It's better if you wiggle it.
I need enough cheddar for 5,400 tubes.
How many of those have I got to cut in half?
You've got to cut...
..196kg, so there's about... Well, you've cut that one.
About another nine of them. Yeah.
Can you phone me wife and tell her I'm going to be late for dinner?
Right, OK. On the scale?
Yeah.
You're getting the hang of that now, Greg.
That is physically really quite demanding.
It takes me 20 minutes...
SHE CHUCKLES
..of solid slicing.
Ugh! That'll do.
I've never have been so relieved to see the back of a piece of cheese.
But it's not the only kind we're using.
We've also got 144 kilos of Gouda.
Together, they'll make up 42% of our finished spreadable cheese.
Why do you add Gouda? Gouda is a milder flavour.
Very mild. Compared to that. Oh, love, give us a bit!
Crying out loud! Just done 20, 30 kilo of cheddar for you
and what do I get?!
What wouldn't fill the stomach of an average mouse!
That is a lovely, strong, mature cheddar, but that's
too strong for you. Yes.
So you put the Gouda in to make it milder, basically. Yep.
Right, how much Gouda? I'm frightened to ask.
144, it'll be.
Thankfully the Gouda is soft enough to go in as it is.
We still need 15 kilos. Go on, put that on.
That's a total of 340 kilos of solid cheese that will go
into our squeezy tubes.
Yes! Yay!
I've gone right off cheese.
I can imagine!
We'll be putting these hefty chunks into hi-tech tubes, but cheddar
was first sold as a convenience food a whole century ago.
Ru's finding out how it all began with food historian Polly Russell.
Polly! Hello! Great to see you again. You too, you too.
So, when and where do we see the beginning of processed cheese?
We have to go back 100 years.
We're going to go back to Chicago, and it starts with a man whose name
will be familiar to you - James Lewis Kraft.
Is that Kraft with a K? Kraft with a K.
Familiar? Oh, yes, it is!
And he was the son of a German immigrant farmer
and he was delivering cheese to Chicago on the back
of horse-drawn carts.
He wanted to find a way to produce cheese that would not deteriorate,
that would remain totally stable.
Before modern refrigeration,
cheese went off quickly in the hot Chicago summers.
But Kraft found a way to stabilise it,
giving it a much longer shelf life.
And I have a patent here from 1916.
"The Improved Process of Sterilizing Cheese."
Sterilizing.
Yeah, the sterilizing is crucial because bacteria, microbes,
are absolutely essential to cheese.
They are what makes cheese cheese, but it also means that it changes,
that it is, you know, precarious.
Yeah, it's a sort of living organic substance. It is.
It is. By sterilizing the cheese, it is not
going to deteriorate,
and that's what this patent is for.
We're recreating the very first processed cheddar
by following the original patent.
It doesn't actually specify what sort of cheddar to use.
We're using a quite mature farmhouse cheddar.
There are no other ingredients.
The patent simply requires the cheese to be heated.
"A temperature of 175 degrees Fahrenheit,
"maintained for a period of ten or 15 minutes
"is ample to ensure thorough sterilization."
Processing complete.
We pour it into a container to set up.
So that's it.
Got some sterile processed cheese.
Once cool, it's ready for sampling.
Ew!
Oh, my!
That's horrible. That's just vile.
It's the texture thing.
It's like butter and chalk mixed together, isn't it? Yeah!
It's hard to imagine that this is what the inventor had in mind,
and it tastes nothing like today's processed cheese.
So this time we're adding an ingredient that isn't mentioned
in the patent, but that's essential when combining fats with liquids.
We're going to use an emulsifier.
Now, I suspect that Kraft used
an emulsifier back in 1916, because they were around then.
Do you think he did it deliberately?
In his patent, he's actually quite vague.
Yeah, it's interesting cos usually, you know, a patent is
supposed to stipulate very clearly. Clearly.
Yeah, I mean, maybe he thought,
"I've spent years and years working this out.
"I'm not having someone else come along..."
And nick it. "..and nicking it." Yeah.
Completely different.
And that's just that little bit of emulsifier and nothing else. Yeah.
It's really bound everything together, hasn't it?
This silky processed cheese was sold in blocks and made
its creator extremely rich.
By 1930, it's estimated that 40% of all cheese sold in America
was produced in Kraft factories.
We're talking about processed cheese but I tend to think
of it, you know, like, pre-sliced.
Yes. Norman Kraft, brother of James, in 1935 wanted to work out a way
to make processed cheese even more convenient for the consumer
and produced sliced cheese.
So, what Norman worked out was that if you put the molten cheese
on a cold stainless steel top and then rolled it with a
cold stainless steel rolling pin,
it would remain pliable enough to get it into slices.
My goodness. So that is that is your processed cheese slice, isn't it?
That's your processed cheese, yup.
And that first becomes available in 1950.
Have we improved it?
It's much easier to eat.
The sharpness is gone, but so is all that horrible texture.
This is what you expect from modern processed cheese.
It took the US by storm,
its convenience making it an instant fast food hit.
And giving us those American classics -
grilled cheese and cheeseburgers.
The main thing is that it's the ultimate product
for mass production in terms of food.
Total uniformity, complete consistency,
there's never going to be any waste.
I mean, it just suits the modern food supply system perfectly.
And in that sense, it's ingenious,
but I wonder, you know, the extent to which housewives before
had ever thought, "Gosh, slicing cheese is a real bother."
LAUGHTER
I don't know!
In Gateshead, we're ready to process our blend
of hard cheddar and Gouda.
Cooking it up will give it a long life,
but how on Earth are we going to make it soft and spreadable?
OK, where do we start?
Right, dose of water.
Water?! Water. Water?! Water.
The cheese makers took ages taking all the water out of it!
I know. We're putting it back in.
Do you want to do it? Just put that down? Yep.
And then you press that one.
It needs 177 litres of water.
Right, what goes in now?
The liquid cheese. Liquid cheese? Yeah.
But that's what we're supposed to be doing,
turning this hard cheese to liquid cheese.
What we're pumping in is cheese made using different production methods,
which keep it soft.
It's a low-fat cheese.
You can have more cheese for less calories, and it adds to the taste.
The liquid base is essential for making and keeping
our cheese squeezy.
What goes in next?
Milk powder. It'll make it a little bit sweeter.
Whoa-argh.
Now what goes in? We put in the whey powder.
You've got whey powder? Yep.
You know the cheddar makers, they've taken the whey out,
you're going to put the whey in? We are.
They've taken the liquid out, you're putting liquid in. Yeah.
Mate, you need to get together with the cheese makers!
We seem to have made cheese only to be unmaking it again.
In there? Yeah.
The whey will make our base thicker and creamier.
It's a bit hubble-bubble.
Next, it's those all-important emulsifiers...
Stick it in? Yeah.
..that will stop the fats and liquids separating.
And starch will thicken the mix, like adding cornflour to gravy,
but there's still something crucial missing.
Can I put the cheese in now?
No, we have to whizz it up first.
Come on, then. Lid down? Yep, lid down.
MACHINE WHIRS
Is it going to take off?
After nearly nine hours of active production, at last we're ready
for the star of the show.
So can I put the cheese in?
Yep.
And that big punch of flavour.
Right now, that's all liquid, right? Yeah, it is.
That's like frying a lump of cheddar into a milkshake. Yeah.
Most of the factories I see, nobody touches anything.
Little machines come out and do it.
But this is very hands on.
So what do we do now? Stir it around?
Yeah. yeah. We heat it up and mix it up.
Agitator!
Heating? Heating.
Yes? Yep.
Put it on auto. And auto.
It's a bit space-age for a bit of cheese, innit?
Inside are 12-inch steel blades
strong enough to cut through the cheddar,
and the giant blender doubles as an oven,
melting the cheese at 95 Celsius and spreading it through the mix.
You can properly hear that machine working, can't you? Yeah.
And I can hear the lumps of cheese bouncing off the side.
That machine's getting a proper workout.
There are literally hundreds of great cheese dishes,
but, in my opinion,
nothing beats good old-fashioned cheese on toast.
But are you making it correctly?
Cherry's been getting the recipe for success.
Cheese on toast - it is a national comfort food.
How do you make it? Brown bread.
I toast the one side... Yes? ..with the cheese on and I put
Worcester sauce on and then grill it.
I'm going to put butter on both sides.
Ooh!
It's time to settle this once and for all -
is there a scientific method for making cheese on toast?
I'm heading to the University of Reading to meet
food experimenter Dr Stuart Farrimond.
Hey, Dr Stu! Hey, Cherry. Good to see you.
So are there any golden rules?
There is some serious science behind how to make the perfect
cheese on toast.
Let's start with the base, the foundation, the vehicle
for the cheese - the bread.
Now, I don't know if you've noticed this but when you toast brown,
it never comes out quite as good as white bread, and there's
good reasons for that.
The brown bread contains a substance called ferulic acid.
That stops this wonderful browning reaction that goes on on the top.
So I prefer brown bread. I think it has more flavour.
I know it's got more fibre.
But you're saying that for cheese on toast, white is preferable.
If we're just thinking about taste and flavour, then you should
go for white.
And Dr Stu recommends pre-sliced.
So you might think, "Let's go for the chunky."
Let's go for the chunky one. Getting more bread in there.
But most of the flavour is coming from this browning reaction
on the outside and so medium works out to be a really good compromise.
So the next big debate.
Butter or no butter? Butter. Really?
Not if you're thinking about your health, but the flavours
that come from that browning reaction blend very well with fat,
which is why if you have a dry piece of toast you don't get the flavour
from it because you haven't got the fat there to release it.
And do we need to spread it carefully?
Need to get it right to the very edges because this is going to let
the very edge which isn't going to have cheese on it
have some flavour to it.
And also it'll help prevent it from burning
when it's under the grill.
Next up, the cheese.
Got mild, medium and extra mature cheddar.
So, which one is the cheese of dreams?
The best melting cheese is either the mild or the medium.
I would have thought you'd go for the extra mature cheddar.
The longer a cheese is aged for,
the proteins that hold it together
they become so tightly intertwined with one another,
they can't soften quickly enough
when you put it under the grill,
so it's important you have a fairly young cheese if you want it to melt well.
I always slice but Dr Stu insists on grating and careful measuring.
50g of cheese is the optimum amount.
I probably got about 200g.
The accuracy doesn't stop there.
You would have thought you should have it really close
to cook it well.
The surprising thing is that if you double the distance,
the heat only drops by a third.
So at this distance, you get a nice even spread of the heat.
That's a scientific 18 centimetres.
You want a medium temperature, about 130 degrees C,
because that's the temperature at which the browning reactions will start.
Science aside, cheese on toast is a beautiful thing.
MUSIC: Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
Look at that.
But my slapdash approach won't win any beauty prizes.
Oh, dear. Oh, dear me.
So mine is bad. Are there any condiments that you can use
to really take it to another level?
I like Worcester sauce.
I'd say put it on at the end and that heightens the flavour
of the cheese and all the flavours that are in there.
We're going to try mine first.
It's not BAD. It's not bad.
It's cheese and it's toast. How bad can it be?
But it's quite hard to eat. It's like eating into a leather sole.
Mm-hm. Let's try my cheese special.
Oh, it looks really nice. It looks better. Cheers.
Mm. Mm-mm. Mm-mm. I mean...
It's just the yummiest thing. It's lovely and flavourful.
So I can safely say that you've taken a household staple to a new level.
We've given it the science treatment.
At the factory, our 788 kilos of processed cheese mix
has been cooking and blending for 35 minutes.
Big cheesy smell!
Fabulous.
Right, what's next?
Put the jalapenos in.
The extra flavour for our batch....
Chilies away!
..is a whopping 22 kilos of red and green chilli peppers.
I'm guessing the green one's bitter. Yeah.
And the red one's sweeter. Yeah.
One last mix and five minutes' steaming
to cook the frozen jalapenos.
Have we got cheese? We have got cheese.
Go on. Shall we have a look?
And our spreadable cheese is ready.
Wow. I don't mind telling you that aroma is lovely.
That's a massive fondue, isn't it? It is.
So are we ready to pour this out? Or...
We need to take a sample fast.
That is red hot.
Shall we? Yes.
Cheese!
We got cheese!
Before we can use our hot jalapeno mix,
it has to pass Sharon's quality checks.
I just can't imagine what tests you have to do on cheese.
What do you have to test it for?
We're looking at the consistency of it.
It's runny.
Yeah, but if it was a lot runnier than that, we'd be worried.
Obviously we need to taste it. Taste it?
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm your man.
I get the tang from the cheddar and I get the heat from the chilli.
Is that what you want? Definitely.
OK.
So, we put this sample in that machine.
Is it taking an X-ray? Not an X-ray as such.
It's like fingerprints.
So it'll shine light into the cheese and reflect it back
to tell you what the fat and moisture
and the salt content of it is.
Our blend aces the tests.
Is that it? That's done. That's it.
That cheese is ready to go in the tubes. It is. Sharon.
Thank you very much. Thank you, Gregg. Cheers.
Our hot chilli cheese travels 30 meters into one
of these 1,500-litre tanks.
The factory makes up to four flavours at a time.
So in here there's also salmon, prawn and ham.
Rob Thurgood is the production manager.
Rob. Hiya. Gregg.
I need to get cheese from there into the squeezy tubes.
Right, Gregg.
Your cheese currently is in Holding Tank 1.
We need to get it into Filler 1.
And you do it with these hoses? With these hoses.
In this factory there are four filling stations, and it's vital
that my mixture is sent to the right one.
So just like an old telephone exchange? It is.
So this one here, that is clearly pumping
and actually that is red-hot.
What are the challenges with moving cheese?
We want to keep it hot
so it stays liquid and keep it moving, continuously moving
all the time.
But of this doesn't stay hot, it'll start to go thick. It will.
No-one wants pipes full of solid cheese, right?
Definitely not.
How long have you got to move it through?
You've got about an hour to keep it moving. Right.
That... Unscrew it? Unscrew it.
And tighten it with the big spanner.
Push the green button.
Your cheese is now on its way over.
Yeah, OK, that's moving.
Gallons of red-hot liquid cheese. It's quite scary. It is.
We've got our cheese. Now...
we need something to put it in.
And Cherry's on the case.
This Colchester factory is the UK's biggest manufacturer
of flexible tubes.
They make 750 million a year.
For toothpaste,
beauty products and, of course, cheese.
Surprisingly, what ends up as black squeezy tubes starts off as a roll
of white layered aluminium and plastic.
Lee Woolgar is head printer.
Hi, Lee. Hiya.
So, are you going to show me how to make a squeezy cheese tube?
I am. Where do we start?
Printing is the first stage.
Right. What have we got here?
OK. This is the artwork is made up of seven different plates
which is seven different colours which go into making the design.
This will have all the detail
that we need for the black.
Every part of the design that isn't going to be black has been cut
out of this printing plate.
And this is just a kind of rubber sheet?
Yes. That holds the ink.
There are six other sheets with different sections removed
according to their ink colour.
Let's do some art.
Oh clever. Right.
To print evenly, each rubber plate
is wrapped around a roller.
Then they're slotted into a 25-metre long printer.
So that goes on here. Can I do it? Yeah.
All right. Do I have to line up that bit with that bit?
Yes.
All right.
Is it good to go? It is.
Each section has a different roller and ink colour.
Oh, look at that.
Rich blue, that is beautiful.
Are you ready? Go for it.
There she blows!
Every colour adds a new element to the design.
Hey.
That is just incredible.
It's whipping through at 100 metres a minute, repeating the pattern
12,000 times.
That is a fast printer.
It takes only ten minutes for a 1km reel to be printed
and pop out the other end.
Woohoo!
And then it just rolls. Wey-hey!
Oh, that's brilliant. It's like a gigantic arcade game.
That flat white laminate has been transformed
but it still looks nothing like a tube.
Hi, Steve. Hello.
Engineer Steve is ready for the next stage.
Under there.
And then over this roller.
First, we thread the machine, a bit like you would
an old-fashioned film projector.
If you press that button there...
Yeah. ..the machine should start for you, hopefully.
Oh, look!
It starts off flat, and then as it goes through there,
it's made it a circle.
The machine curls the sides in to form a cylinder
then heats up the edges, melting them together.
It's almost like a garden hose.
A cheesy tube, like a massive snake.
Correct.
So, here it gets chopped.
Yes, it gets chopped, to the same size every single time.
I mean, it's incredibly fast. So it's two rollers chopping.
Yes. How many are going through there?
Running at about 160 tubes per minute.
It'll take just half an hour to make the 5,400
Gregg needs, but at the moment they're still open-ended cylinders.
Oh, look, I can see here. I don't know what you call them.
Shoulders.
You call them what? Shoulders.
Oh, my God, I totally see why you call it a shoulder.
If the cap is the head, that does look like a shoulder.
Yes. That's so brilliant.
Once the shoulders are melted on,
the machine adds a metal and plastic
seal to the nozzle to make sure no cheesy mix can escape.
And that's the bit I really struggle to get off
cos it's really fiddly.
It's very fiddly and very tight because it has to be a correct seal.
And then where do you add the cap?
The caps come down here.
I love it - the shoulders are there, heads are there,
what about the knee and toes?
Then it screws on like that? Absolutely.
Then out the other end,
lo and behold, is that a tube that's nearly done?
It is. It's a finished tube. Look at that.
And only 40 minutes ago, these were a sheet
of flat white plastic.
So, there we have it.
A lovely finished tube with its seal and shoulders and cap
all in place. That's a batch there of 150.
All they need now is some of Gregg's cheese.
I'm on it. At the factory, my hot and squeezy jalapeno mix
has reached its filling station.
Right. What's this? These are the tubes.
These are Cherry's tubes.
We're going to fill 5,400
of them with our 810 kilos of processed cheese.
So, this is what you call the finger picker.
It's the finger picker. Picks 16 tubes up at a time.
The machine is lifting them straight from their delivery box.
Two rubber discs go inside, captures it,
flips it over, and then it gets pulled up by a rake.
Oh, I can see. It's like a big fork.
The tubes are spun into the right position with pinpoint accuracy.
And those two blue lights, small lights,
are looking for this blue mark all the time. That will align them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
If it wasn't the right way round, when it bent, it might bend
down the middle of the info
and you want it to seal like that.
Like that every time.
Every time. Clever! Clever.
The empty tubes are in place.
And above the machine is our vat of jalapeno cheese,
bubbling away at 85 degrees Celsius.
So, the cheese is up there in that hopper.
How is it getting into those tubes?
What look like steel udders...
inside there is a metal spindle.
The cheese comes down.
Starts filling.
And as it starts to put the hot cheese in, it comes away.
Yeah. So it's got the right amount.
150g goes into each tube, leaving enough space to seal it in.
It looks like they're milking a cow. Robo-cow. Robo-cow.
Well, cheese is milk, isn't it?
Now there's a 400-degree blast of air.
It's so hot, it melts the ends of the tubes together.
And finally, the machine neatly trims off the edges.
State-of-the-art engineering
so that we can squirt some cheese out of a tube.
Yep!
It's taken 45 minutes to fill my batch of tubes.
Now they're weighed...
and X-rayed to make sure
there's nothing inside but our mix.
Now what happens to our tubes of cheese?
Now the tubes go into to the blast chiller.
Ready for packing for the customers. Incredible.
Squeezy cheese finished...
..what shall we spread it on?
Surprisingly, the rather refined cheese cracker started life
as this.
The hard tack ship's biscuit.
Made for sailors to eat on long sea voyages...
..they were thick and tough.
That is rock hard.
In 1831, a factory baking ship's biscuits was established
here in Carlisle by Jonathan Dodgson Carr.
Mr Carr went on to develop a thinner ship's biscuit that was much
more delicate and fit for the captain's table,
and advertised to be eaten with cheese.
These table water biscuits were an instant hit
and have been made here ever since.
Hi, Tony. Lovely to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
So, what's happening right now?
We're just about to set a mix off. Can I do the honours?
Yes, just that button there.
There she blows!
Tony Kidd makes seven million crackers every day.
It's a deceptively simple recipe.
600 kilos of flour, mixed with 155 litres of water...
..plus a little oil and salt.
Wow, look at that.
God, it is so crumbly.
The mix is sent downstairs,
where Tony's going to show me the secret of transforming it
into a crispy cracker.
It then goes through a set of rollers.
Oh, look how... Can I touch it? Yeah. Yeah.
So when it comes out of that set od rollers, that's about three
and a half centimetres.
I mean, it's like a paving stone, it's so heavy and dense.
Yeah. It's really, really bound together tightly.
This dense, heavy dough is thinned down through a series of rollers
to just four and a half millimetres.
So, what on Earth is going on here?
So it just goes through our lamination process.
What is a lamination process?
To me, lamination is when you put a plastic sheet over something.
Basically, lamination puts layers in it.
So, it's a layering process.
So, you've now got six sheets of dough.
Why have you done that?
We'll see further down the process.
The layers are flattened and re-rolled until the sheet
is just 1.5 millimetres thick.
Oh, here we go. Finally.
All right. We have our final sheet.
That is... It looks like material.
It's so thin, it looks like a kind of cotton sheet.
Yeah. Is it now ready to be cut out? It is. Yes.
The dough speeds under a cutting roller
which punches out more than 5,000
cracks a minute.
Oh, look!
Here we are.
Oh, these are amazing.
God, they're so thin.
Can I pick one up? Yeah.
It is quite a thin... It's incredibly thin.
I mean, look at that. That is paper thin, nearly.
The delicate discs head into a 150-foot oven,
heated to an intense 370 degrees Celsius,
emerging two and a half minutes later as hot,
crisp crackers.
Hooray! Look at these. Oh, my gosh. Here they are.
Can we take one off the line? Yeah. They're very warm.
You've got to move fast. Yeah. They are very warm.
Woohoo!
Can I try it? Yeah.
Mmm.
It's really flaky.
Is that because of that lamination process?
It is. Yeah. Yeah.
That's the six layers of flakiness that it gives you,
that lamination process. And that's where you get that lovely crunch.
Yeah - the bite.
Over 150 years of biscuit making tradition,
coming to a cheeseboard near you.
And to think it all started from a rock-hard ship's biscuit.
In Gateshead, my 5,400 tubes of jalapeno cheese
has arrived in packaging.
That's cold now.
Last time I touched it, it was red-hot.
Now it's really cold. Below five degrees.
The tubes have been blast-chilled at minus 15 degrees C.
Now they're cold, what happens to them?
So, now they get put into trays of 12. This is our robot.
I know it's weird, but it seems to me like the machine
is really pleased with itself.
It's lovely - it's stacking them up like soldiers
on parade there. It's fantastic.
We all need a machine like this to organise our homes, don't we?
That's how I would like my sock drawer.
So would I!
Mate, thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you.
It's 11 hours and 56 minutes since production began with milk.
And now my tubes are being loaded 15 at a time
into 450 boxes.
They travel into a massive 800-square-metre chiller
and from there, orders are collected for distribution.
Today, managing director Paul Lewney
is sending them off to the shops.
Hi. Paul. Gregg. You're the big boss.
Cheese ready to go. Absolutely.
So, as accurately as you can,
how many actual tubes leave your factory every day?
Every day, Gregg, we'll ship about 115,000 tubes.
Seven days a week? Seven days a week across the whole country.
We can't be eating that many.
Trust me, you are. We can't be.
People are confusing it with toothpaste.
Absolutely not.
This is our last pallet, isn't it?
It looks like it's ready to go.
Shall we let him load? Yep. Take it away.
From here, it's distributed to supermarkets all over the UK.
It also has fans as far afield as Malta, Greece and Korea.
What a journey for a piece of cheese.
From a creamery in North Wales to a factory in Gateshead.
We started off with enormous blocks of cheddar that I had to cut in half
and then add Gouda.
Then a lot of other ingredients then cook it all up.
All so that it would fit inside a squeezy tube.
Amazing.