The Cornish pasty. This pastry-based meal-for-one is a British classic.
We get through 120 million of them a year.
Laid end to end,
that's enough to stretch from here to Bangkok and back.
To be labelled as Cornish pasties,
every single one of them needs to be made in Cornwall.
That's because, legally, they have protected geographical status.
You can't go making them anywhere else.
So, to find out how they're made,
I've come here to the biggest Cornish pasty factory in the world.
Whoa! That's a swede avalanche.
I'm Gregg Wallace.
Oh, sorry. Now, you...
It's sticking, it's sticking!
And I'm getting a much-needed lesson in pastry management.
Whoa!
And flavourful fillings.
For a proper Cornish pasty, it's got to be baked from raw ingredients.
I didn't know that.
I'm Cherry Healey.
I'll be getting to the root of what goes into this savoury treat.
Aaah! It's really hard.
No, a little bit more. Ha, ha!
It's like I'm carving a Sunday roast.
And historian Ruth Goodman...
Look at the chandeliers!
..is unearthing the truth behind some common pasty myths.
I've heard the crimp around the edge was used just as handle.
Sorry, I'm not going to go along with this. You're not convinced?
Over the next 24 hours,
180,000 Cornish pasties
will fly out the door of this bakery.
Welcome to Inside the Factory.
This is the Ginsters bakery in the town of Callington, Cornwall.
This 20-acre site makes over three million savoury
pastries every week.
From chicken and mushroom to steak slices.
But, today, we're looking at how they make
their large Cornish pasties.
In order to be called Cornish,
they not only have to be made in Cornwall, but they can only contain
three specific vegetables -
onion, potato and swede.
The first of today's vegetable deliveries is arriving
at the bakery's intake area...
..where I'm meeting production director Richard Bain.
Good morning. And to you.
What you got there - fresh batch of swedes? Exactly right.
So how much swede have you got in here now?
2.1 tonnes on this delivery. 2.1 tonnes of swede?!
We're making a lot of pasties.
You know, we've got to keep the swede rolling. How many pasties will that make?
So we'd expect this delivery to make 184,000 pasties.
Crikey. Come on, let's have a look.
All right, get it unloaded.
Our pasty production begins.
Brilliant!
This tough little root veg was first introduced to the UK
in the 18th century.
Today, farmers sow its seeds in the early summer
and harvest in the autumn and winter. Cherry is lending a hand.
It's 8am and swede dreams are about to be made right here.
This 550-acre farm in Devon grows 12,500 tons of swedes a year.
Farm manager Richard Clarke is in charge.
Morning, Richard. Morning, Cherry. All right?
I've got a lot of pasties that are in need of a swede. Yeah.
I think you might be able to help me, looking at this field. Yeah. We've got a few.
Oh, wow.
Look at that. Oh. Would you like to try a bite?
I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of eating a raw suede.
First time for everything.
That's quite nice. Quite sweet, really, isn't it?
So what is the difference between a swede and a turnip?
Turnips are quite white on the bottom and more purple around the top.
More of a radish, really, a bit more bitter.
Whereas swedes are orange and sweet, but they're not the easiest of veg
to get out of the ground.
Oh, my God. Feel like The Sword in the Stone.
Aaaargh! Oh, I got it!
Great, yeah.
Fortunately, Richard has the help of a seven-and-a-half-ton harvester...
..that can pull up 200 a minute.
There's a long piece of metal that goes just underneath the roots of the swede. Yeah.
So a huge spade goes underneath the roots, lifts up the swede.
To bring it up, yeah, exactly.
Hidden just behind the wheels, the blade scoops up the veg
and bounces them over a perforated conveyor which shakes off the soil.
Large stones, leaves and roots are picked out by hand.
Then the swedes drop into a trailer,
which is pulled alongside.
So is that your average swede? Yeah.
What's a big swede?
Ho!
You're not mucking about, are you?
Yeah. You could make a lot of pasties with that. You could, yeah.
Whoppers and tiddlers alike, Richard's harvester gathers
100 tonnes of them a day.
They head four miles down the road...
..where they are tipped into a 9,000-litre water bath...
Here they co... Whoa!
..which cleans them up.
The swedes are having a swim.
Yeah, this is the first wash they get.
They climb up and into a rotating drum, which tumbles them
at 20 revolutions a minute.
It's a bit like a very elaborate carwash.
Yeah, pretty much. But just for a swede. Yeah.
Now free of soil, the swedes are sorted by size.
Only the small and medium ones fit through our factory's machines.
So the big ones are separated out.
They'll head off to supermarkets and other factories instead.
Look at these now they're all washed. They look beautiful.
Yeah. It does have a bit of a hairdo problem.
Yeah, well, we'll take that off next door.
A team of 15 people use machetes
to give 375 swedes a short back and sides every minute.
So, quick and forceful. Yeah, you've got to be confident.
Aaargh.
It's really hard.
Oh, is that not enough? No, a little bit more.
Ha, ha, it's like I'm carving a Sunday roast.
I don't think I'm cut out for this.
Now topped and tailed, the clean-cut veg are presentable enough
to become pasty filling.
68 miles down the road in misty Cornwall,
it's taken 30 minutes to offload today's 2,100-kilo delivery.
Once safely inside, prep operator Paul Hutchins checks them over.
Hello, Gregg. Hello, my friend.
Yah, big pile of swedes. What happens to them now?
They are put into the swede tipper behind you.
And what do we do? Just tip it up? Yeah, carefully tip it up.
Obviously, you don't want 300 kilos of swede going over at once.
My reputation for clumsiness clearly precedes me.
Whoa, bit nervous.
But I reckon I can't go wrong pressing a button.
The tipper uses an eight-tonne hydraulic ram to lift the veg.
I can hear 'em. Yeah.
Whoa, whoa! But I've been a bit heavy-handed.
Whoa! Yeah, you've got to...
That's a swede avalanche!
I've overloaded the chute.
HE LAUGHS
Did I tip it up too high?
I messed it up a bit, didn't I?
Yes, you did a little bit.
We're quickly back on track and our swedes take a short 20-metre trip
to the vegetable prep area.
Here, they fall into a water tank for another wash.
This is the reason why we don't let so many down the belt in one go.
As you can see in there. That's all right, that's not full up.
No, they should all be under water.
Oh!
Sorry. That's all right.
Luckily, my swede sabotage hasn't completely messed things up.
With the push of a button, they're raised out of the water
by an Archimedes screw and are dropped into a rotating drum
which strips them of their skin.
You can actually hear the swedes hitting the side of the drum.
That's the high speed it's spinning at.
You know what that's like? Being under a tin roof in a thunderstorm.
Yes.
It's spinning at 230 revolutions per minute.
I've got a spare one here.
It's a very rough, abrasive material we use there.
It's like a heavy duty sandpaper. Yes, it is.
That spins very fast, pushing the swede against the side,
which is what causes them to peel.
Wow.
That is seriously abrasive.
It is. Yeah.
This mean machine de-skins 30kg of swedes in just 50 seconds.
Whoa!
HE LAUGHS
Peel them beautifully, don't they? They do.
The newly nude veg are lifted out of the water
by another Archimedes screw.
Now what happens? They are cut into flakes.
You don't dice them up?
We flake them because they cook quicker.
RATTLING
Each swede is pushed through a blade
which slices it into three millimetre thick strips.
It's raining swede!
Then each slice is cut into two centimetre squares called flakes.
GREGG LAUGHS
We weigh out 45 kilos of them for one batch of pasties.
Do you know how many pasties that would make?
Yeah, roughly 3,600.
Big numbers for a little swede, right? Very big numbers, yes.
Yes, we got swedes.
HE GROANS
40 minutes after my swedes arrive,
they're prepped and ready for pasty making.
One veg down, two to go.
Next up is the humble spud.
A batch of 224kg is de-skinned and flaked, just like our swede.
The third and final veg is onion,
which is prepped last...
I'll help.
..because it can quickly lose moisture and dry out.
How many onions do we need for our batch? 50 kilos. 50 kilos.
Why don't you cry when they're chopping the onions?
You will eventually.
Well, that's our three veg prepped and ready for our Cornish pasties.
But when did the Cornish pasty become, well, the Cornish pasty?
Ruth's going underground to find out.
Cornwall isn't just famous for its pasties.
For around 4,000 years,
it was the centre of tin mining.
It's been claimed that the men who toiled at the rock face invented
pasties as a convenient snack -
and that they even helped influence their classic shape.
But how much of what we think we know about Cornish pasties
is really true?
I've arranged an underground rendezvous in this abandoned mine
with food historian Glyn Hughes...
Glyn? Ruth. Hey! THEY LAUGH
..to help me unpack the connection between miners and pasties.
Digging this rock out is really, really hard work.
You need to get energy inside you.
And what could be better than a pasty?
Yeah, makes sense.
We've got a photograph here in my miner's bag.
This is from the 1890s.
Yeah, I mean, that's really clearly a pasty.
It's a meal all in one, isn't it? It's simple.
It's easy to carry and it's cheap.
These fellas were not well-paid, they were very often working on a
system where they only got paid if they could actually get tin ore out.
So you want something you can eat quick because it's eating into your earning. Absolutely.
It is the ultimate convenience food.
It's clear that miners WERE packing pasties in their lunches.
But what about the idea that they had a very particular
way of eating them?
I've heard, traditionally,
the crimp around the edge, that sort of crust bit,
was used just as a handle and wasn't for eating.
Well, have a look. Freshly made.
The reason for that story, I think, is that this isn't just tin ore.
There's also arsenic here.
And that's not a very good thing to get on your hands. Right.
So if you just hold it by the crust, then you throw the crust away,
you don't eat the arsenic. Well, I'm not going to go along with this.
You're not convinced?
Actually, I couldn't even hold the weight of the pasty just by the crust. No, I don't think so.
In any case, we've seen it from the 1890s.
And they've got them in little bags.
Lovely little cloth bag!
Yeah. Absolutely.
So is there any actual historical evidence of 19th-century miners
using it as a handle?
Well, we've been back through literally thousands and thousands
of newspapers and magazines going back to the 18th century
and we can find absolutely no mention of it anywhere.
So it seems the traditional story of how miners ate
these pasties is false.
Far from being a handle, the crimps simply sealed the fillings
into the pastry.
Shall we go and get some fresh air? Some fresh air, yes.
And these miners can't lay claim to inventing the pasty either.
Ah, daylight!
People had been folding pastry over fillings for 2,000 years,
and it's thought that the first use of the word "pasty" came way back
in the 13th century.
This is what a traditional medieval pasty would look like.
It's one single piece of meat, in this case, some venison,
some wine with spices, with butter, nutmeg on top,
a very fancy piece of pastry around it.
This is not your everyday snack down a tin mine, is it?
So who exactly would have been eating something like that?
The fella in the big house.
Right. The King.
The Queen.
Oh, now, that looks good, doesn't it?
Very reminiscent of the beef Wellington. It is.
So how, then, do we go from this sort of pasty to what we know today
as a Cornish pasty?
As always, with ordinary, everyday people's foods,
the problem is it doesn't get written down.
It's only the posh people's stuff that gets written down.
Over the centuries, the vegetable contents slowly increased
and Cornwall became particularly associated
with these pastry-wrapped treats.
The earliest reference we can definitely find to a Cornish pasty
is, strangely enough, in the Leeds Times.
This is 1861 and this says, "The standing dish of Cornwall
"is the Cornish pasty, small pieces of beef, highly peppered, enclosed
"in a wrapper of paste."
So it's starting to become a regional specialism.
But it's not exactly the same, is it?
There's no vegetables there.
The first reference we can find to a Cornish pasty as it's made now
is as recent as 1929.
It's in Cornish Recipes Ancient and Modern.
And a lovely little poem.
A Cornish Pasty.
Pastry rolled out like a plate,
Piled with "turmut, tates and mate."
Doubled up, and baked like fate,
That's a "Cornish Pasty."
It's there, isn't it? Absolutely.
I mean, the main ingredient, turmut, that's like turnips and swede. Yep.
Tates - potatoes, and mate, accent on meat, isn't it? Yeah.
So why do you think it sort of finally settled
on these simple ingredients?
Because they're cheap, and because they're produced locally.
And very delicious. Very delicious indeed.
There may be gaps in the local history of these famous pastry parcels,
but one thing's for sure - those miner's knew
they were onto a good thing.
Back at the factory, we're continuing that proud
pasty-making tradition. All the veg are prepped.
Hello...
And I'm with Richard to beef up my fillings.
The factory gets through 70,000kg of British beef every week.
Whoa, that's it, a drum of beef.
Can I ask what cut that is?
That's flank from this section of the animal, sits over the top of the rib cage.
There's a nice big-sized muscle of it, so there's plenty of it.
It's 30% fat to 70% meat.
That fat will help to keep our pasty filling moist.
So now you cut it into chunks, I'm guessing.
No, we're going to mince this.
Mince it? You don't have mince in a Cornish pasty!
You can have mince in a Cornish pasty, and we mince it
so we get a nice even amount of beef throughout the whole of the pasty.
What you're saying is if it was chunks, I might take a bite
of a Cornish pasty that might not have meat in. That's right.
Cos it might all be at one end. That's right, yeah.
What percentage of the Cornish pasty is the meat?
So 15% beef in every pasty.
And it's going to need 138 kilos from the mincer to go into our batch
to be able to get the 3,600.
Why do you smile when you say the weight of beef?
Because I just didn't want to forget the number. You swotted up before I got here!
I've made sure I'm aware of the numbers that we're using.
This lot is about to become mince.
Inside this mincer, there is a screw
that pushes it through the mincing plate.
Like an old-fashioned sausage machine?
Yeah, we've just got a big version of it.
Whoa! Look at that.
The screw hacks through the pieces, then forces them through three
plates with increasingly smaller holes.
The meat emerges as uniform, 5mm-thick ribbons of mince.
Whoa! That's a serious amount, isn't it?
At a rate of 1.5 tonnes an hour.
Our spare plates are just here.
Come on, show me.
So this is the first plate.
The red meat comes through this section.
That blade rotates, which cuts the meat.
Then it comes through the next plate, which sits over the top.
And the red soft meat that we're looking for in our pasties
comes through this final plate.
And there's an ingenious way to remove any gristle.
What's the - like sausage - that's coming out the side there?
Well, this tube here is what we call the de-gristling tube. De-gristling tube?
We're working on the basic density,
the tougher chewier part of it is more dense.
So any gristle that might be in there gets exited out the left
and we don't get any gristle or chewy bits in the mince.
The gristle's too big to go through the little holes?
Yeah. And then you sell that to go into other people's pasties?
HE LAUGHS No, that goes to food waste.
Over an hour into the process,
our mince is covered to keep it fresh.
But it still needs seasoning.
# Spice up your life... #
So I follow my nose to the aptly-named Spice Room.
You can smell it. You can.
An overriding smell of pepper.
The dry powder ingredients for our Cornish pasties are blended here.
So if you can grab the pepper.
Yes. Yes.
They mix in a monster 180-litre blender.
Already inside is salt
and vegetable stock for flavour, and starch to thicken it all up.
I'll just get some coriander and some white pepper
and add some mustard. Righto.
That is a fair amount of mustard.
That's a hot old mix, mate.
But that's not the only kick in here.
Where do these black peppercorns come from? Cos they are powerful, mate.
The pepper's coming from Indonesia. Right.
It's a specific pepper type that we use.
Is it a secret? Yeah.
Is it?
No.
I'm going to take Richard with a pinch of salt from now on.
And I'm keen as mustard to get my seasoning mixed. Tip it all in.
Combining the powders like this ensures that every pasty
gets a consistent blend of spices.
A six-minute spin is all they need.
Now we come into our weighing-up booth.
We are going to get all that up our nose, aren't we?
Well, you step forward into there
and see whether you can tell the difference.
You've got some serious extraction here, haven't you?
This is a downflow booth, it's bringing in the air down gradually
and out through the filters in the bottom.
Out here, you've got the slight irritant of a pepper. Yep.
But, in here, you've got nothing. So this is all designed to make sure
that it's - literally - not going up our nose.
I measure out four bags, each containing four kilos
of my powerful spice blend.
And we head to the Mixing Room,
where all our fillings are finally coming together.
Give these to you? Thank you very much. Thank you. Splendid.
Perfect. So these are all of our ingredients for our pasty mix.
Got our beef. Yeah. Some diced onions.
That's the swede. Are those two at the back potatoes?
They are, that's the potato at the back.
That's a nice mix, mate. That's a nice mix.
But it's not an even mix.
The vegetables are very different sizes.
For a proper Cornish pasty, it's got to be baked from raw ingredients.
I didn't know that. The vegetables are all prepared to a flake
and a size to make sure they all cook evenly at the same time.
So if I get you a piece of swede and a piece of potato, you can see
that the potato is slightly thicker than the swede.
That's because the swede is denser than the potato and will take longer
to cook. You've got it.
And if they were the same size, they would cook at different times.
Exactly right. So you cut 'em exactly right,
so they all cook at the same time. That's it. Let's do it.
Let's do it. Let's get it together.
Our 45 kilograms of swede goes into the paddle mixer first,
followed by 224 kilograms of potatoes.
And finally... Onions!
..50 kilos of them.
Now, we're going to mix all the vegetables to get that nice and even through.
After a couple of minutes, we add the spices.
Nice.
The starch starts to bind all the veg together.
We don't want to put the beef in until the end,
because the beef is a bit more delicate.
It's already minced, why would it matter?
Well, you'd lose the texture. We don't want it to turn into a gravy.
So we're as gentle as we can.
Right, OK.
After two minutes... Whoa!
..we add 138 kilos of our minced beef.
Right at the minute, you've got yellow with pink patches.
It's like somebody's worst nightmare cardigan.
Another 120 seconds and we have 507 kilos...
That's great.
..of evenly mixed meat, veg and seasoning.
You can smell the spice coming off there. You can.
Along with these spices, it's the onion in our blend,
which helps it to pack that flavourful punch.
So what is it about them that we love so much?
And why do they make us cry?
Cherry is getting to grips with their chemistry.
From beefburgers to bolognese,
from stir fries to curry,
onion is the essential ingredient for so many recipes
around the world.
To peel back the layers on this multi-purpose vegetable,
I've come to one of Britain's biggest onion producers,
Collmart, to see Dr Meriel Jones...
Hi, Meriel. Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
..a biologist from the University of Liverpool.
The wonderful onion.
Where does it come from?
They originate from somewhere in Central Asia, where it's very dry
for a lot of the year.
So the sugar, the water in these bulbs would have been great for
people travelling.
I would never think of an onion as having a lot of sugar.
To me, it's savoury.
Yes, but the sugar is concealed in the flavour by the savoury flavours.
Is that why it makes such a good basis for a lot of recipes?
Absolutely. Yes.
It's their complex chemistry which makes onions so versatile
and creates that all-too-familiar teary feeling.
Boy, do they make you cry. But not immediately.
I mean, try taking the skin off one. OK.
And what's it smell like?
Nothing.
The reason I'm not getting that intense onion smell
is because I haven't cut into it.
Inside the onion is a chemical that's within the cell.
And it just sits there quietly, not doing anything.
And there's enzymes in another part of the cell.
They're kept apart until you cut.
When you cut, you break the cells open and the enzymes
break the chemicals up and... Ohhh!
Smells of onion? Oh, yeah.
And it's stingy and slightly uncomfortable.
Inside each onion cell,
the chemicals and enzymes are kept separate.
When the cell is broken open,
they mix, producing new chemicals, including one called
lachrymatory factor.
Lachrymatory factor is what gives the characteristic
smell and taste of onions.
That's the compound that really sets your eyes off.
If there's a lot of that,
you'll start crying.
You can reduce this by wearing goggles or even chopping
under running water, but lachrymatory factor isn't
just an eye irritant.
It also helps give onions their distinctive oniony taste.
And, when you cook them, they release a whole load of new flavours.
So we're going to fry some onions. You'll do them for five minutes.
I'll do them for 15.
So we're going to have a cook-off?
Yeah, we are.
Yeah!
How long you cook them for
determines which flavours you get.
That is a lovely smell.
What is going on inside the onion when it's being cooked?
You're getting a reaction between the sugars, the same sort
of reaction that makes caramel.
So that's a really sweet, nice flavour.
And then they also react with the protein in the onion,
so that you get these great savoury flavours.
Time for them to come out.
It's pretty obvious that cooking onions for just five minutes
isn't long enough.
Well, they certainly look very different. Yours look lovely
and caramelized and mine look a bit pale.
Very punchy. Mm-hm.
After a shorter cooking time, the raw flavour
is still very strong.
Very oniony. Let's try yours.
Whereas the longer-cooked version tastes far better.
A very savoury, sweet flavour now, isn't it?
This oniony sweetness is the basis for so many of our favourite dishes.
When it comes to cooking them,
there is no quick shortcut.
They're just splendid.
It tastes fantastic.
The chemistry under the skin of the onion certainly helps
to explain why this vegetable is so very versatile.
In cloudy Cornwall, we are one hour and 28 minutes
into making our pasties,
but there is one very important component missing.
So I'm heading to the Pastry Production area.
Helping me to wrap this one up is David Eyam.
Morning. You're David? I'm David.
What pastry is this? So we're making puff pastry. Puff pastry?
Puff pastry. Not shortcrust pastry?
Traditionally, in the home kitchen, you might have produced a short
pastry, but because we need to have a product that is both good
cold and hot, we make our pasties with puff pastry.
The problem with, like, a shortcrust is what, it's no good cold?
It tends to be a lot harder to eat. And you'd have a lap full of crumbs.
And that's not what anybody wants.
Show me how you make it.
Sure. So we've got two sets of margarine that are going to go in.
This one is softer and creamier, which is going in for flavour.
How many of these do we need?
We're going to put four and a half in this bowl.
Four and a half.
This first batch of marge has a relatively low melting point... Like that.
..which will create a creamy texture in our pastry.
They look like enormous sugar cubes.
Bit heavier than sugar.
Oops!
We've got another margarine which is going in to get our lift,
because it gives better strength to the dough.
This green-wrapped marge has a higher melting point,
which will strengthen our pastry and help hold it together.
What is in the margarine? Just like the margarine you'd buy
in a shop, it's made of oil and water emulsified together.
88 litres of water drops into the super-sized bowl...
Here he comes.
..along with 224 kilograms of flour.
Press the white button. What, the button that says "discharge flour"?
That's the one.
Enough for a batch of 4,000 pasties.
The difference between this and the way I would do it at home,
is here I haven't got a glass of wine and I'm not listening to Abba.
Would you really want Abba? Yeah!
What's a perfect pastry-making music?
Jazz.
Jazz? Yeah. Contemporary jazz.
LIGHT JAZZ PLAYS
Nice!
Ingredients collected,
next, we swing by the mixer.
How long's it going to mix for?
About two and a half minutes.
As the ingredients combine, the water and flour mix, forming gluten.
Whoa, mate! That is seriously stretchy, isn't it?
The elasticity on it is quite incredible. Yeah.
Look at that.
It's gluten that makes this dough elastic.
It needs to be tough so that we've got enough strength
in there to expand to give us the puff pastry.
Our giant bowl of stretchy dough is lifted up and tipped into a hopper.
Before a series of five rollers
force it through an 18-millimetre-thick slit.
So the dough is extruded and then we cut it in half
and then we put one over the other.
Oh, yeah. One's going up and one's going down.
This all happens because we're adding more margarine.
The margarine is extruded between the two pieces of dough,
as we can see under here.
Ahhhhh!
Right.
That's brilliant. All right.
So the dough is being split.
One's going up, one's going down and then more margarine comes
in the middle - like a sandwich. Correct. That's right.
This process is called lamination.
When the pastry is baked,
the water in the dough of one layer boils, becoming steam.
As the steam expands, it pushes up the layer
of margarine and dough above it, creating a pocket of air.
How many of these layers are you going to have?
There are going to be 80 layers when we finish.
80 of them? 80 layers.
To create the 80 layers,
our dough-fat sandwich is rolled to a thickness of 12mm,
before being folded over on itself, giving us four layers of margarine
sandwiched between five layers of dough.
It's then rolled flat again.
And the process is repeated to produce 16 layers of fat.
Finally, it's cut into sections and stacked.
So this is where we get our 80 layers.
Each piece of pastry here has got 16 layers and they're five deep,
giving us our 80 layers.
Is 5 x 16 = 80?
It was when I was at school.
Maths lesson over - the stacked layers are rolled back down to
create one continuous sheets of dough with microscopic layers
of fat inside it.
And that is 80 layers.
80 layers, you're absolutely right.
80 layers squashed down into one bit of pastry.
All of this folding and rolling takes just seven minutes.
So here we are, this is the end of the pastry-making process.
We've got our 12mm sheet - it's coming along here.
We're then going to cut it into 1.5-metre lengths,
roll it up and place it on the racks
ready to go to the production of the pasties.
The pastry is carefully rolled to protect and store it.
That looks relatively easy to me.
Stand back. Stand back. Round the back here.
Whoa! Whoa!
Erm, I've dropped this one.
I'll take that one away, then.
David might regret allowing me to try this.
Have another go.
Oh!
That one, at least, didn't hit the floor.
GREGG CHUCKLES
It's like wrestling a crocodile.
THEY CHEER
Well taken!
Yes!
You've got it.
I think he's got it.
Each of these pastry rolls weighs 14kg.
That might not sound heavy, but I'm cream crackered.
That's hard work.
Have you got a pasty? I've got plenty.
Like me, the pastry needs to rest.
In 45 minutes' time, the gluten inside it will be more relaxed
and easier to work.
Our pastry is nearly ready to be filled with the spicy Cornish
pasty mix that I whipped up earlier.
And one of the most important ingredients in that mix is pepper.
But when did our love affair with this spice begin?
Whenever I'm tucking into a plate of steak and chips,
the pepper grinder is never far from reach.
But how did this spice become a staple of the British kitchen?
I'm hoping food writer Christine McFadden can help me find out.
Hello, there.
How nice to meet you. And you.
We've come to the home of the Worshipful Company of Grocers...
Wow.
..which was originally called the Guild of Pepperers.
Enter.
Oh, look at the chandeliers.
From the 12th century, it was responsible for setting
the standards of pepper imports to Britain.
So what exactly is it that is so special about pepper?
It had the same kind of importance as, say, oil has now.
So how much worth am I holding?
Well, in the 12th century, you're holding, pound for pound,
maybe the same as gold.
Wow.
It was so expensive that it was known as black gold.
I mean, who on Earth is eating
something that's worth its weight in gold?
Mainly the noble people, and they wheeled it out at banquets.
It was a status symbol.
So it's super-rich party food.
Yes, absolutely.
Peppercorns came from the pepper plant, which is native to Asia.
Its high price was largely due to the expense of transporting it.
So, notoriously, a difficult plant.
It has to grow in the tropics, Vietnam, south-west India.
It requires dampness, monsoons, rain.
We cannot grow it in Europe.
So it would have come all the way across the land with camels.
So, right across the Arabian Desert? Yes.
And then it would have been put on barges and boats and shipped
across the Mediterranean and, from there,
over land to the rest of Europe.
The trade was controlled by spice merchants along the route.
They had the pepper trade sewn up and were very good
at protecting it.
They invented myths about how hard it was to get.
And I've got one here written by a 13th century chronicler called
Bartholomew, and he said,
"And serpents keep the woods that pepper groweth in.
"And when the woods of pepper are ripe, men of that country
"set them on fire and chase away the serpents by violence of fire."
It's complete codswallop.
So it's trade protection. You don't want to muscle in on our trade.
This is really just too dangerous and difficult for you.
In a bid to break their dominance and make pepper cheaper,
in the 15th century, European traders decided to cut out
these profiteering middlemen and transport the pepper themselves.
This was made possible by advancements in shipbuilding,
which allowed vessels similar to this replica of the Golden Hinde
to sail round the globe.
And the type - and many other ships similar - opened up the world.
So this represents a technological leap forward.
Suddenly, you could do huge voyages across open oceans.
These ships could get to Asia,
load up with pepper and sail back,
circumventing the pepper traders entirely.
All the way around the bottom of Africa, right round the equator,
right across the Indian Ocean.
Ooh. Oh, it really is tiny.
In 1601, British businessmen clubbed together to form
the East India Company and promptly dispatched four ships
to Southeast Asia.
Sir James Lancaster was a captain.
The man of action.
Lancaster returned with around 450 tonnes of pepper.
It was equal to a quarter of the consumption of all of Europe.
It used to come in sort of dribs and drabs, smaller bags,
but suddenly these massive sacks.
Can you imagine?
During the decades that followed, English merchants imported huge
quantities of pepper.
So, much more pepper keeps arriving. Yes.
They're bringing in more and more. More and more. And more.
And what happens?
The price goes down.
And it becomes a much more everyday commodity. Yeah.
So, pepper has gone from being black gold to... Something for everybody.
Everyman spice.
It's thanks to ships similar to this and the men
who sailed them that pepper is so popular on our dinner tables today.
In the pasty factory, two and a half hours after our swedes arrived,
the veg has been chopped, the filling seasoned,
and our relaxed pastry is ready to roll.
I'm delivering this batch to the production line...
..where I'm meeting Emma Sanders.
You must be Emma. I am.
What are we doing here?
We're joining the pastry by hand.
The hungry pasty-making machines our pastry
will be travelling into require one continuous ribbon.
So the rolls must be seamlessly joined.
Emma has to keep up with the conveyor, which travels at
20 metres a minute or the line will grind to a halt.
Start from away from you and just push and push.
Shall I have a go, next one?
Yeah, if you're up for a laugh.
Let's see if I can perform better here than I did earlier.
Wahey!
You just nearly lost that one!
Oh, now what do I do?
Oh! Fold the pastry...
It's stuck. No, you've ruined... It's sticking! It's sticking!
You're going to cause a jam-up.
Emma!
Right. Right, how do I get it up there?
You push it up.
Where'd he come from?
He just pops up now and again.
Now... Use the step when you're going up.
Start from the other end.
Oh, that's why you need the step. Yeah, because you're short like me.
No, you're...
That looks good to me.
He's back again. There you go.
You know you've got it wrong if he comes up.
You're going to cause a jam-up.
Every time. Every time.
Get out!
The seam needs to be perfect.
Otherwise, pasties made from the join could fall apart.
I wouldn't quit your day job.
This is why it's running slow, is it?
Mate, this is really hard. Is it running slow?
Emma, you've got a trainee. How's he doing?
Not very good.
All credit. Thank you. I can't do that.
That is physically really tough. It is.
Surely you can get a machine to do this.
Well, we've tried a number of different machines to do it,
but we just can't get it to join and keep the pastry even
all the way through.
Otherwise, we'd get dead pastry and the pasty would be no good.
We need 40 rolls to make our batch of 3,600 pasties.
So, we've joined the pastry together.
Well, Emma did.
And now what we're doing is rolling it to the right thickness.
So we're taking it down in stages, ready to put it into a pasty.
And is that through a series of different rollers? Yeah.
A bit like a pasta machine at home.
You don't automatically make it thin cos it will stretch it. Is that the same?
That's exactly right, yeah. We want to take it down gradually.
It is squashed through three rollers
which reduce its thickness from 12mm to 3mm.
It's like a pizza cutter. Yeah, that's right.
We're cutting it into four strips for the four lanes of pasties
that we're making. Brilliant.
And then we've got a little bit of water that we're spraying on
for joining the pastry. Yeah.
Makes it stick, right? Exactly right.
Same as at home. Exactly.
Now, this pastry is ready for the raw filling
we prepared earlier.
That is a lot of pasty filling.
We'll need four of these bins.
# Row, row, row your mince... #
The filling is pressed out in 140-gram shapes, four at a time.
They're semicircles.
Yeah. That surprised me.
But then, I suppose that's the shape of a pasty, isn't it?
That's right.
How long will it take before that's finished our batch of 3,600?
Half an hour. 30 minutes? Yeah.
Each line of pastry runs under stainless steel bars,
which gently fold it over the filling.
Oh, I love that.
Yeah? Yeah.
Is there a technical name for that? They're our folding bars.
Each dollop of filling is spaced exactly 150mm from its neighbour
and sits perfectly in the crease of the pastry.
It almost looks like it's going to move the meat filling off.
That means that we've got it right to the edge of the pastry.
So we've got fill to every edge.
You're not going to get a bite of hot air, right? Exactly right.
Most of that comes from me.
And I'm getting a second wind.
There's one more process before I finally see a Cornish pasty.
A set of metal teeth press down onto our pastry parcels.
The blue rubber sheet stops them sticking to the metal mould.
There we go. That's it.
It's the first time I've seen anything pasty shaped in here.
So here's our crimper.
This comes down onto the pasties. Exactly.
You've got the inner section which crimps the pasty together.
This is what gives it the decoration.
And then the outer edge is the bit that cuts it right through.
Brilliant!
The pastry offcuts are collected and added to the next batch of dough.
The team here make every effort to minimise food waste.
But some can't be helped.
Cherry's hitching a ride in a lorry full of the stuff gathered
from local schools, hospitals and food producers to find out
what happens to it.
I'm on my way to a site where waste from nearby factories
is turned into energy.
And in the back of this lorry is a whopping ten tonnes
that will be turned into electricity.
Dave Atkins is going to show me how it's done.
Hi, Dave.
Hi, Cherry.
He's plant manager at Andigestion Waste Recycling, where they use
a process called anaerobic digestion to generate energy.
So, anaerobic digestion, what happens?
It's a biological process where we use microorganisms
to break down the food waste.
It all starts in the intake area.
Dave, this really smells like the bottom of my dustbin.
Yeah, you're correct. It's not my favourite place.
How many of these lorries do you get a day?
Normally, it's about ten lorries.
So, probably, you know, 160, 180 tonnes a day.
Suppliers pay to get rid of their food waste here.
How much they're charged depends on many factors,
including the calorie content.
High-calorie foods create more energy as they rot down,
which can help make them more valuable.
So what about pasties?
It's got a lot of pastry in it.
It's got fats, meats, so it's a very good fuel for us.
But before these leftovers can be converted into electricity,
the packaging must be removed.
Inside this mill, 28 rotating hammers bash open any packets
and squeeze the food out of them.
The light plastic is blown into a hopper...
..and is sent to another power plant, where it's burnt to generate
heat and electricity.
The sludgy food remains are combined with enough water to help them flow
through the factory's pipes.
And there you go.
There's your food waste you brought in, all liquidised.
Oh, God!
It's like the world's worst smoothie.
This unappetising liquid is pumped into this four-million-litre tank.
Wow. That is huge.
This is the heart of the process, the digestion tank.
In here are two types of naturally occurring microorganisms
which feed on the waste, producing methane gas.
It looks like a massive vat of hot chocolate
with loads of bubbles on it.
Yeah, see the methane gas bubbling up through the food waste
being caught in this gas holder at the top.
This soupy mix bubbles away for around 56 days.
After that, it is given away
to local farmers to be used as fertiliser.
But it's the gas that produces the electricity.
It's siphoned off into this huge PVC dome.
This is our biodome.
It holds up to 5,000 cubic metres of methane gas at any one time.
It's a lot of gas.
I mean, it's soft.
So the outer membrane is filled with air
and the gas membrane is inside.
This protects the gas membrane from the elements, basically.
The methane is pumped into one of the plant's
six electricity generators.
Inside, the flammable gas fuels an internal combustion
engine, producing electricity.
On average, we're exporting 70 megawatt hours a day, which equates
to about 6,000 homes.
That's just huge.
You really help keep the country's lights on.
Yep, all from food waste.
From waste to watts in a little under 60 days.
And if you're wondering how much of that energy will come
from a pasty, it takes just two and a half of them to produce enough
electricity to boil a kettle.
Tea, anyone?
Just me, then.
Two hours and 41 minutes after unloading the swedes,
our pasties are looking a little pasty, so they're glazed.
Nice and shiny.
What is that, an egg wash? It's an egg wash, yeah.
It's 70% whole egg, 30% milk.
Are they ready for baking? Into the oven next.
Mate, this is a ludicrously long oven.
How long is it?
60 metres.
And how long does it take to go 60 metres?
27 minutes.
Right.
As the pasties travel through the oven
at around 230 degrees Celsius...
Can I see in here? Yeah.
..their pastry begins to puff up.
You see the pasties are just starting to colour now
and bake through.
They're just about getting a bit of a sun tan.
I can smell 'em.
Finally, the golden shell of a Cornish pasty.
There we go. That's a nice sight.
I do like that.
That is really nice.
Endless stream of pasties.
But they're hot, right? Yeah.
Really hot.
Our pastry may be perfectly cooked, but the filling
still has a way to go.
The residual heat from the oven ensures the veg inside will carry
on softening for the next five minutes.
Now we've got to check the quality.
So we'll go to our tasting station.
The what station? The tasting station.
Really? Have I caught your attention?
Come on. Come on.
Look at that. Steaming. There we go. Absolutely steaming.
Quite a little bit of give in them. Yeah?
But they're going to carry on cooking, right?
They're going to carry on cooking. But I don't mind them having a little bit of texture.
I can think of one improvement, though.
You haven't got a pint of beer down there, have you?
Not just at the minute.
The pasties continue their journey by taking a sharp left-hand turn.
They're going to fall off the edge, are they? No, no.
Ha-ha-ha! You like that?
Do you know what, I've never seen one of these before.
The rubber belt extends, then retracts by 80 centimetres.
The slack taken up by four rollers underneath.
Now in neat, diagonal rows of four,
our pasties glide effortlessly onwards.
So this is just so we can line it up to send it off to the cooler.
Brilliant.
Over three hours in, my pasties have been baked, and are in a spin.
They're travelling through a seven-metre tall,
minus 24 degrees Celsius, cooling corkscrew.
Which takes their temperature from around 95 degrees
down to below five.
After 90 minutes, they reach the bottom fully cooled
before heading into the packing hall...
..where Kim Campbell...
Good to meet you.
..runs the factory's state-of-the-art packers.
This bit looks much more hi-tech than the other bit.
Yeah, it's an automation line.
There's three scanners which scan the pasties and they map out
where the pasties are on the belt.
As each pasty processes under this red line,
a computer checks it's the right shape and size.
And then the grippers, as you go along here,
the grippers will then pick the pasties and place them into the card
to protect them.
They're like a load of robotic hungry birds picking at the pasties.
I almost feel sorry for 'em.
Looks like they're being attacked.
The six robot arms use information from the scanners to rotate each
pasty to match up exactly with their individual
protective cardboard sleeves.
They grab our batch of 3,600 in just 30 minutes using four
delicately controlled pneumatic fingers.
Does it ever miss any?
Do you ever get any left on at the end?
Only it it's the wrong size or it's not the right shape
or the right colour.
What happens if I get hold of one
and break it in half and put it through?
Will it go through? No, it won't go through.
Challenge accepted.
Right, let's see if it gets grabbed.
You feeling confident? I'm feeling very confident.
There it is. That should come out right at the end.
Pick it up. Come on.
Go on. Get it! Go on! Get it!
Get it!
It's not grabbing it, is it?
There you go.
What about our good pasties? What happens to them?
Well, they go through our flow wrapper now.
Each pasty is covered and sealed in plastic and a use-by date
is stamped on the packaging.
What is the shelf life of that once it's sealed? About ten days.
Wrapped and ready to go, our pasties are boxed by hand.
The packers double check every pasty is whole.
Robots vacuum-lift stacks of boxes onto pallets, 18 at a time.
After four hours and 49 minutes,
our finished Cornish pasties travel to the 2,700-square-metre
dispatch area, where warehouse manager Peter Wilford
is waiting for me.
Hi, Gregg. Peter. Nice to meet you.
Is that a double-decker lorry? Yes, it is.
40 pallets on there, 67,200 pasties. Or 20 tonne, if you like.
How many of those trucks leave here every day?
15 of those trucks leave here every day, roughly every hour and a half,
seven days a week, 24/7.
That's an incredible amount.
I never knew we ate that many pasties.
I know. You can tell.
They ship 180,000 pasties out each day...
..sending them all over the UK and Ireland.
Londoners eat the most, but pasty fans in the Midlands
aren't far behind.
I've enjoyed my visit and I've learned some
really interesting stuff.
Here in this bakery, they mince the beef.
And the pastry they use is puff pastry, which really surprised me.
And also what I learned is to be an authentic Cornish pasty,
the filling has to go into the pastry uncooked.
And, of course, it has to be made right here in Cornwall.