Pots and pans, our cupboards are full of them.
Whether they're nonstick, cast iron or stainless steel...
We spend over £800 million a year on cookware.
We couldn't simmer, stew or fry without these heavyweight
kitchen essentials.
So, how do you turn this into this?
To find out, I'm heading inside this giant French foundry.
I'm Gregg Wallace.
The heat is incredible!
And I'm testing my mettle in perhaps the most challenging factory
I've ever visited...
Whoa! That was terrifying.
..as solid blocks of iron...
Wow!
..are transformed into colourful pots using Gallic flair.
How do you catch the drops?
We have a waterfall.
I'm Cherry Healy.
And I'm at one of the largest open pit iron ore mines in the world!
Unearthing the heavy metal in our cookware.
It's like driving a gigantic house. Whoo! Woohoo!
And historian Ruth Goodman
is learning how one-pot cooking evolved.
Oh, I can do it in one hand!
They completely revolutionised many people's style of cooking.
Over the next 24 hours,
this factory will produce one cast-iron pot
every five seconds.
Welcome to Inside The Factory.
This is the Le Creuset foundry in Fresnoy-le-Grand, northern France.
This 50,000 square metre site produces pots and pans
in more than 300 different shapes and sizes.
From saucepans and grill pans to cooking pots,
as long as it's cast in iron, they make it here.
Today, we're following production of their signature cast-iron
round casserole dish.
I'm starting at Material Intake...
..with production director Frederic Salle.
Good morning. Morning. Bonjour. Bonjour.
What is on that? Inside, it is pig iron.
What is pig iron, please?
Pig iron, it is the raw material coming from the iron ore,
and then already melted in the blast furnace.
How much is on there?
About 20 tonnes, yeah. Yeah.
20 tonnes of iron! 20 tonnes, yeah, yeah.
How many of your dishes will 20 tonnes make?
About approximately 5,000.
5,000? Yeah. Wow!
That's a lot of stuff. Yeah. That is a serious lot of stuff.
Right, how do we get this unloaded? Yeah, we can start,
but we're going to need this. Why?
Because of the noise. You will see. Really? Really!
OK, show me. Yeah, let's start.
A hydraulic arm jacks the trailer nine metres into the air.
And the pig iron begins a deafening descent.
YELLS: Whoa!
Whoa!
Once it's safely unloaded, our production begins.
GREGG LAUGHS
That is fast!
Wow! 20 tonnes of iron!
Come on, come on!
Wow!
GREGG LAUGHS
That is the fastest unloading I've ever seen,
of anything, ever!
That's a great big dirty pit of metal.
We can say that, yeah!
This metal is derived from iron-rich rock known as ore.
The iron ore used to make this iron comes from Russia.
But it's dug out of the ground in many other countries
around the world.
One of the biggest suppliers is South Africa, where Cherry went
to see how it's mined.
This is Sishen Iron Ore Mine, one of the largest open pit mines
in the world!
An 80-minute plane ride west of Johannesburg,
it's over nine miles wide,
three miles long
and 400 metres deep.
And it's getting bigger all the time.
To learn how they mine and process a staggering 670,000 tonnes
every day, I'm meeting general manager Bongani Buthelezi.
Hi, lovely to meet you! Hi, Cherry. Welcome, yeah.
I feel like I'm at the top of the Grand Canyon,
if it was on Mars! This mine is the largest iron ore
mining operation in Africa.
What is iron ore? What are you after?
So what are you looking for is iron ore.
I actually have it here in my hand. So this is premium grade iron ore.
So, an ore is actually a rock that has minerals in it.
Iron ore is any rock that has enough metallic iron inside it
to be worth extracting.
And it's our only source of iron.
What can we make out of it? So for any infrastructure in the world.
Any building? The bridges, the skyscrapers that you see,
that's made from this key ingredient.
It's funny, cos this is blue.
It's got that metallic look to it.
Correct. And yet, everything that I can see is red.
The red that you see is the oxide of iron. In layman's terms,
that is rust. Right.
So when it's deep in the earth, it's blue, because it's metallic.
Yes. And then it meets the oxygen, it oxidises,
and it turns that red colour. Yeah.
The purest iron ore sits 300 metres below the surface.
So there's only one efficient way to get it out of the ground.
Twice a week, over 2,000 tonnes of explosives are detonated
below the surface, dislodging over 4 million tonnes of iron ore.
Once the dust has settled, clearing up is a big job.
This is my ride for the day.
And like everything in mining, it is super-sized!
This is one of the biggest trucks in the world.
It's seven metres tall
and weighs in at 164 tonnes.
Mpho Dinsi is in charge.
Oh, my goodness.
This is one hell of a ride!
Whoa!
This beast has 3,500 horsepower,
the equivalent of about 23 family cars.
It shifts over 7,000 tonnes of rock a day in this harsh terrain.
It's like driving a gigantic house. Yeah. Whoo! Woohoo!
Do you love it? Yeah, I love it.
It's like driving a car. But just a massive, massive car.
Here's the shovel. It's absolutely enormous!
A 14m-tall digger scoops up 65 tonnes of iron ore and drops it
into the back of our truck.
The whole truck is shaking.
You can feel the weight of it when you take off.
The whole truck is kind of groaning.
The scale here means that a single driver can transport
over 220 tonnes of iron ore across the site every 30 minutes.
Mpho backs it up to the crusher.
Tipping.
Whoa!
The next challenge is getting at the metal inside.
In a huge cloud of dust, it's pulverised to break open the ore.
This is what we blasted out of the earth,
and what I collected on my truck.
Its content is about 50% iron,
but there are some things that've just got to go.
To increase the percentage of metal within the ore,
it travels through a series of machines which remove things
like rock and sand.
Our ore now has a metallic iron content of 64%
and is ready to leave the mine...
..on its very own train!
Each wagon will hold 100 tonnes of iron ore.
And in a total, they'll be 342 wagons.
That is a very long train!
More than two miles long, in fact!
Over 30,000 tonnes of iron ore is taken away every day.
How amazing that this rock has come from the earth raw and dusty.
And now it's ready to go on a very long journey.
Who knows what it will become?
A car, a hospital, or maybe even a pot?
Back at the factory in France, our iron blocks are on their way
to a hot date.
But shifting 20 tonnes is no easy job.
All right. How do we get it out of there?
We use a giant electromagnet.
No way. Yeah. Really? Whoa!
How do we get that started? Just using this. Can I do it?
You can do. What do I say in French? Vas-y! Vas-y? Vas-y!
Hello? Vas-y! OK.
That's right.
The control room turns on the electromagnet,
sending 13 kilowatts of current through the wire coil inside.
That's like a science fiction film!
By changing the current in the electromagnet,
you can change the load you pick up, yeah.
Wow! Wow, wow!
The electromagnet picks up two tonnes of iron at a time...
No, no, no. That is just incredible!
..and transports it 25 metres across the factory.
When the current is turned off, the iron drops into the hopper,
in Melting.
But this iron isn't the only ingredient in the recipe
for our pots. The magnet also collects steel.
What is the balance between the pig iron and the steel?
50/50 almost. Yeah. Oh, right, OK.
That's easy to understand.
A pot made from pig iron alone, although hard,
risks being brittle. The steel adds some flexibility.
How much metal on there?
Eight tonnes of metal.
But we can't make pots from a load of solid blocks of metal.
We need to melt them down in a terrifying piece of kit
called a crucible.
What is that? It's an oven.
A melting furnace.
It's like a giant cooking pot.
That's exactly what it is, isn't it, really?! Yeah, it is.
What temperature does that get to, to melt the..?
The objective is to reach 1,550 degrees Celsius.
That's like a volcano! Nearly, yeah!
Electric induction coils heat the contents of the crucible
up to a temperature even hotter than lava.
Now we need to get our eight tonnes of metal down the throat
of this man-made volcano.
So the control panel is here.
So you just see the white button here? So just press it.
This is the biggest load I've ever played with.
Ever, ever, ever.
It works! Wow, it's moving!
It's moving!
The hopper travels on its very own rail system.
Wow, this is big!
Whoa, look at this!
The size of this thing!
The mix of metal is tipped out of the hopper
on a vibrating chute and melted down.
40 minutes later, our iron and steel has combined.
Any impurities, called slag, rise to the surface of the mix.
They can damage the crucible, so must be removed by hand.
And it seems I'm expected to get hands-on, too!
OK. Why am I dressed up like a spaceman?
Because we have to check the composition of the cast iron.
We need a sample. A sample from there? Yeah.
So you need to wear this hat also. Me?! You, yeah.
So we take a sample using a 2m spoon. Really?
With the foundry guy. The big man here? Yeah.
He is twice the size of me! OK.
ROBOTIC VOICE: I am ironman!
No way!
No!
The heat is ridiculous!
All that stands between me and third degree burns
are thick leather gloves and a gold visor.
Whoa! Whoa!
Oh, the heat, the heat is incredible.
Yeah, help!
OK.
Whoa! Look at that stuff!
This is a really tricky challenge.
Look at it!
It requires strength and accuracy to tip my white hot sample
into a 4cm-wide mould.
I've never done anything like this, ever.
Whoa! Brilliant! Big man!
Well done! You're a real foundry guy now!
That was terrifying.
Yeah. That was so scary.
My sample of molten metal cools for five minutes.
A spectrometer fires electricity through the disc.
The atoms of the different elements within it send readings back,
which are checked against the requirements for our pots.
Has it passed the test? Yeah. Everything is green.
So you passed the test?
Are we ready now, please, to make some pots?
Yeah, we are. Come on. Come on, show me where. Show me where.
With our metal given the all clear, the molten mix is poured
into smaller, 1.6 tonne holding crucibles.
These are kept at 1,450 degrees Celsius
to ensure the metal remains liquid
until we're ready to turn it into pots.
This French foundry has been casting cast iron for almost a century,
but it was a Brit who first developed the technique
they use here, more than 300 years ago.
Ruth is picking up the story
at the Iron Bridge Gorge World Heritage Site in Shropshire.
Just along here is one of the most important sites in British history.
A furnace where the modern method of making cooking pots
was first devised.
But it didn't just change the way we cooked,
this changed the whole world.
Because the humble cooking pot helped forge
the Industrial Revolution.
To find out how, I'm heading to the furnace,
where the first mass-produced cast-iron pots were made
and meeting historian Georgina Grant.
Georgina! Hello.
So what is it that makes this structure so special, then?
Well, it's here that someone called Abraham Darby developed a patent
for sand-casting pots. And I've got this patent here.
So it says, "A new way of casting iron-bellied pots in sand only.
"And in regard to their cheapness,
"may be of great advantage to the poor."
Abraham Darby was an innovative 30-year-old metal worker
from the Midlands.
So before, you would use a clay mould to make cast-iron pots,
or any kind of cast iron, but it was a very laborious process.
So if you're making a clay mould, well, presumably you have to make
one by hand, you get some sort of moulding clay. Yeah.
You pour hot iron into it.
So the only way you're going to get that out is that clay
is going to bake, isn't it? So you'd have to actually smash that mould.
Yes. Which means you cannot use that mould again.
Darby discovered a method that allowed him to make
moulds from sand. They were quicker and cheaper
to work with than the old clay moulds.
Metal items could be cast in the sand moulds and, once cool,
the sand could easily be knocked off and reused again and again.
It was the start of an efficient factory process.
So they're producing lots and lots of cooking pots.
They were cheaper to buy. And I've got one here, actually.
So this is a real one, this came from... Right. This is...
..the Darby furnaces. Oh, goodness.
Well, you were pretending it's heavy!
This, in comparison to all the early cauldrons, is incredibly light.
I mean, look at that! Yep.
I can do it in one hand! Yeah, much more manageable.
Yeah. Much more affordable.
It really is the birth of mass production here.
But sand casting wasn't the only innovation.
Darby had a secret weapon, a new process that made his pots
better quality, more desirable and a lot cheaper.
Because instead of using the traditional wood charcoal,
he was using this - coke - to fuel his furnaces.
This coke, a form of purified coal, replaced the dwindling wood supplies
that had traditionally fuelled these furnaces.
It had many advantages.
Smelting iron, using coke as a fuel, allows the furnaces to become
incredibly hot, producing high-quality iron
in massive quantities.
Melting iron using coke made the iron more fluid
when it was poured, helping to make thinner pots
that were still strong.
But soon it wasn't just pots that they were making.
People were beginning to come up with ideas for all sorts of things
that they'd like made out of cast iron.
The most striking of which is the very first iron bridge,
constructed just a mile from the original foundry
by Darby's grandson, Abraham Darby III, in 1779.
Only 72 years after his grandad's ground-breaking success, this bridge
was built to showcase just what cast iron could do.
Quickly adopted by 19th-century engineers, iron became the magic
material that built steam engines, railways and factory machines.
Today, this place, Ironbridge, calls itself the birthplace
of the Industrial Revolution.
But let's not forget, it all began with a cooking pot.
In the modern pot factory in France, my molten metal
is being held in crucibles, ready to be poured into moulds.
We just need to make them.
They still use Darby's sand method here, but it's done
on a mammoth scale,
over in Moulding...
..where they make a sand mix by adding a little carbon,
clay and water.
I still don't understand how fine sand can be made into a mould.
You can have this, which can stick
because of the water which activate...
..the clay. Ah, OK!
And that's how you can make a mould? Exactly.
So it's soft sand until you squeeze it? Yeah.
And then it squeezes into a shape? Yeah, exactly.
Because of the clay and the water? Exactly. That is genius!
Every hour, 70 tonnes of sand mix is pumped down
into an ultramodern moulding machine.
What is happening? Where is the sand? Ah.
And where are the moulds?
So we're making some moulds there, in this machine,
at a very high speed.
The black sand funnels down from above
and is then squeezed with a mould from either side,
a bit like an accordion.
The inside of a pot shape is pushed from one side
and the outside of a pot pushed from the other.
The whole block is then shunted towards the one in front,
leaving a 3mm to 4mm gap, which is the mould for our pot.
That is unbelievable!
Unbelievable.
The newly created moulds travel out of the moulding machine
in a continuous block, filling the holes in the top,
ready for the molten metal.
The metal we left in the holding crucibles on the other side
of the foundry is sent over by rail.
It's lifted up and poured into a funnel system
above the moulding line,
which drops 11 kilos of molten metal into the top of each mould.
The liquid metal flows round the gap inside,
creating the shape of our pot.
Wow!
That's what we call really hot! All right? Yeah.
So what we've got here is a continuous block of sand...
Yeah. ..with metal being poured inside, creating lots
and lots of little pots? Yeah.
We're producing pots with a lot of heat
and enough sand to fill a beach!
Very, very good.
I want to see them born, come on. Let's break the moulds.
It takes 25 minutes for our metal-filled moulds
to travel 18 metres
along the conveyor, cooling as they go.
Removing the moulds is a very simple process.
Because they're made of sand, you just shake them off.
The pots travel along a vibrating conveyor
where the sand breaks up in a noisy black river of dust.
It falls through the grates and is funnelled back
to make another set of moulds.
Finally, the newly created pots emerge.
There they are!
There they are. Why is it rattling so much?
It's a vibrating grate.
Just to make the separation, to break the sand moulds.
All that tonnes of metal,
all that heat, there's our pan. Can I touch one? Yeah.
What temperature is this now?
200 degrees. 200 degrees.
So it was 1,400 degrees? Yeah.
And now it's 200 degrees. So you can feel the temperature?
I can feel the temperature on my face.
It's like I've taken a hot pot of stew out of the oven.
From here, our pots have any remaining sand cleared off
and sit to completely cool.
Half of the metal in these pots is steel.
It's the most recycled material in the world, with the ability
to be melted down and reused an infinite number of times.
Cherry's going to find out how it's done.
The biggest single lump of steel we're ever likely to recycle
is a car.
So I've come to ASM in Oxfordshire to see what goes on.
When it's time to retire a car, it can be a very emotional thing.
And it got me thinking, what really happens behind the gates
of a scrap yard?
Every year, around 2 million cars reach the end of their life
in the UK, and in this modern scrap yard,
they pride themselves on recycling as much of the car as possible.
Site supervisor Josh Morgan is going to demonstrate their methods
on my old banger.
Hello. Hiya.
It's a sad moment. Yeah!
But it's time. It's the end. It is, the end.
How much of her will you be able to recycle?
Eh, usually about 95% of the vehicle. Oh, so almost all of it.
Yeah, almost all of it, yeah, yeah.
So what's the most useful material? The steel.
But, before we get to the steel,
any hazardous or valuable parts are removed in the de-pollution
and dismantling workshop.
So what's next? Wheels off now. Yeah.
Oh, look! That was really fun.
Screwdriver?
We remove anything that can be sold as spare parts,
such as wing mirrors, doors and bumpers.
OK, right. We're going for the barcode on it now.
Taking her wings off? Mm-hm. Lovely.
And drain fluids like oil, which will be recycled.
Next, my car is taken outside, where a machine packing 60 tonnes
of gripping pressure, called a power hand nibbler,
removes larger non-steel items.
Oh, my... Oh!
Whoo!
He's peeling the roof back like a tin of sardines.
Oh! Oh!
That just exploded.
Woohoohoo!
Whoo! Whoo!
You've got various different components in the vehicle.
You've got the aluminium, which is in the radiators.
You've got the copper, which is in the wire.
And you've got obviously the steel,
which is the main chassis body of the vehicle.
There are lots of things that can be recycled? Lots of things, yeah.
But the steel is the main body? Yeah.
The car is now an empty shell of around 90% steel.
She's looked better. Yeah, she certainly has.
Next, we need to make it easier to transport.
The giant hydraulic grab picks up my 1.2 tonne car
like it's a cuddly toy in a seaside arcade.
And it's dropped into the baler.
I feel bad, but it's very satisfying.
Oh, listen to that crunch!
CRUNCHING
250 tonnes of crushing weight,
the equivalent of 20 double decker buses,
pushed down, reducing my motor to, well, a bale.
Oh, no, here we go.
Oh, my goodness!
And that's it.
I don't know what to say.
It is a square of steel.
It's now just 30% of its original size, but the all-important metal
is still twisted around plastic, glass and paint.
That is very, very strange.
The steel needs separating out, so the bale's loaded
onto the back of a waiting lorry.
And 25 bales are driven to nearby EMR Metal Recycling.
Lovely to meet you. Good to meet you.
Mark Priestman loads my car bale into a pre-shredder.
So I've spent ages compressing it into a tight box,
and you just loosened it all? It's just tearing it open
so that it can go easily and at a very fast rate
into the main shredding process.
The opened up bale is dropped into the 7m-tall mega shredder.
The machine is a bit like Granny's old mince meater,
with a 6,000 horsepower electric motor attached.
Hidden inside this steamy machine,
giant hammers spinning at 500 rotations a minute
pound the metal.
The resulting friction strips away the paint.
It chews through one car every 15 seconds.
Next, a revolving magnet separates the steel we're after
from any remaining plastic, glass or other metal.
240 tonnes of it drops onto a huge stockpile every hour.
This is what's left, Cherry.
Ha! Is that the exhaust pipe? That's the exhaust pipe!
I mean, it's just torn that car apart.
It's too late to say you want it back now!
Worldwide, 700 million tonnes of ferrous metal, like steel, gets
recycled every year, enough to make around 69,000 Eiffel Towers,
using 80% less energy than making new metals from virgin iron ore.
Steel is the most brilliantly recyclable material on Earth!
It's extraordinary to think that one minute I can be driving in it,
and the next minute I can be cooking my stew in it.
At the factory, almost two hours in, our pots have been cast and cooled.
But they're looking a bit rough around the edges.
An extreme beautification process begins with a rub down.
The rim is smoothed with an electric grinding wheel
in a process called de-burring.
Ten workers speed through seven pots a minute,
before they're sent over to Finishing...
..where they'll be cleaned up in preparation for their colour coat.
Your factory just does not stop being crazy!
Everywhere I look, there's just something else ridiculous going on.
Have we got to load these up? You can just load it here.
So they have...
POTS CRASH
Not like this!
You know what this looks like to me?
The inside of a dishwasher. Yeah, it is!
Just like a dishwasher rack, the large wire baskets
we're loading our pots on to allow them to be cleaned.
They travel sedately into a huge grit blaster.
Inside, millions of tiny pellets of steel
are fired against the surface of the dishes.
That's really heavy.
Stainless steel. Yeah. But that must make the surface rough?
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
And it is what we want to obtain. Why?
Just to allow the colour coat to stick on the metal.
I see. So they do two jobs.
They clean the pot... Exactly. And they make it rough
so that you can put the colour finish on. Yeah, you got it.
After 45 minutes of extreme exfoliation in the gritter,
our pots head off for individual spot checks
in a busy area called Hand Finishing,
where workers smooth away any remaining blemishes.
So we have to see all the little tiny imperfections
we can have remaining on the bottom. So you can see this.
It's a little imperfection. There? Yeah.
So how do you get rid of that? You use a grinding tool... Show me.
..just to remove this little imperfection like this.
Can I have a go? Yeah. You can have a go, yeah.
Yeah. That's OK?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like this job! This is a good job.
I hope the person that buys my pot
appreciates the hard work I've put in.
To protect my pots from rust, they're sprayed
with a fine base coat, spinning as they go.
This will also help the colour coat stick to the metal.
They're coming on nicely.
Soon they'll be ready to make a French casserole.
Or, its British equivalent, the Lancashire hotpot.
Ruth's investigating the history of this classic one-pot dish.
200 years ago, during the Industrial Revolution, men and women
were going out to work all day in mills and factories.
With no-one at home to look after a stew pot on the fire
and no ovens at home to speak of,
many people resorted to this - a pot
that they took along to their local baker,
or the communal oven, shared by all the people in the terrace.
12 hours later, on their way home from work,
they collected their slow-cooked meal.
The old name - a hodgepodge, meaning whatever you had to hand
bunged in a pot - came to be known as hotpot.
I'm at Beamish, the Living Museum of the North, to see how the hotpot
transformed from a working-class dish to a 20th-century staple.
I'm following the evolution of the recipe with chef Roopa Gulati.
Roopa, hello! Hello!
I have brought a hotpot from the communal oven.
So what exactly is traditionally in a Lancashire hotpot?
Not very much. Potatoes...
..meat, usually mutton.
It's cheap, it's accessible.
And you've got a filling, tasty meal.
Lots of fuel to keep you going.
But by the end of the Victorian era, the humble hotpot had made it
into middle-class cookbooks.
This recipe is from 1892.
Oh, yes! A Lancashire Hot Pot.
And in there... Oh!
..you see all kinds of interesting... I do.
Four mutton kidneys, a score of oysters!
A score is 20.
As Britain's empire expanded, so did tastes.
Oh, my goodness!
And a teaspoonful of curry powder. Glamorous!
So you have a humble Lancashire hotpot that started off
being something quite simple for mill workers,
and you're now adding curry powder to it.
But it wasn't just the recipes that were evolving,
so too were people's kitchens.
The availability of cast iron in the 19th century saw
the widespread adoption of the coal-fired range oven at home.
By 1900, little tiny cheap versions were available
in pretty much every coal-burning household in Britain,
and they completely revolutionised many people's style of cooking,
because now you've got an oven at home.
The next time I turn my convection oven on and, five minutes later,
it's 200 degrees... Oh, yeah. ..I will pay homage to my ancestors!
# When all the skies are grey
# And it's a rain day
# Think of the birdies in spring...#
By the 1940s, the hotpot found itself on the front line
of the war effort, with people encouraged to oven cook
economical one-pot dishes.
There's no better poster that sums things up than this one.
"Better pot-luck with Churchill today
"than humble pie under Hitler tomorrow."
And the message, "Don't waste food!"
Yeah. The idea is that, in a hotpot,
it can cook long and slow
and you can basically chuck anything in it and let it just simmer.
Right. Whereas if you're going to be kind of indulgent,
you're going to make a quick pie... In a saucepan. ..in a saucepan!
So what sort of recipes have we got from this era, then?
Well, this recipe I find really interesting.
It talks about three quarters of a pound of meat.
No mention what. Just any meat you might... Any meat!
Anything you can get your hands on. Anything,
because it was in such short supply at the time.
It was about coming together
and making a little go a really long way.
Post-war, one-pot cooking was marketed as labour-saving,
even glamorous.
But fast forward to the 1970s, and the latest technology gave
the humble hotpot a new lease of life.
And here we are in the 1970s!
Absolutely! Dressed to match.
I do remember these... I do! ..1970s slow cookers.
It was a curiosity, but it really did take hold in the 1970s.
I mean, why do you think that was?
I think it had something to do with women
suddenly having to go out to work. Right.
And being independent.
And yet, when they came home in the evenings, they were still
expected to put a meal on the table, a hot meal at that.
And this was their way of giving the best of both worlds.
1970s working women embraced this dish for the same reasons
the millworkers had 150 years earlier.
And right back to the sort of earlier history of the hotpot,
in that it's something you can pop on in the morning, go to work,
come back, got a hot meal.
It's almost as if it's completed the full circle. It is, isn't it?
Come back to its roots. Yeah.
And it's big on flavour...
And convenience. Mm!
That's nice!
At the 21st-century factory,
my pots have been cast, buffed and received their base coats.
After almost four hours of production, they're now ready
for their colour coating
over in Enamelling...
..where I'm meeting ceramic engineer Sandra.
Hello. I've come to find out about enamelling.
So enamel is a layer of glass.
And so we mix the pigments with glass.
So you mix colour dye with glass? Yes.
We mix all the colour here.
So, this is the mixing machine?
Yeah.
The enamel is 80% powdered glass,
5% colour pigment and 15% additives,
like clay powder mixed with water.
Resistant to heat and acid,
it will protect our cast-iron pots and give them a long life.
Although their outsides will be orange,
their insides will be a creamy sand colour.
SHOUTS: That looks like a big milkshake,
a big vanilla milksha... MACHINE TURNS OFF
Sorry? SHOUTS: That looks like... Sorry.
That looks like a big vanilla milkshake.
LAUGHS: Big milkshake.
How much enamel do I need?
One barrel like this. That's it? That's it, that's enough.
The barrel for the... Brilliant.
The barrel of enamel is connected up to tubes,
and the dishes are placed on revolving pedestals
on a conveyor which will carry them through the colour process
at a sedate 0.2mph.
The enamel is pumped through into precision spray guns
which coat each spinning pan in a uniform 0.3mm-thick layer of colour.
GREGG LAUGHS
Right, that is my sand-coloured enamel going inside the pot, right?
How many different guns does it take
until you have completely covered the inside?
So, the inside it's six guns.
Six guns? Yeah.
What...are they all different angles? Yeah.
Ah, I see!
Oh, yes.
That one is higher than that one. Exactly.
OK. So, six different angles... Exactly.
..to cover the inside of what... Right.
Why is there not enamel everywhere?
So, we are using a waterfall.
We connect it to an air cleaner
just to collect all the dust, yeah.
The waterfall is clearing away the excess enamel?
Yeah.
The enamel is liquid when it is fired out as a fine mist
at the speed of sound.
Larger liquid droplets cover the pot,
but smaller particles dry into dust in the air
and are sucked by fans into a waterfall,
removed to stop workers breathing them in.
How do you catch the drops?
"We have a waterfall." Of course you do. Yeah.
You people here are incredible.
Incredible.
Interiors complete, my pots move into the next spray booth,
where the machines have been replaced by humans,
who spray the hard-to-reach handles manually
using a temporary lid to stop the orange colour seeping inside.
Here we are.
That's our orange, right?
Yeah, it is.
Workers have just 12 seconds to complete each one,
as it spins past them on the conveyor.
Please, take the gun.
The colour.
Go.
Let's see if I'll make the grade.
Yes.
It's not enamelled inside the handle.
I think there may be a few for the reject pile.
A little better, but there's no enamel on this handle, here.
FREDERIC LAUGHS I can't do it. I can't do it.
It may look simple,
but it's surprisingly tricky to get the enamel right inside the handles.
Yes! No, no.
There's no enamel here.
FREDERIC LAUGHS
Stop laughing!
It's not helping.
Please, please, may you stop?
We have too many rejects.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
It's not my fault.
So, it's not as easy as it seems.
That was really difficult. Yeah, it is.
I'm not going to be in artist. No.
I am no Matisse.
The pots I haven't messed up
are flipped over and sprayed a vibrant orange.
But they also like to give this dish a final French flourish.
What happens at the end?
Are you spraying another...are you spraying it red as well?
Yeah, it's a different colour.
It's a gradient, right? Is it more red at the bottom? Yeah.
And then more orange at the top.
Exactly.
The change in colour is created by gradually reducing the amount
of darker red enamel that is sprayed as the gun moves along each dish.
All the colour creates quite a spectacle.
I love an orange waterfall.
You could travel around the whole world
and you will never see an orange waterfall.
You guys are crazy in here.
The wet pots are sent through for drying.
That is hot. How long is that dryer?
About eight minutes.
At what temperature?
At 150 degrees Celsius.
Can I see them coming out the other end?
Yeah. Yes, please. Yes, please.
What have you done to them?
They're pink!
Why is it that colour and why has it gone all matte and not shiny?
It's because it's a dried enamel.
The dryer has removed all the water from the enamel, dulling its colour.
But it's a vital step before it can safely enter
the high temperature of the kiln.
That's a kiln? That's a kiln, yeah.
And what will happen to it in there?
So, there we just transform the enamel into glass.
We need to increase the temperature up to 800 degrees
just to recreate this glass
and to melt all these elements all together.
And how long is it in there for?
35 minutes.
The powdered glass within the enamel melts down into a liquid in the kiln
and then sets hard when it cools,
transforming into a layer of super-hard coloured glass...
..a process called vitrification.
It gives the pots a glossy shine.
There we are. Lots and lots of shiny, shiny pots.
May I? Yeah.
So it is, shiny again. There it is.
Yeah, that looks good.
That looks really, really good.
I didn't like it at the last stage.
Are they all quality-checking?
Yeah, it's a quality-checking.
What are they checking for?
Little pin holes. Maybe the handle isn't painted.
Maybe. BOTH LAUGH
Our pots are placed in crates to cool for 30 minutes.
The amount of science involved in making these pots
is pretty astonishing.
There's a fair bit involved in making a decent casserole too,
as Cherry is discovering.
Look at that.
That is a thing of beauty.
Soft, melt-in-your-mouth meat and thick, gorgeous gravy.
The perfect casserole.
But when I try and make this at home,
it just doesn't cut the mustard.
Can science tell me what I'm doing wrong and help me get it right?
In search of tips to ensure my casseroles are more hit than miss,
I'm heading to London Metropolitan University
to meet food scientist Dr Sue Bailey.
Lovely to meet you. Lovely to meet you, too.
So, can you teach me the art of making the perfect casserole?
I'd be delighted to.
First, choose the correct cut of meat.
What is the best cut of meat for a casserole?
Well, the best cut of meat, actually,
is the cheaper cuts of meat.
That's good news. It's very good news, yes.
I mean, something like this, for example, which is brisket.
So, where is the brisket from?
It's from part of the shoulder of the animal.
So, quite muscly. So, quite muscly.
So, anything that's been working very hard
and it's got a lot of connective tissue in it.
Why do you want connective tissue?
That just doesn't sound yummy at all.
Well, connective tissue, when you cook it,
breaks down and then makes you a nice, thick casserole.
That is so interesting because, in the past,
I've got rid of these bits cos they just don't look very tasty.
Next up, brown the meat.
In order to actually get a really well-flavoured casserole,
you must brown your meat.
Now, a lot of people think
that's to sort of sear and seal the outside of the meat.
Yes, lock in the juices. Lock in the juices.
Well, actually, no, that's not what it's there for.
What you actually need to do is start off a reaction
called a Maillard reaction.
You've got a small amount of sugars in the meat
reacting with the protein in the meat
and then creating a whole load of new taste molecules.
Rule three, add the correct amount of stock.
You need to add enough water to just cover the meat.
It would dry out otherwise.
Yeah. About right? That's about right.
Now choose the right dish.
What is most important is that you have a lid.
So, it doesn't really matter what you use,
as long as there is a lid and it fits tightly.
What you want is no steam to escape during the cooking process.
You want to retain all the flavours in your casserole dish.
Finally, it's the all-important cooking time.
Now, I've always believed cooking for longer
equals a better casserole.
And this time, instead of telling me what's best,
Dr Sue's devised an experiment
so we can measure the differences accurately.
We're cooking three identical casseroles
all at a relatively low temperature.
Check the temperature.
OK, so it says 140. Perfect.
One will be cooked for an hour and a half,
one for four hours
and one for eight hours.
Which will come out best?
You have to get to this sort of magic zone within a casserole.
And that is where you get the connective tissue
beginning to break down, turning into gelatine
and then giving a really nice mouthfeel.
OK.
BOTH: Ooh! That looks very good. That smells amazing.
We take the meat to the lab for scientific testing.
A compression test is done with a texture analyser,
which measures the meat's tenderness.
A vacuum oven analyses moisture content.
Now the moment of truth.
So, this is the 90 minutes,
so that's 58% moisture.
This is the four hours' cooking time with 61% moisture.
So, you can see that the moisture level has gone up.
But in fact, for the eight-hour cook, it's gone down quite a lot.
It's clear that our four-hour casserole had the most moisture,
meaning it's the most succulent.
And the four-hour bake also results in the most tender meat.
Why does cooking time affect the meat so much?
Well, what's actually happened in the casserole
that's only being cooked for an hour and a half
is that there's not enough time for the connective tissue
to break down into the lovely, silky gelatine in there.
Yes, cos you can see it's still very hard.
This one, however, that's been cooked for eight hours,
there's not much gravy,
everything is quite burned.
What you've had here is a secondary breakdown of the proteins.
The muscle fibres have actually broken apart.
I've always thought the longer you cook a casserole for,
the better and better it gets.
No, that's not true.
So, this one that was cooked for four hours is pretty much perfect.
The meat falls apart really easily, the flavour is delicious,
the vegetables are still intact.
I mean, it's bang on. Exactly.
They say that you can't rush a good casserole,
but it turns out longer isn't always better.
Finally, I have the secret to making the perfect casserole.
Back in France,
and our cooled enamelled casserole dishes are sent to Packing...
..where they meet their lids.
But there's one thing missing -
a stainless-steel knob.
I have been involved with every stage of production.
I would really, really like to just screw the knob on, put them in.
Yeah, it's the last operation.
Because it's got to be easier than spraying the enamel.
So, please. Please, can I?
Excuse me. Excuse me.
Sorry. Pardon!
Can I just...? Right.
The screw.
Yeah. Aha.
Then, yeah, you maintain the screw like this. Aha.
You take a stainless-steel knob.
Oh, I can't believe the screwing a knob on is difficult.
Look, I'm going to look so stupid.
So, 150 pots per hour will be difficult.
And now... And look. Now, look. Ready?
Gladiator.
Yay! Come on!
After five hours and 44 minutes,
we have finished pots.
They box 150 an hour.
Overall, it's taken 42 pairs of hands to make each one.
From here, our boxes are loaded up on pallets of 116 dishes
to be sent to distribution,
where I'm meeting company owner Paul Van Zuydam.
Paul. Hi, Gregg.
Good to meet you. You too.
Do you know who your biggest customer is in Europe?
That's the United Kingdom. Yes! Exactly.
I think that proves we may be the best cooks in Europe.
You are the best cooks. GREGG LAUGHS
The Italians won't agree with us.
No, and my wife's Italian.
Oh, no.
Paul, do you know how many casserole dishes are on there?
Yes. There are 3,828 casserole dishes on there.
We export over 95% of our product today.
So, the last pallet on there, should we send the truck to the UK?
Yes, indeed. It's ready to go. Come on. Thank you, Gregg.
Up to three lorries leave every day.
The casserole dishes are shipped
to over 60 countries all around the world,
as far away as the USA and New Zealand.
When I came to this factory in Northern France
to see a casserole dish being made,
I had no idea I was going to start off in an enormous foundry
and I didn't know that enamel was made from glass.
And as complicated as these systems appear,
actually, they're pretty traditional.
They're making this pot in the way that craftsmen have worked
for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Au revoir.