Original subtitles

The humble sausage.

Every year in the UK, we eat a meaty three billion of them.

From coiled Cumberlands to herby Lincolnshire and skinny

chipolatas--

There's no doubt about it, we love our bangers.

Tonight, we follow the production of traditional pork

sausages, from farm to fork, via this rural factory

in North Yorkshire.

I'm Gregg Wallace.

Whoa! Whoa!

Whoa!

Whoa!

I'm finding out how the simple sausage--

That's a sausage superhighway.

- -is at technology's cutting edge.

This is the first one we're running in a factory.

Hey!

CHERRY HEALEY: I'm Cherry Healey

[groaning]

Slow and painful.

I want to know how to get the best from our bangers,

and I'm discovering the secrets of a favorite sausagy snack.

And the egg drops into that sock of meat.

Is a meat sock a technical term?

[laughter]

GREGG WALLACE: And historian Ruth Goodman--

Oh!

Oh!

GREGG WALLACE: Learns how a German bratwurst

became top dog in America.

So we're getting an early association between sausage

dogs, dogs and sausages.

Every week, this factory produces more

than four million sausages.

And this is the delicious story of how they

put the sizzle into every one.

Welcome to "Inside the Factory."

[theme music]

This is the Heck Sausage Factory in Ripon, North Yorkshire.

It's the largest independent sausage company in Britain.

22,000 square feet and 101 workers

all dedicated to one of our favorite traditional foods.

Over a year, they turn out what would be a string of sausages

nearly 13,000 miles long.

That would stretch from here to Honolulu and back.

They make 17 different types of premium bangers,

including chicken and chorizo.

But tonight, we're following the production

of their 97% pork variety.

Is that good?

That's very good.

OK, thank you.

And pork comes from pigs.

Most British pigs are born and reared indoors.

But to get a close-up look, Cherry's at a farm in Suffolk

where the piglets are bred outside.

17,000 of them a year.

Hi, Jonathan.

Hello.

I've never seen anything like this.

Jonathan Green has been working with pigs for 25 years.

They've all got their little houses and their courtyards

and their feeding troughs.

It's like a little town.

Yes.

On this field alone, there are 750 sows and their babies.

CHERRY HEALEY: Jonathan and other large-scale pig

farmers use cross-breeding for the best commercial results.

What breed are these pigs?

These sows are Landrace-Duroc crosses chosen for heartiness.

So you get the combination of a hearty,

a sow having large litters.

And we use the Hampshire boars because they

give us good muscles, good meats in the carcass.

CHERRY HEALEY: This sow is about two years old,

and this is her fourth litter.

All right, should we play count the piglet?

Oh, look.

Oh, mommy's showing me her sign.

Oh, go away.

[laughs]

They're four days old, and they're already running around

and are really strong.

Over the next five weeks, they'll double in weight,

and they'll look like this.

Then they'll be moved on.

When will they leave the farm?

They will leave the farm tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

Yes.

Where will they go tomorrow?

They will go to a farm and be raised indoors

for 22, 23 weeks on that farm.

CHERRY HEALEY: And then they go--

To be made into sausages.

Sausages.

Yeah.

Is it more cost effective to take them indoors?

Very much more cost effective because to rear

them outdoors running around in this cold environment,

their food conversion's not very good at all.

Because they're burning off lots of energy--

Yes.

- -protecting themselves from the cold.

Yes.

[music playing]

When they leave here, they'll go onto a diet that will grow them

in such a way as that they have lots of lean growth,

but not excessive fat growth, because people don't want

to eat too much fat, but they want a little bit of fat

for the succulence in the meat.

CHERRY HEALEY: They'll go to an abattoir at about six months

old, the same age in size as these pigs

who are staying on Jonathan's farm to breed.

Look how curious they are.

Hello.

How does it make you feel to see your pigs go off?

It's part of the business that you're in, is to produce meat.

You look after them as well as you can,

but I don't get attached to them, no.

I'm getting attached now.

Oh, my God, they're biting my boot.

About 30% of the meat on a pig is suitable for sausages.

That'll be the shoulder cuts, the belly,

and perhaps some from the neck.

It's a lot.

It is a lot, yes.

It's a huge amount.

GREGG WALLACE: Nothing on a pig is wasted at all.

The loin is used for chops.

The ham for ham.

What about something like the snout or the ears?

Well, the ears and the trotters

will probably go to China because they're delicacies.

CHERRY HEALEY: No part is wasted.

GREGG WALLACE: No.

Snout to tail, nothing is wasted.

They're fighting over your welly boot

because they all want to have a nibble of your welly boot.

Yep, and my coat.

Do they-- will they just eat anything?

[laughter]

Oh, pick me up, yeah.

I mean, it was inevitable.

You know what?

If you kneel in a field of pigs, that's gonna happen.

It is, it is.

Yeah.

[music playing]

GREGG WALLACE: The pork shoulders are

taken to commercial butchers.

One of them is a family firm in Consett near Durham.

Whoa!

You go through how many shoulders a day?

3,000 to 4,000.

That's immense.

Yes.

GREGG WALLACE: Commercial director Jack

Young checks them for quality.

They've got a good bit of solid lean meat

there, decent amount of fat coverage

there, but not too much.

What's a shoulder got that makes it good for sausages

that a belly wouldn't?

A pork shoulder is about 80% lean, 20% fat,

and that gives you a good mix for a solid sausage.

GREGG WALLACE: These super-sized shoulders

are about twice as big as the ones in your local butcher's.

Arr, Jim Ladd, ha-ha arr!

[laughter]

I'm on it like a car bonnet.

So I hang on to the leg here, hook it somewhere-- oh.

Oh, that's a slippery one.

Our countdown to sausages--

- Whoa! - -begins.

There's something wrong with your hook there.

It just slipped off.

All right?

There are up to 28 butchers at work

here deboning and preparing the meat.

They're protected by chain mail.

[music playing]

A 21st century stainless steel version of medieval battle

dress.

I'm dressed up.

Can I get a knife?

Not a chance, no.

No?

100% no.

GREGG WALLACE: Tony Laws is head of production.

So this is real butchery?

This is very skilled people here,

yeah, working with dangerous machines and dangerous,

obviously, implements.

GREGG WALLACE: Each knife is numbered

and allocated to a butcher who must keep it perfectly sharp.

What do you have to do-- take out the bone,

take off the skin, take out all the bits you don't need.

First two gentlemen take the rib cage off.

Boy, what's happening here?

That's an open-top de-rinder.

It's a very dangerous machine.

You've got to be very skilled to do this, I'll tell you.

Wow!

Wow!

There's a blade there.

That's a big blade.

Whoa, whoa!

That's a bit all the way across that way.

GREGG WALLACE: The razor sharp points on the roller

pull the meat onto the blade, which strips off the skin.

He's the only one not dressed up in chainmail.

Well, you can't wear one of these chainmail

because he's got teeth on this machine,

so that would grab you and take you in.

So you can't have on here.

GREGG WALLACE: The skin can be made into pork scratchings

or sold to other factories for budget sausages.

Brilliant.

The most skilled butchers work alone.

TONY LAWS: This is the fastest model.

570 in a day.

All I just saw was a blur of arms and knife.

The rest are on the pace line.

They have about 10 seconds to cut

away their part of the shoulder as it moves along the conveyor.

When I'm not here, do you play music?

Yes.

You do?

I like ABBA when I'm deboning meat.

ABBA doesn't make you debone faster.

You want something loud and something beating,

you know what I mean?

You have AC/DC?

Yes.

[music playing]

GREGG WALLACE: From the first to the last man on the line,

it takes just one minute to completely debone a joint.

And this line will do 2,000, 2,500 a day.

Fabulous.

Fabulous.

Do you know what?

I thought this would all be, like, machine.

I didn't think I'd find a line of skilled butchers.

Every animal is totally different.

Yeah, you don't make animals in a machine.

TONY LAWS: Yes, everyone's different.

GREGG WALLACE: The shoulder blade comes out

and the ball socket.

Then a lean cut of meat named for its shape.

Leg of mutton cut on a pig?

Every animal's got one, see?

Every animal's got a leg of mutton.

TONY LAWS: Yeah.

It's solid, solid, pure meat.

That's a big steak.

TONY LAWS: Yeah.

GREGG WALLACE: It's only used in skinny ranges of sausages.

There's not enough fat on it to make a sausage.

TONY LAWS: Some people like more meat, all this health kick,

no more fat.

Yeah, you need a bit of fat.

Course you do.

It's a sausage!

The next butcher, he takes all the glands off,

any bits of gristle that's been left on.

GREGG WALLACE: The average shoulder has enough meat

for around 100 sausages.

Is this now finally our sausage meat?

TONY LAWS: It certainly is.

Well, hang on a minute.

We've taken quite a bit off.

I mean, we started off with, what, 12, 14 kilos?

Yeah.

What've we got now, 4?

4, 4 and 1/2, yes.

Nothing gets wasted, though.

Even the bones.

The bones get taken away.

They get boiled and they get put in lipsticks, mascaras,

anything with animal fat in it.

Wine, gums.

- That's where you get it from. - Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Well, you don't wear mascara, so you're all right.

One minute.

Lipstick you do.

[laughter]

I'll say it.

- Thank you so much, mate. - No problem.

Honestly, I mean that.

Thank you so much.

These workers slice their way through a pallet

of shoulders every 10 minutes.

Then the meat for our sausages is vacuum-packed

and dispatched on the same day.

The pork shoulders from the butcher's have traveled just

over an hour down into North Yorkshire,

and they've arrived at our factory.

Where every day, they make around 625,000 bangers.

[beeping]

The intake area receives a steady supply of fresh meat

from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM, overseen by Jack Tate.

Is this the pork shoulder?

- This is it, yeah. - Brilliant.

OK.

All right, how do we get it off?

20 of these one-ton meaty mountains

come into the factory every day.

Test your driving skills.

It's 38 minutes since sausage production

began at the butchers.

I just need to check the temperature,

make sure it's all OK.

Jack, I can tell you what the temperature is.

It's cold, mate.

JACK TATE: Sitting around two degrees.

- GREGG WALLACE: That's good? - Spot on.

Better get on with it, haven't we?

JACK TATE: Yeah.

We need to grab you some seasoning.

- What's that, a mix? - It's for us, yeah.

Do you know what's in it?

Salt, pepper, a little bit of ginger,

little bit of coriander in there, and preservative.

I'll tell you what, let's not bother with it, thanks.

I don't like coriander.

[laughter]

[grunts]

The factory gets through 1,000 kilos

of herbs and spices every day.

That's it.

We just need to go grab some frozen pork.

Whoa, that is super cold!

Super, super cold.

[grunting]

Oh, that is freezing!

What temperature is that freezer?

About -18.

GREGG WALLACE: Why have you got a load

of fresh and some frozen?

That's to help with temperature control.

As the pork's going through the machines, they tend to heat up,

and it's just to help with keeping the temperature down.

GREGG WALLACE: OK.

Is that it?

JACK TATE: That's your lot.

So to make sausages, just the pork shoulder, just seasoning.

That's it.

Thank you very much indeed, Jack.

I'll take it from here.

Yeah.

Right, I'm coming, I'm coming!

[music playing]

I'm taking these ingredients along the length

of the building and into the first stage

of production-- mixing.

You, I suppose, are Misha.

I am, yes.

And you are in charge of all of this?

Yeah.

Let's get some frozen meat flicked.

You got a box.

Can you manage?

[laughs]

I'm strong as an ox, me.

The workers wear hygienic head covers and layer

up underneath because the factory is kept at a chilly 4

degrees C for meat safety.

This is Vadim.

He works in this area.

Right.

This is the pork that I saw at the deboning place.

It's just-- it's just the frozen stuff, right?

MISHA: It is, yeah.

So we put it in there to flick it into little bits

so that when we put them in to be mixed

it doesn't break the machine.

Oh!

Hey!

They must be very strong, fast blades.

Yeah, very strong.

I think that's lovely.

You're making little Gammon steaks.

Yeah.

GREGG WALLACE: What do we do now?

MISHA: Right.

So this goes over to the bowl chopper.

The what?

The bowl chopper.

Bowl chopper?

Bowl chopper, yeah.

It's a big bowl.

I'll push it straight onto there.

Go on.

There.

So in mixing the meat together, this big bowl spins.

So it's moving the meat round whilst those blades

are chopping.

GREGG WALLACE: So the arm stays static.

MISHA: Yeah.

GREGG WALLACE: Ah!

We're using 97% shoulder meat.

But legally, a pork sausage can contain just 42% meat, which

could include skin and fat.

Rusk can make up the rest.

MISHA: The blades are now chopping up the meat.

GREGG WALLACE: In here is 50% fresh and 50% frozen pork.

I always stop.

Why do you stop?

Why'd you stop?

Next what we need to do is put in the seasonings.

Seasoning? MISHA: Yeah.

The stuff I got earlier, right?

Yeah, that's right.

[music playing]

Is there no way of doing this quick?

Unless you want a rubbish sausage, that's how we do it.

Yeah!

[laughs] I love the sudden waterfall of sausage.

I love that.

After 15 minutes of mixing, we've

got a 150-kilo batch of roughly-minced seasoned meat.

Where's this go, Misha?

Just on here.

You're gonna need to push it hard.

So that is going up there, so you're gonna have to lift it.

Yeah, get out.

What button do I push?

This button here.

GREGG WALLACE: This will become 2,250 sausages.

The meat moves down the giant funnel.

At the bottom, it's finely minced,

and any remaining gristle or cartilage is removed.

MISHA: The meat gets pushed through these little holes.

And anything that does not fit in those holes,

this swipes it round into this hole.

That is brilliant.

We're in the factory's filling area,

ready to turn 150 kilos of pork mince

into their best-selling bangers.

They have machines to put their sausage meat

into skins, but supervisor Misha is showing me

how it used to be done--

by hand.

Looks easy.

All we've got to do is hold the end, right?

[music playing]

Hang on a minute.

Who on Earth is gonna want a 20-yard sausage?

So you knot it after.

GREGG WALLACE: Oh!

Look at that.

Do you reckon you could do it that fast?

GREGG WALLACE: No.

I think I can do that bit.

I have no idea what's happening with that bit.

That is amazing.

Right.

Let's limber up, right?

It's using the button there.

It's pressing it here, right?

Yeah, that's correct.

GREGG WALLACE: Whoa! Whoa!

Whoa!

[laughs] Should I try again?

Yes.

You're letting go of the skins too quickly.

That's it.

GREGG WALLACE: Filling a sausage requires precise meat

flow, speed, and pressure.

Oh!

All at the same time.

Oh, that's better.

That's the best you've done so far.

Right.

And now I've got to try and knot it, right?

MISHA: Yeah.

[music playing]

I can't do it.

I mean, I literally cannot do it.

Oh!

MISHA: [laughs] That is really bad.

GREGG WALLACE: Our batch of 2,250 sausages

will need over 280 meters of skin.

That's nearly 5 times the height of the Tyne Bridge.

What is this?

MISHA: It's a collagen skin.

Made out of what?

This is beef hide.

GREGG WALLACE: Weren't they traditionally

made from-- from intestine?

Yeah, they did used to be guts,

but this makes the consistency of the sausage better.

GREGG WALLACE: Even a sausage-filling expert can only

make 1,500 of them an hour.

And this factory needs to work 24 times faster than that

to keep up with orders.

So this machine is making 600 sausages per minute.

No way. MISHA: Yeah.

A minute? A minute?

Not an hour.

MISHA: A minute.

The sausage meat is inside those tubes.

Yeah.

The metal tubes.

You call them horns, right?

MISHA: Horns, yeah.

And that horn is constantly pushing sausage meat out.

Yeah.

GREGG WALLACE: The skin is loaded onto the hollow horn,

which starts spinning.

The meat is pushed through the middle and into the skin,

creating one long rotating sausage.

So there's horns on the machine

so it can reload really quickly.

GREGG WALLACE: This is it, right?

Here we go.

Skin on the top.

That one will get to the end.

Spins it round.

Genius stuff!

Then two silicone belts grip the sausage between them.

A quick pinch as the sausage is spinning

creates a twist every 12.5 centimeters.

How good is that?

That is very efficient sausage-making.

It's a bit faster than your, uh, sausage-making, isn't it?

I would have caught up eventually.

[laughter]

It's brilliant.

What's this bit doing?

This is cutting them.

GREGG WALLACE: The linked sausages

are pulled into the cutter, which

has three spinning blades.

They slice and separate them at a rate of 2,000 a minute.

That's a sausage superhighway.

In just one hour and nine minutes,

we've made bumper to bumper sausages.

But what's the best way to cook them for the fullest flavor?

CHERRY HEALEY: I'm heading to the University of Chester

to run an experiment with food scientist Dr. Stewart Ferryman.

Dr. Stew.

Hey, Cheery.

How do you cook the perfect sausage?

STEWART FERRYMAN: Very good question.

We're gonna put them to the test.

[music playing]

Cherry, first off we're gonna do a long, slow fry

for 25 minutes.

CHERRY HEALEY: And is there a trick to it?

Plenty of oil.

Keep it turning.

Don't let it go black.

So it's quite a high-maintenance method.

It is.

OK.

STEWART FERRYMAN: Oh, smells so good.

CHERRY HEALEY: The next batch go in the oven.

170 degrees C for 25 minutes.

Give them a flip halfway through.

CHERRY HEALEY: I like doing it this way.

It's very lazy.

You put them in a pan, boom, done.

Our final set, head under the grill.

So what is the secret to cooking sausages under the grill?

We're getting them on there for 15 minutes,

and like when you're frying, you need

to turn them to make sure that they're brown all over and.

The brown is a secret to the flavor.

Oh, it's such a thing of beauty.

STEWART FERRYMAN: And there you can see the fat drips down.

More fat in the pan and less in your tummy, whereas actually

you can see with the frying pan it's all right there, isn't it?

In their different ways, all our sausages are browning

up, developing their flavor.

STEWART FERRYMAN: What's going on

is a very important reaction called the Maillard reaction.

And on the surface, you can see it's Browning,

and that's the reaction taking place.

When it gets hot, the building blocks of the proteins

called the amino acids react with traces of sugar,

and they produce thousands of different chemicals.

There are ones that give it meaty flavors,

and you can kind of get nutty, caramelly flavors.

It's what makes it taste good.

CHERRY HEALEY: We're dividing up our cooked sausages

and giving some of each type to the lab

to measure their fat content, moistness, and texture.

Wow.

Slow and painful.

We've also asked 10 sausage fans to rate

them in a controlled taste experiment.

It's a blind test, so they don't know how

each sausage has been cooked.

Good day to you, Sophia.

Hello.

So which was your favorite sausage?

418.

CHERRY HEALEY: Why was that?

I love barbecued sausage, and I

love it when they're all brown and quite dark

color on the outside.

Rob, you've left the most mouse-like portion

of sausage on each plate.

I just kept trying bits and bits.

It's so wonderfully unusual.

This one I liked, 539.

But to be fair, they were all very nice sausages.

There's got to be a winner.

I think it was that one, but who

doesn't like a good sausage?

CHERRY HEALEY: Hi, Jenny.

Hello.

Which was the sausage for you?

Definitely that one.

Every side is brown.

I do like my sausages to be brown.

That is your one true love.

It is, 418.

CHERRY HEALEY: Our testers 419, slow-fried sausage,

as their favorite, with a score of 76 out of 100.

Can science explain why it came out on top?

The lab results are in, and here we have the texture

analysis of the sausage.

That was the cutting through the sausage,

so it gives us an idea of how soft, how juicy it is.

Grey is the fried, and you can see the fried one needs

about half the force to cut through it

compared to the other two ways.

So the fried is softer and will give

you a more succulent sausage.

Why is it so much softer?

The surface hasn't dried out.

It had oil over it the whole time.

Whereas the other two ways, they were drying ways of cooking,

and so it's got drier and a bit tougher on the outside as well.

It has a lot more fat in it, though.

So if we go to the next results, here's

the percentage of fats in the different kinds of sausage.

So when you compare the fried sausage

to the oven and the grilled, that difference in fat is huge.

Is a lot of the flavor in the fat?

Yes.

The fat conveys a lot of those flavor molecules.

And also there are fat-sensitive taste receptors in the mouth.

Kind of "melt in your mouth"?

The tasters confirmed that the fried has a better texture.

And in terms of overall liking, they loved the fried

much more than the other two.

CHERRY HEALEY: Frying might not be the healthiest option,

but our tests confirm it delivers

flavor from your sausage.

I'll just take one for the road.

So it seems that low and slow frying

all the way if you want to get the most

flavor from your banger.

It does take more work.

But like most things in life, good things

come to those that wait.

[music playing]

GREGG WALLACE: In this rural factory,

there are 37,000 sausages an hour

heading into the packing area.

It's the biggest part of the building,

with an average of 32 workers across 4 lines.

Sausage production is an hour and 10 minutes in,

and they're ready to be packed.

Let's see how you get on with this.

OK.

Oh, you're gonna need some of these.

GREGG WALLACE: Looks like a giggle.

You're welcome, you're welcome.

What do we have-- thank you.

Thank you very much.

- This is Solace. - Solace.

SOLACE: Yes.

If you were my brother, you'd be Solace Wallace.

Solace Wallace.

Oh, nice.

Yeah!

[music playing]

I've been to many factories that are almost fully automated,

so it's unusual to see so many people hand-packing.

For crying out loud, you have the world fast here, don't you?

Yeah.

GREGG WALLACE: The machine is shooting out 600 sausages

a minute, and we're packing 10 at a time

for the family-size pack.

[groaning]

Put nice.

What do you mean, put nice?

MISHA: Solace is very good with his sausages.

That thing there is called the sausage separator.

Solace actually created that himself.

No way!

Why did you make a sausage separator?

Oh, better system.

Easier sausage.

GREGG WALLACE: There used to be workers only

on one side of the conveyor.

Then Solace drew up his invention on a beer mat,

and the factory got it made.

As a result, they've doubled their packing rate.

What was your job in Lithuania?

Mechanic.

Mechanic?

Oh, I see.

That's fantastic.

Faster sausages coming down.

Oh!

Georgetta, she's one of our best packers.

GREGG WALLACE: Is your surname Sausage?

Georgetta Sausage?

Not quite, but I will change it.

And what do I have to do to be a good sausage packer?

You have to--

to want to work.

If you don't want to work here, you can't be it.

Do you ever sing songs on the line?

Yeah, we always sing songs on the line.

GREGG WALLACE: The butchers who deboned our pork

liked working to hard rock.

What is the best music to pack sausages?

Disco music.

Disco!

[music playing]

What is the most spoken language in this factory?

Russian.

Russian?

GREGG WALLACE: What other nationalities do we have here?

Latvia, Lithuania, Polish people.

Yeah, and I'm from Romania.

What is the Romanian for sausage?

[romanian]

[romanian]

[music playing]

The company is growing fast and trying new ways

of speeding up production, including testing

this prototype packing robot.

This machine is the first one of its type

to be running in a factory.

Really?

Yeah.

So it makes all of our packing automatic.

The sausages go into the machine,

collecting them into sixes, passing them along and putting

them into the trays on its own.

I see.

It will be able to pack 1,800 sausages a minute,

40% quicker than by hand.

Hey!

Packs of sausages.

It's amazing.

GREGG WALLACE: The company says better productivity

means they'll be able to allocate

the packers to other areas.

But there's one tradition that won't change.

[bell ringing]

Why'd you build this factory so close to the airport?

Every day, the whole factory stops for lunch together.

What are we gonna have for lunch?

- Sausages. - No way.

Yeah.

GREGG WALLACE (VOICEOVER): At 4 degrees C,

it feels like we've been working in a giant fridge.

Oh, it's warm.

It's nice and warm.

Yeah.

Can I have three sausages please?

Of course you can.

You're a Corsican?

Of course you can.

Of course you can, of course you can.

Way, I am hungry.

Give me a factory canteen and a traditional lunch,

and I'm happy.

I'll eat sausages with anything.

I've always wondered, how do you

get an egg inside a scotch egg?

And that's not the only mystery.

No one knows who invented them.

One theory is that Fortnum & Mason created

them for rich coach travelers.

Another, that they were developed

from an early Indian dish called nargisi kofta.

One thing's for certain--

we love them.

The biggest scotch egg factory in the UK is in Lincolnshire.

That's a lot of eggs.

Production starts with 20,000 pre-shelled hard boiled eggs

being checked over by Andy Dawson.

Hi, Andy.

Hi, there.

There is something weird about a big bag of eggs.

ANDY DAWSON: Bit strange, yes.

Gotta put it into the [inaudible] first of all.

Oh, wow!

Oh!

That is really good fun.

They almost look like ping pong balls or golf balls.

ANDY DAWSON: Golf balls, isn't it?

And wait.

You need to use the ladle.

Any ones that are defective, we'll take out here.

We're looking for egg shells.

We're looking for smaller eggs, broken eggs like that one.

Pull them out.

Yeah, pull them out.

And then they go into the bottom.

What happens is the waste eggs?

They get used again for mayonnaise.

So nothing gets wasted.

No, nothing gets wasted.

CHERRY HEALEY: What happens next?

These are moved along the egg steppers,

and then they get dropped into a little hole there.

And that's where the meat comes in.

I feel like this is where the magic is.

A red laser checks if an egg is there.

Then a piston pushes it into a tube of sausage meat.

The meat basically forms a sock,

and the egg drops into that sock of meat.

CHERRY HEALEY: A meat sock?

Is a meat stock a technical term?

No, not really.

[laughs]

CHERRY HEALEY: The meat sock twists

and seals the top and bottom.

It takes just three seconds to wrap an egg.

They start out oval, but tumbling off multiple conveyors

rolls them into a spherical shape.

ANDY DAWSON: It goes into the batter machine.

Woo!

Is that a batter waterfall?

ANDY DAWSON: Just flour and water.

That's fabulous.

[music playing]

The egg parcels drop onto a conveyor

slide filled with crumbs.

And as they roll, they get covered.

What is a crumb made out of?

Depending on the customer, we have different ones

where tortilla crumb.

Tortilla? ANDY DAWSON: Tortilla crumb.

Oh, my God.

Then we also have seeded bread that goes on certain ones.

CHERRY HEALEY: So you could put almost anything on the crumb.

ANDY DAWSON: Anything.

Anything you life.

They look much more like a Scotch egg now.

So how many of these do you make?

Approximately, average, 1.4 million a week.

CHERRY HEALEY: That's around 74 million Scotch

eggs made here every year.

Who eats all those Scotch eggs.

British summertime, everybody loves them.

CHERRY HEALEY: Now covered in bread crumbs,

they enter the fryer for about seven minutes.

Oh, they're so beautiful.

Fresh out the fryer.

Yep.

Can I crack one open?

Go for it.

Oh, that is a lovely thing.

So there we go.

The mystery of the Scotch egg is solved,

and it's all down to amazing machines

and the magic of a meat sock.

GREGG WALLACE: An hour and 20 minutes

after we began making sausages, and our porky parcels

have reached the ceiling section at the end of the line.

Misha, explain to me please what happens in here.

So this is wrapping them, so it's

putting a film around them.

You see the arms.

They grab the trays, and then it's

pushed off onto a hot plate.

And the hot plate melts a little bit of plastic on the top.

That is how they come out, heat shield.

That is the film that's so satisfying to--

Pop, yeah.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

Now they have to go through a series of safety checks.

Every tray of sausages passes under a detector

to make sure no metal has slipped into the meat.

Why is it going so fast?

It's like-- it's like a toboggan ride.

Is that the end of the production line?

MISHA: It is for this room.

Thank you, Misha.

You're very welcome.

I never knew there was so much to a sausage.

There's still one more test to go,

and it happens in the canteen.

Hello.

Do you do the quality check, right?

- You're in the right place. - Yeah.

Hi, Isabel.

Right.

What do we have to do to check quality?

Well, first thing is make sure that it's sealed properly.

And it's properly sealed.

Then the next thing is to smell.

How many sausages do you smell in the course of a day?

More than I ever thought I would.

The sausages are weighed and then shallow fried.

That's a mildly seasoned, mildly spiced,

very meaty, bouncy sausage.

I think that's exactly as it should be.

The interesting thing is that you say it's mild, because it's

quite strong seasoning, but because these are literally

fresh off the line, they haven't had time to kind of develop.

So it'll be a couple of days before they hit the shelves.

They'll get stronger flavor?

Yeah.

Ah.

Brilliant.

Thank you very much.

ISABEL: You're very welcome.

[music playing]

Traditional bangers like these are the best-sellers in the UK,

but in the US they're partial to a hot dog.

But just how American are they?

[music playing]

A red sausage in a white bun with mustard over the top.

It's an American icon.

But it turns out it didn't originate in the USA.

American food anthropologist Kaori O'Connor

has invited me to sample the sausage

that led to the hot dog.

Oh, yummy.

Look at that.

- Oh, they look nice. - Whoa, yes.

They do look nice. Thank you.

Yes, yes.

So where exactly did the hot dog really come from?

From the distant past, by way of Germany.

What we've got here is the classic bratwurst-- very finely

processed, mild sausages.

One of the great things about these sausages,

they're so mild that they're very adaptable.

So how do we get them from this sort

of German-style sausage to what we think of as a hot dog,

always--

and it's always-- in a bun?

This is how-- this is the father of the American dog,

Charles Feldman.

WOMAN: Feldman was one of hundreds of thousands

of German immigrants who sailed into New York

in the 19th century.

KAORI O'CONNOR: He arrives in New York about 1856.

He's young, he's 15, and he has to make a living.

What's he gonna do?

He thinks-- food, fast food.

Now, in Germany the sausage has been

a street food from before there were streets, you know?

He said, well, there are these sausages.

What can I do to make them more attractive?

And he thought, I can put them in a bun.

It's really easy.

And he would slash open the bun, put

in a warm hot dog, put on some mustard, and there you are.

He sold them at Coney Island, which is the big resort.

WOMAN: So it's a sort of holiday food.

It's cheap.

KAORI O'CONNOR: Yeah.

The Coney Island Red Hot.

And it was the fact that it was hot that sort of first

captured the imagination.

OK, yes.

A cold sausage is one thing, but a hot sausage--

yeah, it's much more appealing.

That explains half the name we know today,

but what about the other half?

Whoa, look at that.

When was the first reference to a hot dog?

We scoured the archives, and one of the earliest

is here, "The Patterson Daily Press," 1892.

And it's a young boy who is so keen to get his hands on it.

He says, Hey Mister, give me a hot dog quick!

WOMAN: The dog part can probably be traced

back to a popular German pet.

One of the things the Germans brought over

was their dogs, notably the dachshund or sausage dog.

So we're getting an early association

between sausage dogs--

KAORI O'CONNOR: Dog and dog.

- -dogs and sausages.

Because you see, the sausage is long and narrow,

and so was the dachshund.

So that's it then, the hot dog, all elements assembled.

You don't need much, do you, to make us happy?

This is perfect.

[music playing]

GREGG WALLACE: At the factory, the sausages

have passed quality check with flying colors.

And they're ready to be boxed up.

Are you Harry?

Yes, nice to meet.

GREGG WALLACE: So what happens here?

This is the sleeving side, so you want to grab some of these?

Oh, I'm doing it, am I?

Yeah, you can give me a hand if you'd like.

All right, OK.

Harry's been sleeving sausages for two years.

So with your finger, you can prop it

against your hip like that and then push

it with your finger like that.

And all you have to do is grab a pack and then just slide

it in, just like that.

That's not difficult. HARRY: And then just pop it--

I can do-- I can do this.

We have just 4 minutes to sleeve 175 packs before the next batch

rolls off the line.

Cannot get these things to fold up quick enough.

How many packs are you doing in the course of a day?

HARRY: In a day, it's tens of thousands.

Oh, my word.

They won't stop coming along, will they?

I can't-- I can't do it.

The fast pace is set by the sausage

packers on the production line.

You can't stop here, really.

What can go wrong?

If the sausages all fall on the floor,

which is what I don't really want.

But we're doing it.

We're getting in front.

Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.

Look, this is good.

This is really good.

We've eventually caught up.

This is a job that is easy to do but very hard to do quickly.

Now the packs are date stamped for a 10-day shelf life

and put in display cases of 6.

I can keep up with this.

It's this here that fascinates me.

So that's a box strapper.

Box strapper?

Box strapper.

GREGG WALLACE: What's your name? Len.

My name is--

yeah.

Great.

That's good. Let me do it.

Let me do it.

Let me do it.

And try it.

Good.

You must have trapped your finger in.

You not lost your finger.

Show me.

It's got a sensor.

It's working.

It's safe.

Oh, your hands have--

Oh, Yeah.

It's OK.

It's OK!

[laughter]

[music playing]

I've got it.

It's been just 2 hours and 28 minutes

since our pork shoulders were deboned,

and we've made it to the final stage--

distribution.

You must be Izzy, right?

Hi, Gregg.

Nice to meet you. I'm Izzy.

You're in charge of distribution.

I am.

So we have about five lorries that

load onto the dock each day.

GREGG WALLACE: How many pallets on each lorry?

IZZY: So we usually get about 26 to 28 pallets.

So you're looking at about 10,000 sausages per pallet.

10,000 sausages per pallet?

Per pallet.

So if you look down the lorry now,

we've got roughly 170,000 sausages there.

That's a lot of sausages.

[music playing]

GREGG WALLACE: These chilled bangers will be on the shelves

of 10,000 British supermarkets within two days,

and more are bought in London than anywhere else.

I've enjoyed watching the sausages being made,

and I am pleased that they actually

contain so few ingredients.

But I am surprised that it's still really a people industry.

It requires enthusiastic and highly-skilled people,

especially in the butchery.

But really what they're making is

something that we've all enjoyed for hundreds

and hundreds of years.

That is a sausage.