Original subtitles

- Whether you're enjoying a ploughman's at the pub...

Thank you.

- Putting on a tasty spread...

- ..or picking up a snack to have on the go...

- ..in the UK we love a pork pie.

Spending more than £13 million on them every month.

And where's the best place to find out how they're made?

A factory that makes 80 million of them every year.

I'm Gregg Wallace...

Whoa!

..and tonight, I'm getting stuck in...

Whoa!

..making a traditional pork pie...

That is very clever.

..that mixes ingenious engineering...

It's coming down, folding over on itself,

then pulling itself tight again.

..with the latest food science...

If that doesn't set, it's just going to destroy the pastry.

..and the skill of hundreds of workers...

360 pies a minute!

You could end up pie-eyed.

- And I'm Cherry Healey.

I'm revealing hacks for the perfect vegan pastry...

Vodka! That is so clever.

..and learning to drive...

It's really high.

..an HGV, like the thousands transporting our food every day.

Tell me when, tell me when, tell me when!

- Stop. Stop! - Ah!

- And historian Ruth Goodman...

- That's quite loud!

- ..is fishing for the origins...

- The heads of the pilchard studying the stars.

- ..of one of Britain's most unusual pies.

- Would this sustain you?

- 300,000 pork pies are made in this factory every single day.

And I'm going to reveal just how they do it.

Welcome to Inside the Factory.

MUSIC: The William Tell Overture by Gioachino Rossini

This is the Vale of Mowbray Pork Pie Factory in Northallerton.

They've been making pork pies here in Yorkshire since 1928.

And it's still a hands-on job, with over 200 workers

making all sorts of pies,

from caramelised onion to cheese and pickle.

And today, I'm following production of their best seller,

the traditional pork pie in Snack Size.

They make 425,000 of these 75 gram pies every week.

That's a lot of pork!

So over at intake, I'm MEATING Mark Gatenby...

- On the deck!

- ..to help with the delivery.

Good morning. Mark.

- Gregg, how are you?

- Very good to meet you. - You too.

- What's your role? - Yeah, I'm the managing director.

- Responsible to whom?

- Just myself. It's a family business.

- Where does your involvement with it start?

- So I started here in 1998, in the factory floor,

learning all the jobs, the first job was making pastry.

And then I went through the whole factory

over the course of two years,

learnt all the jobs, and worked my way up

and then took over for my father in 2020.

- So there is nothing about the pork pie making that you wouldn't know

like the back of your hand.

- The back of my hand. - Brilliant.

So I've come to the right place. - You have.

- Where do we start?

- We start right here at goods in. This is a delivery of meat.

- We're going to start with the pork, right? - Indeed.

- I'm really looking forward to this, mate. Good.

I mean, pork pies and Britain, it's almost... - Synonymous, isn't it?

- Yeah! Almost like the shipping forecast or Coronation Street.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- Inside, doors open directly on to the back of the lorry.

And as the first pallet of fresh meat is unloaded...

..my pork pie production begins.

Right. What have we got on there?

- Pork belly.

Each of these containers holds about 500 kilos.

- Each one of those containers has got half a tonne of pork on it?

- Something like that, yeah.

- And how many of your snack pork pies with half a tonne make?

- 70,000 to 80000.

- So is it all pork belly that you use?

- No, it's not all pork belly.

We use three different kinds of meat altogether.

- Can you show me? - Yeah. Come on, have a look.

- Lovely. I want to take some of this home, make a stew.

Right. OK.

Do all three of these cuts go in your pork pie?

- All three.

- That's a belly. - Yep.

- Is that a loin? - It's bauck bacon.

- And what's that? - This is shoulder.

- So what does the belly give you?

- That gives you the flavour, along with the bacon here.

And the shoulder we use, that gives it the texture.

It's that firmer mouthfeel that you have when you eat the pie.

- Meaty. - Meaty.

- You know, there's a popular perception

that it's all sorts of bits.

Do you know what I mean? Like minced-up bits of ear or...

Forgive me, but... - None of that. No.

- No offal, no livers, kidneys...

- I'll quash that perception right now.

These are the only pieces of meat that go into our pies.

- But nothing else? - Nothing else.

- The factory uses 60 tonnes of pork meat in their pies each week.

Shipments arrive by road nearly every day from farmers in the UK,

Holland and Germany.

That's a lot of work for drivers like Rob here.

Like many businesses, this factory depends on a fleet of lorries.

But driving one of these monsters

isn't like parking your car at the supermarket,

as Cherry's been finding out.

- In the UK, 98% of all food and farm goods are transported by road.

To keep the UK's supply lines moving,

there are nearly half a million HGV licensed here,

and the demand for drivers is on the rise.

So to see what it takes to become one,

I've decided to give it a go.

- HORN WAILS

- You must be Sue!

- Hi, Cherry.

- The number plate gives it away.

Each year, former trucker Sue Howe trains 300 new lorry drivers.

A test and licence is needed to drive HGVs

over three and a half tonnes.

Oh, my God. I'm so intimidated by her.

She's absolutely enormous.

- Don't be, she's a real sweetie.

- Today, I'm getting my very own basic training

in a fully articulated lorry,

which means it's hooked up to a trailer

rather than having a single, rigid body.

Oh, my goodness!

It's really high!

It looks quite familiar.

Is it relatively similar to driving a car?

- Everything fundamentally is the same,

it's just a lot larger.

- Sue's training HGV is 3.9 metres tall, 16 metres long,

and up to 44 tonnes fully loaded.

- Ignition key's on your right-hand side,

if you turn it towards the windscreen

and that'll start the engine up.

First we're going to put our truck into drive.

- Drive is go.

- Then we're gonna have a good check around about the truck

to make sure it's safe to move away.

So we start with this mirror here.

- Clear.

- Your right mirror.

- Clear.

There are six mirrors to check in total.

- If it's safe, press the gas pedal, truck will move forward.

We're going to go out of the gate. - That way? - Yep.

- Oh, my God, and we're off.

Ah-ha!

Oh, gosh, the tail's sticking...

Oh, that's really weird.

In a car, you turn, the whole car turns.

But with this, it's almost like a snake.

You turn the front and the body then follows on.

So you have to be really aware of that time difference.

It's estimated that 70,000 drivers quit the haulage industry

during the pandemic,

with Covid, Brexit and working conditions all blamed.

- Keep checking your mirrors

so you know what's going on round about you.

- So, to keep Britain moving,

it's vital to train new drivers for a life behind the wheel.

Did you enjoy being a truck driver?

- I loved being a truck driver. Really enjoyed it.

- Why do you think that more men do it than women?

- Before trucks had power steering,

it was quite a physical job just driving the vehicle.

A lot of girls should be doing it. Why not?

- But still just 1% of the UK's lorry drivers are women.

So in support of my trucking sisters,

I'm going to conquer a personal blind spot.

Reversing.

Ooh! What are those?

Sue has loaded us up with buckets of water

which will give the game away

if I fail to reverse smoothly between the cones.

- So let's have a check all around us.

Make sure it's safe.

Very gently. The slower we go,

the more control we'll have over the trailer.

- This is really, really hard.

When reversing an articulated trailer,

movements on the steering wheel are opposite than those in a car.

It's really counter-intuitive.

- That's it, lovely.

- Sue set me a relatively straight course.

If I were taking the real test,

it would involve much more of a corner.

That was a nice, gentle stop,

so I'm pretty sure the water in the buckets will be intact.

- We might have had a little bit of a splash.

- My final challenge is really going to put

those water buckets to the test.

An emergency stop.

A 44-tonne lorry driving at 55mph

needs at least 120 metres to come to a halt.

Is there something on the runway?

Is that Gregg?! - That is Gregg.

What I want you to do, Cherry, is drive up to him

without frightening him.

And I want you to stop as close as you can,

but without making an impact.

- Oh, no.

- When you think you're ready, start to brake.

- Tell me when, tell me when, tell me when!

Ah!

- Stop, stop! - Ah!

Gregg!

He's gone down.

I didn't hit him. I didn't hit him.

Oh, God.

Slamming on the brakes may have just saved cardboard Gregg,

but there's not much left in my buckets.

- Oh, my goodness!

Oh, dear.

- Do you know whose fault this is? - Gregg.

- It's Gregg's! - Yeah.

- Because I didn't want to hurt him!

- He shouldn't have jumped out in front of us.

- Sue recommends up to six days training,

and each week she puts six drivers through the HGV test,

helping to keep the wheels turning on over 100 million HGV journeys

in the UK every year.

- Thankfully, I'm still standing,

37 miles north of York at my pie factory.

My real lorry load of pork's been safely unloaded

and three different cuts weighed out...

We've got bacon. We've got belly. We've got shoulder.

..ready for meat prep with Mark.

Whoa! God, this is heavy. - Come on!

- How much pork have I got in here?

- 200 kilos-ish.

- 200 kilo. Where am I going? Over there?

- Into here. Yes, into here.

- Oh, and what is that?

- This is a mincer.

- We're starting with the pork belly, which is lifted with a hydraulic arm

into the top of the mincing machine,

where it joins the bacon and pork shoulder.

There she goes.

- Perfect.

- The three cuts of meat are pulled down

through a five mil mincing plate,

taking one minute to fill a hopper with enough mince

for around 17,000 pork pies.

- There you go.

- And now it's ready for some spicing up.

- We're now going to mix this meat

with the seasonings here in this machine.

- And what's in there?

- So you've got the blend of the seasonings to give it the flavour.

- But what seasoning? - Secret.

- I'll grab a quick smell.

Well, there is most certainly pepper

and there is mace as well. Nutmeg. - Yeah, yeah.

- Bit of chilli. - That's it now.

- All right. I'll get you. All right.

It's a guarded secret.

Right. How's that bucket of spice get in there?

- You've got to lift it in there.

- What?! - But I can help you if you like.

- No, no, don't worry.

Whoa. - You sure?

- Ugh! - Yep. Go on, then. That's it.

- Ugh! It's taller than me.

The 20-kilo bowl also includes 13 kilos of white starch,

a carbohydrate extracted from potatoes,

and 45 litres of water go in too.

- Are you ready?

- In the mix, the potato starch gets to work absorbing the water.

- If you didn't keep the moisture in there using the starch,

it would be really dry.

- And after baking, the starch will retain moisture

in the heart of the pork pie,

more than if the meat were left on its own.

That smells proper good!

That is meaty. - Yeah.

- So what do we do with it now? - So we'll put this in the fridge, right?

Because we're going to go off and make some pastry.

- Brilliant! - OK. - I'm enjoying this.

- I'll let you push that.

- Pull it. - You're fitter than me.

- To keep all that moisture locked up inside,

we need the right sort of pie crust.

So I'm entering the wonderful world of pastry.

Something I must admit I'm better at tasting than making.

So I'm going to get a masterclass in pastry, am I?

- You are getting a masterclass in pastry.

- So what goes in it? - Very simple.

Flour, salt, lard, water.

- What sort of pastry is it?

- So it's a hot water pastry.

It gives you a different texture of pastry.

- Can I help? - Yeah, absolutely.

We need some blocks of lard. We need two of these.

- Do you know what? I don't actually know what lard is.

- Pork fat. - Is that what it is?

- Yeah, it is, actually.

- Why do you use lard and not butter?

- So, it's traditionally made with the lard,

and back in the day, I think the pastry wasn't really something

that would be eaten.

It was designed as a carrier.

- Ah! Because, really, pastry traditionally

was a way of preserving meat.

- So you wouldn't put your expensive ingredients, like butter, into it.

- Now what goes in it?

- A bit of salt. - How much?

- One cup.

- The salt adds flavour, but the bulk of the ingredients

are added from pipes over at the super-sized mixer.

First up is 110 kilos of strong flour,

which pours down into the 250-litre bowl.

The mixer blends the lard, salt and flour for three minutes.

- So, now we add the hot ingredients.

That's where this pastry differs from everything else.

- Most pastry uses cold fat and cold water.

But here, blocks of lard are heated to 100 degrees,

turning it into a liquid, which is piped into the flour mix,

followed by 30 litres of boiling water.

This creates an emulsion that thoroughly mixes

all the ingredients into a smooth dough.

That is red hot as well.

- Magic happening in there now.

The hot liquid starts breaking down the starches.

It gelatinises it.

And that gives it the strength we need.

- The boiling water fuses all the ingredients together

and is the key to a pork pie not needing a supporting tin.

You need a strong pastry, don't you?

- The pastry can't be too fragile.

When it's finished, it would all just drop apart.

- Do you know what cooking is?

Cooking is art meets science.

Once baked, this super-strong dough will form

the tasty container of my meat pie.

While my pies will be packed with pork,

Ruth's been fishing for the facts about one of the UK's

more mysterious pies.

- The far west of Cornwall is a place steeped in seafaring myths.

And the ancient village of Mousehole

is home to some very unusual foodie folklore.

Local legend has it that a terrible set of storms one winter

in the 16th century gave rise to a particularly peculiar

British pie recipe.

Stargazy pie.

Cooked and eaten in this village for centuries,

its origins are a little bit fishy.

So I'm off to catch up with local historian Elaine Borden.

So what would Mousehill have been like way back in the 16th century?

- Well, completely different to the Mousehole that you see today.

This harbour was completely full of fishing boats.

It was a true fishing village.

They depended on the sea.

- The most abundant fish were pilchards,

now more commonly called sardines.

And the whole village would help to process them in summer and autumn.

But in the depths of winter, fishing was a perilous business.

And that's when it's thought the 16th century story begins

with the exploits of a fisherman called Tom Bawcock.

So what exactly is this great myth?

I mean, you're the Mousehole person.

How does Mousehole tell it?

- So you have to imagine there's a strong southerly gale blowing.

The waves are coming up over.

It's very difficult for anybody to get out of the harbour to fish.

And the village was starving.

And Tom Bawcock, he took his little boat

and out he went, and he came back with seven sorts of fish.

- He's landed this saving harvest, and they turn it into a pie.

- They do, and, of course, the crowning glory is the pilchards.

So it would have been with egg and potatoes and fish,

a pastry topping, and then through the top

came all the heads of the pilchards looking up towards the stars,

Stargazy pie.

And that is what saved the village from starvation,

according to the legend.

- I've put in an order at the local pub to try this quirky fish pie.

And I'm sharing it with historian Dr Mukta Das,

who's been de-boning fact from fiction.

So what do we know about the stargazy pie itself?

- Not much.

We know that there's loads of different names for it.

Stargazy, stargazing, starygazy.

But it's not until we get to the sort of 20th century

that we start to see recipes for it.

- Does stargazy pie go any earlier than that?

- I've got a reference here for you from a dictionary

printed in 1847,

and his assertion is that starygazey pie

is actually a term from the 1300s.

- Wow. Well, that's way before the Tom Bawcock story!

- Absolutely. Interesting, isn't it?

- A pie made of pilchards and leeks,

the heads of the pilchards appearing through the crust

as if they were studying the stars.

- Very familiar, isn't it?

- But one thing I wanted to ask, though,

was there ever actually a Tom Bawcock?

- There doesn't seem to be any evidence of a Tom Bawcock

in the parish records.

- Was it a local name that turns up regularly?

With different spellings?

- It's really difficult to pinpoint an actual man

who would have been the centre of this myth.

Presumably, it kind of reflects a wider idea of

what a fisherman's life is

and the kind of risks that you have to take

when you brave such rough seas.

These kinds of calculations were kind of everyday heroic acts.

- So when we talk about Tom Bawcock,

he might just be a sort of an everyman. - Yes.

- A sort of useful figure to pin a story on,

but he never actually existed as an individual.

The myth is encapsulating the whole way of life

of these little Cornish fishing villages,

where people are genuinely, economically,

physically dependent upon a very iffy crop.

The stargazy story is still celebrated at this pub in Mousehole

every year on the 23rd of December,

when locals gather to get a taste of history

and to toast their brave fisherman ancestors.

- There you are guys. - Ooh.

- Lovely. - Thank you very much.

So have you had stargazy pie before?

- No, this is my first time.

- So, here we go. - Here we go.

- Would this sustain you through a long, hard winter?

- Mm.

- So what do you think, Mukta?

- It's hard to know if the legend is true,

but the pie itself is pretty legendary.

- This hearty pie made use of the whole of the fish

with the skin, tails and heads full of vital protein and nutrition.

- Look at these lovely pilchards packed with omega-three oils.

- It would have been a life saver

for the starving people of Mousehole deep in winter.

No wonder it's so fondly remembered.

Although Tom Bawcock remains an elusive superhero,

the facts are rather less fishy than I'd thought,

and the pie remains an eccentric Cornish favourite.

- Back at the pork pie factory in Yorkshire,

after 56 minutes,

my meat has been blended with spices,

and my hot water pastry is mixed,

ready for someone rather special.

- I'm going to take you to meet the queen of pastry.

- The queen of pastry?

- The queen of pastry. - Pastry royalty.

- Pastry royalty.

- I wish I'd have known, I'd have put on a special hairnet.

I'm heading for a royal audience in the tinning room.

Are you Mary, the queen of pastry?

- That's what they say! - I'm Greggg Wallace, the king of puddings.

- Oh, brilliant.

- We should run away together! Start a factory!

- Well, why not? - What are you doing? Playing cards?

- Yeah, playing cards.

- What are you doing, Mary?

- Just putting pastry in tins.

- What do I do with this? Put it in there?

- Put it in there, please.

- 150 kilos of my pastry mix

is loaded into a machine called the dough oddy.

The wet dough is fed down a pipe

emerging at a consistent speed of two centimetres a second

to meet a ram pushing down 100 times a minute,

all mechanically timed to dish out 38-gram portions,

which will form the pastry base in each baking tin.

Mary and her team are filling trays of 50 tins.

That is very clever.

This film has not been sped up.

You are amazing!

I can't believe my eyes.

Right. I want to pit my skills against yours.

But Mary insists I start at half speed.

- I'll slow it down for you.

You ready? - Yeah.

And scared.

All we need now is a leotard and some disco music,

and this is a perfect workout.

- Hey, that's not fair!

That's cheating!

I'm going to the belt up.

- I'm not sure even a high-tech robot could beat the experience of Mary.

At full speed, she can fill 6,000 tins an hour.

I, it seems... Ah!

..can't.

Ah-ha!

Stop, stop, stop!

You are like an automaton.

An, automa-Mary.

How do you do that? That is exhausting.

Thanks to Mary and the team's incredible dexterity,

the factory prepares 12,000 tins an hour.

Every five minutes, trolleys of 1,000 tins

are wheeled to the chiller,

where the pastry rests and strengthens.

My pastry has been made using a good old-fashioned lump of lard,

but these days, some people want the pleasure of the pie

while following a vegan diet,

Cherry is putting vegan pastry to the test.

- I'm going to make a shortcrust pastry.

It should be fairly simple compared to the complex flakiness

of a puff pastry,

but getting a tasty crumble in the mouth texture

is a real science.

And if you want to follow a non-dairy or vegan diet,

the choices are massive.

I mean, look at this lot.

To see how they compare with traditional dairy butter...

Well, hi, Dr Stu! - How are you doing? - Come in.

Food scientist Dr Stuart Farrimond is my vegan baking buddy.

- You've been shopping. Look at that! - I bought...

..every fat known to man.

Traditional pastry made with dairy butter

relies on its fats to convey flavour and create a crumbly texture.

But can fat from a non-animal source do the same job?

What fat are we going to use today?

- So with dairy butter,

we're going to go for a vegan alternative.

Vegetarian shortening.

- What is shortening?

- Shortening is actually a vegetable oil that's been solidified

into a solid block so that we can use it to make a shortcrust pastry.

- So it's fully vegan and might make a cracking pastry.

But we shall see. - We're going to find out.

- For today's shortcrust pastry challenge,

I'm using the oil-based shortening block,

while Dr Stu is using standard butter.

Where do we start?

- OK. Pastry is really simple.

It's literally just flour, fat, and a little bit water.

But we're going to make apple pie,

so I'm going to add a bit of sugar to make it sweet.

- For a true comparison,

we're both using 400g of plain flour and 200g of sugar,

which we rub into the chilled fats.

- Yours looks easier to mine.

Can I have a feel? - Yeah. Have a feel.

- Oh, it's much, much easier. Yeah.

- I think it's softer than the butter. Yeah. - It is.

When they've made that with the vegetable oils,

they can make it softer than the butter, so it's easier to work with.

It's also got a higher melting point,

so it's less likely to turn liquid in your flour.

- What does that mean in terms of how easy it is to use?

- We don't want it to become liquid

because you end up with one big block,

and so you don't get that lovely shortcrust crumbly texture.

- More crumbliness means a more melt-in-the-mouth pastry.

Unlike the hot water pastry in Gregg's strong pork pie cases,

we're adding cold water to make our apple pie crust nice and soft.

- For yours, you need about three tablespoons of water.

I wouldn't need quite as much because butter has some water in it.

Butter's actually 15% water.

- Water activates gluten in the flour.

This stretchy protein holds food together well,

but risks making your pastry more bready than crumbly.

So Dr Stu has a handy pastry hack.

What is that?

Vodka! - Vodka is 40% alcohol, which means it's 60% water.

So it's less water in the pastry.

- Why not just use less water?

- We need a liquid just enough to hold it together,

but if we add the vodka, we're using even less water.

We're making less gluten because too much gluten

will make it really bready.

- That is so clever.

So to stop the pastry getting leathery and too like bread,

you add vodka, which gives you the liquid you need,

but actually a lower water content.

- And most of the alcohol will actually come off in the oven.

- That's a very clever Dr Stu science trick.

Once the liquid is thoroughly mixed,

both batches of dough rest in the fridge for 15 minutes.

This solidifies the fats before we roll them out.

- They need to be chilled because we don't want the fat to melt.

- Why do we really want these little blobs of fat throughout our pastry?

How is that going to give a crumbly effect?

- The fat makes it taste better,

so it'll have that lovely mouthfeel when we eat it.

But also it's important that we have dots of fat throughout it

so that the flour isn't all one complete sheet, it's not too bready.

So it gives the lovely crumble.

- The rolled pastry is filled with caramelised apple,

topped with a lid and baked in the oven.

The melting point of vegetarian shortening

is ten degrees higher than butter.

So in theory, this should make the little pockets of fat

puff up even more in the oven,

creating a crumblier pastry texture.

But will my non-dairy version impress a passionate pie fan?

Well, they look very similar, I would say.

You wouldn't know necessarily that one was vegan and one was not.

- You wouldn't, no.

- But what about the taste?

One for you.

That is the vegan one.

And this one's yours.

- The butter.

- I think, let's do vegan first.

- That's pretty good. - It tastes like pastry.

- Pretty good. Yeah.

So this is with the butter.

Here we go. - Here we go.

It does have more flavour.

Side by side, the dairy pastry does taste a little bit richer.

Why is that?

- It's cos yours is 100% fat.

Whereas mine has some milk proteins

which gives it that extra flavour and a few sugars.

- So it's the milk proteins and sugars in the butter

that give it a flavour that the oil just can't quite match.

I suppose what we want from pastry is crumbliness,

richness, butteryness.

And considering that one doesn't have any butter in it,

I feel like it's a pretty good alternative.

- Inside the pork pie factory,

we're one hour and 40 minutes into production.

My strong hot water pastry has been whizzed into a tin

and chilled for 40 minutes.

So it's ready to be shaped into pork pie casings

over in assembly with Emma Marsh.

Emma, I've got your tins. - Hello!

- Is this what you're after? - Yeah!

- Right. Can I help?

- Of course you can!

- Right. What do I do?

- Grab four tins.

- Yeah.

- And we put them in. - OK.

- Go on, then. - All right, all right, all right.

Is that it? - Yeah, just like that.

- Well, you don't have to be Lightning Mary, do you, for this one?

- This is slower than normal. - Shut up.

Stop embarrassing me.

You know what I like about this factory

is how many people there are here!

- Very easy-going people to work with.

- We're loading them up, I know, but where do they go now?

- They go through here,

and the blockers come down and fill in our tins out.

- The blockers, they're like the pistons

that are hitting the pastry. - Yeah.

And they're nice and hot.

- Are they? - The pastry with the hot blockers

makes it push out nice and evenly.

- Oh! It's not just the force? - No.

It's the heat that comes with it as well.

- The blockers are heated to 135 degrees

to soften the pastry mix as it moulds into the base of the tin,

emerging just four millimetres thick.

And how many are they doing at a time?

- 15 pies every time it comes down.

- Which makes a pastry casing for 180 pies every minute.

So what about the meat?

- Just round here. - Come on.

200 kilos of chilled minced pork and spice mix

drop into a meat depositor.

Wonderful. This is where you meat comes in, right?

- Yeah.

- A ram pushes it down with 90 psi.

That's greater than the pressure exerted by a walking elephant.

It squeezes the meat mix through 15 35-millimetre holes,

filling each pastry base with 30g.

How many snack pork pies are coming off the conveyor belt every hour?

- 12,000 snack pork pies an hour.

- Brilliant.

So we got pastry,

we've got the pork meat inside,

is there a lid?

- Of course we have a lid.

Just around the other side. - Come on.

- So, Gregg, if you look up here...

- Right. Another hopper. - Another hopper.

- Everything in this factory comes from a hopper up by the ceiling.

From the hopper,

a ball of 175 kilos of pastry is fed into

a pastry sheeter rolling machine.

It emerges as a constant ribbon of lid pastry

four millimetres thick.

Fabulous.

Absolutely fabulous.

Now, I'm guessing that's exactly the same pastry

that's on the underneath.

- No, our base pastry is made with hot lard.

Our lid pastries made with cold lard.

- Unlike the hot lard which creates strength for the base,

cold water pastry makes a softer, more delicate texture for the lid.

Activating more gluten in the flour results in a stretchier dough,

which is easier to roll but requires ingenious mechanical handling.

It's coming down, folding over on itself,

then pulling itself tight again.

Why?

- To stop all the tension from pulling it apart.

When they get thick, the lids can shrink back up,

and they'll snap off the pies.

- This fold, stretch and release removes elastic tension

built up in the glutinous pastry

after squeezing through the roller.

Very clever.

Very, very clever.

It also helps the soft pastry lids retain their shape

as the lidder machine presses down to crimp and seal them

onto the stronger base pastry below...

..punching a hole in the top at the same time.

- And this holes are for the steam to rise out

while they're getting baked.

If we didn't have that hole,

our pies would probably just explode in the oven.

So here, Gregg, our ejectors are pushing our pies up from the line.

- Those pillars are coming up through the holes in the trays

and pushing them up? - And then sliding them off.

- I think that's great.

Right. And then what's happening here?

- So this is where the pies get glazed.

- With what?

- Egg powder.

- At home, we would use beaten up egg, and we brush it on.

- Here, we use powdered egg.

So it lasts a lot longer.

- For each batch, one kilo of powdered egg is rehydrated

with ten litres of water and sprayed in a fine mist.

It's a quick and economical method of glazing 12,000 pies every hour.

And the egg wash is to give you a shiny finish?

- Yeah, a nice shiny finish at the end.

- It's just the same as home baking,

just on a massive scale. - Yep.

- These days, powdered egg is used in a lot of food production,

but it wasn't always so popular, as Ruth has been finding out.

- Today, protein-packed eggs are widely available in the UK,

but in the 1930s, our egg supply was far more precarious.

And with the outbreak of World War II,

that supply chain was strained to breaking point.

Here at the Yorkshire Farming Museum,

I'm meeting food historian Dr Annie Gray

to find out why.

- At this point, in the 1920s and '30s,

I mean, look around you.

This is poultry production, very much on a small scale.

And as a result, we didn't ever really have enough eggs

to feed everybody in Britain.

So we were importing 70% of what we ate,

huge ocean-going ships filled with eggs.

- I mean, as soon as war broke out,

that must've been totally impossible.

- It was a tad problematic. Yes.

- In the early years of World War II,

the ships that imported eggs from all over the British Empire

were targeted by German U-boats.

So new supply lines were established from North America.

With its large-scale farming methods,

it had a surplus of eggs

and a nifty bit of kit to help them get ready

for transport across the Atlantic.

Annie has taken me to meet its modern-day descendant.

- This is a solution to all our egg ills.

Because this makes powdered egg.

- Oh, of course! Powdered egg!

- Well, powdered egg also known as dehydrated egg, or, today,

spray dried egg, is brilliant because what it is

is egg without all that water,

which means it's going to be easily transportable and very light.

So the first thing to do is to crack our eggs.

- But how on earth do you turn a whole fresh egg into a powder?

- Let me just pass you a whisk.

- Each egg contains about 75% water.

The idea is to remove this liquid and then replace it

only when it's time to cook.

- It's good, tough eggs.

- In wartime factories, huge teams of workers

cracked eggs at breakneck speed.

- ARCHIVE: - The shells are broken and their contents removed.

- An experienced operator could break an incredible 48,000 eggs a day.

The eggs were added into giant mixing machines...

- Give it some welly...

- ..which we sadly don't have.

OK, they're done enough? - Brilliant.

Let's pour those into the beaker.

- There we go.

- Pop in the tube. - In the tube goes.

- Then we're going to turn the air.

- That's quite loud! - Yeah.

We need to leave it about 30 minutes.

- The machine sprays out our beaten egg as a fine mist.

As it falls, it meets hot air coming the other way,

which evaporates all the water.

Well, it seems to have done its stuff.

- Yeah. And you can see how little it makes

when you consider how much liquid egg we had.

That's all we've got.

A product which has low volume and will last for months and months,

if not years.

- All thanks to removing the moisture that enables rotting.

So, is it nutritious?

- It's just as nutritious as an egg would be.

It did very much look like it was the solution

to an EGGS-traordinary problem.

- Powdered egg was so lightweight and compact

that it could be imported to the UK on a huge scale.

From January 1942, each UK household was allowed a single tin,

the equivalent of 12 fresh eggs, in their rations every month.

But did the Great British public like it?

- The real problem with dried egg was that nobody knew what to do with it.

So adverts like this were put out in order to educate

the British housewife.

- Time to make a wartime omelette.

We rehydrate our egg by dissolving the dry powder in water.

- You do need to get all the lumps out,

otherwise, you're just going to have a mouthful of egg powder.

- Then it's straight into the pan.

OK, well, it's sort of setting.

- It's not sort of quite reacting like normal egg, but...

- But the proof of the omelette is in the tasting.

- Oh, there's an aftertaste.

- That's not great, is it? - It's, uh, it's pretty foul.

- But, I mean, despite the fact that it's not that great,

you're hungry, you can eat it.

And people were hungry, and there was nothing else.

- Also, when you bear in mind that this can be used for cakes,

and one of the things that really fuelled the Second World War

were cakes and biscuits and little sweet treats

that would just get you through a day.

It's just, as breakfast,

it's just disappointment on a plate.

- So whilst it can't compete with fresh eggs for a good fry up,

powdered egg did support the nation's wartime baking

and went on to become a hugely useful ingredient

in many of the factory foods we eat today.

- Back at the pork pie factory in Northallerton,

and nearly two hours into production,

the pastry bases have been filled with meat,

covered and coated with a misty sheen of egg.

Now me and my pies are on our way to baking...

Oh!

These things are heavy. I suppose they would be, wouldn't they?

..for a very warm welcome from head baker Gaby Zimetky.

- Hello. Yes, I'm Gaby.

- I'm guessing that is a very hot oven.

- Yes, it's 230 degrees.

- How long do the pies stay in the oven?

- 45 minutes.

- At 230 degrees?

And they don't burn? - No.

- Are you sure? - I'm sure.

- How long have you worked here?

- 18 years. - Oh, OK. OK.

Right. What powers the oven?

- Gas, gas oven.

- I wouldn't want to pay that gas bill.

Nor right now. Right.

Do we have to push the trays into the oven?

- Yes. - Can I help?

- Yes, of course.

- Whoa!

My word.

Whoa!

That is hot like the sun!

A carousel moves my trolley round so another can be loaded in.

How many can we get into the oven?

- 8,000 pies.

- Mind the gap!

Gaby, we've done it. - Yeah.

- Come on!

- Shut the door.

- That is hard work.

But I tell you what, one hour of that would be

the best workout for your body.

Inside the oven, a gas burner creates hot air,

which is blown through the space by a fan,

heating eight trolleys of pies,

which rotate every 40 seconds

on a large turntable to ensure and even bake.

It's a 45 minute spin class at 230 degrees.

My pies will be unloaded from a door on the opposite side of the oven.

So that's where I'm joining Aaron Dixon.

Aaron. - How are you doing, Gregg? You all right?

- I'll tell you what, I loaded them the other side.

They're going to be hot. - Nice pies, huh?

- Whoa, whoa!

- It's going off. Yeah.

So we'll check the colour now. Yeah.

- So tell me what we're looking for.

- They need to be a nice colour.

- So, biscuity brown.

Can I? - Yeah. Yeah.

Hot. Very hot. - Ouch!

To ensure the meat is thoroughly cooked,

the pies must be above 90 degrees.

You got well over 90 degrees there, my friend.

- Yeah, 99.1.

And they're ready to come out, Gregg.

- With the batch checked and meat well cooked,

Aaron unloads the baking hot trolleys with a metal hook.

The pies are removed by hand and stacked in wire racks.

- Cheers, Gregg. - Cheer, Aaron.

These pies may look finished, but, of course,

there's a very important element missing.

The jelly!

So Mark's showing me another hands-on process.

Right. What's in there?

- So, a bag of gelatine.

This is just a make up of pork gelatine and salt.

- What exactly is gelatine?

- It's boiled pig bones.

- Eight kilos of pork gelatine salt mix are poured into 100 litres

of hot water, enough for 12,000 pies.

- And you mix it up to make sure there's no lumps in it

and it's fully dissolved.

- So what consistency is this when you put it in the pie?

- A liquid, so the consistency of water.

- So it sets in the pie?

- It does, yeah.

- I would never have imagined that.

- Yeah. Yeah. - Not in a million years.

The gelatine mix heats for 35 minutes to boiling point.

To get the liquid into the pie,

which has already had its lid baked on top,

they must inject it.

So tell me what's happening here, please, boss.

- It's injecting 50 pies at a time with 10g of jelly each pie.

- When the pork pies are baked, the meat inside shrinks,

creating a gap between it and the pastry.

Four-millimetre-thick needles then inject the liquid gelatine

precisely into that small cavity.

If that doesn't set, you've just got liquid,

and it's just going to destroy the pastry.

- Yes. - Too hard, and you've got a pie with chewing gum in it.

- Absolutely.

- The trick is careful temperature control.

The gelatine is above 75 degrees,

ensuring it's liquid, but it won't leave a soggy bottom.

The meat in the pie is 30 degrees -

any colder and the jelly would start to set

without completely filling the gap.

You'd never do that at home.

You'd have the meat and you'd have a mould,

and you'd put the jelly around the mould, let it set,

and then you'd build the pastry around it.

- Yeah, well, we can't do that. We haven't got the time.

- Traditionally, the jelly was added to preserve the meat,

but today it packs moisture back into the baked pie.

There we are. - Yep.

- Complete.

Got the meat, got the pastry, now we've got the jelly in them.

- Yeah.

- My pies chill for three hours at minus seven degrees,

setting the liquid gelatine.

So when you cut your pie in half at home, there's a thin,

transparent layer of jelly around the meat inside.

I'm happy to eat them all on their own, but for many,

the perfect accompaniment for a pork pie is pickle.

And Cherry's on the hunt for the perfect preserve.

- Pickles, you say.

Pickles for pork pies?

Well, you're definitely spoilt for choice.

Now, what would Gregg choose?

Ah-ha!

The king of relish.

Piccalilli-lee.

Pacalilli-lee?

OK. So I can't quite say it,

but I'm off to have a go at making a special piccalilli

that's environmentally friendly.

And Somerset farmer Richard Plowright

grows the main ingredient.

Cauliflower!

I spy a cauliflower, many cauliflowers.

How many do you grow?

- We grow about 20,000 in total during the year.

- Will you show me how to cut one? - I will. I'd love to.

You just push it over a bit. - OK. Ooh!

- Cut it like that. That's it. - Lovely. - Simple. - Simple as that.

It's really beautiful.

While most of the cauliflowers do go to the supermarket,

not all will make the grade.

- The industry, they would probably call this a second class...

- How rude, Richard! - Terrible, isn't it?.

- A second class cauliflower!

Like a second class citizen!

- I don't know whether you can see it, it's a slightly yellow.

- So would that be waste or would that be used?

- Some supermarkets might think that's a grade out

because it's discoloured slightly.

- Graded out veg is perfectly tasty produce

that can be rejected by supermarkets for its imperfect appearance.

So too small, rejection, too big, rejection,

too sun damaged, rejection.

It's thought that as much as 815,000 tonnes of fruit and veg

could go to waste on British farms every year.

So I'm taking a box of unloved cauliflowers

to a woman who embraces imperfection.

Kerry Dodd makes a spicy piccalilli

using only waste fruit and veg.

Kerry, I have brought you some freshly picked cauliflowers

straight from the field.

- Brilliant. Thank you.

First things first. Hat.

- Oh, this is a familiar territory.

All right.

Our first job is to chop the cauliflower

into bite sized pieces.

One whole cauliflower per batch.

What are your requirements for the ingredients

that go into your piccalilli?

- Must be organic.

Must be as close to here as possible

to cut down on food miles.

And stuff that people can't sell.

- So as sustainable as you can possibly make it.

- Yes.

- As well as Richard's cauliflowers,

piccalilli embraces a whole range of vegetables,

including chopped onions, tomatoes, beans and courgettes,

all of them retail rejects.

The traditional pickling ingredients,

salt and vinegar, act as preservatives.

Enjoy your bath, my friends.

Pickling is a great way to avoid food waste in the kitchen,

lengthening the shelf life of fresh veg from days to years.

- OK, let's pop it onto the stove. - OK.

Whilst the veg cooks, we're mixing the spice.

Popularised in the days of the British Empire,

the Indian spices, turmeric, cumin and coriander

create piccalilli's distinctive flavour and colour,

along with mustard, cornflour and more vinegar.

Ooh!

It has just turned into the most beautiful rich yellow colour,

and the cauliflower looks super tasty.

Finally, I'm ready to pour my perfect pork pie pickle

into glass jars.

Gonna put one more bit of beautiful cauliflower,

picked by me from the farm this morning,

to crown this jar of piccalilli. Look at that.

The flavours will only improve as the ingredients mature in the jar.

And Kerry has a three-month vintage for me to try.

Here we go.

Ooh!

That is so good.

What have I been doing all these years?

Piccalilli and pork pie, match made in heaven.

Mm.

Yeah, I'll be doing that again.

- At the factory in Yorkshire,

my strong pastry has been filled with meat,

baked, jellied and chilled.

Can we get them out? Cos it's cold in here!

So it's ready for packing with Chloe Allen,

who's in the middle of her 12-hour shift.

Where do they go?

Teams of workers are busy packing four pies

into each recycled plastic tray.

It's a well-oiled human endeavour.

That is rapid.

How quick are you loading it?

- We're doing 90 packs a minute of four in a pack.

- 360 pies a minute?! - That was quick maths!

- 360 pies a minute!

You're gonna end up pie-eyed. - I am.

- What is that? - So, this is a flow wrapper,

and the knife is heated,

so it cuts either side of the package. - Brilliant.

- And then it goes through to boxing.

- Where's boxing?

- Boxing's just through that wall there. - Shall we?

Do you do it every day or just Boxing Day?

- Every day, Gregg.

- I'm hoping boxing up is where an ex-greengrocer like me can shine.

- We're gonna pack six packs into a box.

You've got to pack four, and I've got to pack two.

- Four.

Hang on. Are you going to shut...? Is there a knack?

Look, four, there you go.

- That's not how we do it. - Oh, there you go.

- You need to leave me some pies. - One, two, one, two.

Who's getting four in a box perfectly?

- You have to left me no pies now.

- Oh, sorry. Yes.

One, two, one, two. Leave you two.

One, two, one, two.

- You getting the hang of it now?

- Leave you two.

- Could you do this 12 hours a day?

- If paying the bills depended on it, yeah.

I'm actually pleased with myself. Did I do all right there?

- You did very good.

- Come on!

Pies boxed, and they're ready for dispatch...

- You might have to give it a bit of a push.

- ..where I'm catching up with big boss Mark.

- Keep going.

Bit more. That's it.

You ready to wrap some pies?

We've got to put the plastic on here.

Tuck it into a corner somewhere here.

Start the table running.

- I don't think many people would look at you in the street

and consider you to be a wrap artist.

- I don't have that wrap artist aura about me, do I? - No.

Mark, I've got to ask you about numbers.

- Go for it. - This always surprises me and delights me, this.

- Yeah, yeah. - Right. How many pork pies in a box?

- 24.

- How many boxes on a pallet?

- 200. - Right.

So how many pork pies on a pallet?

- 4,800. - Come on, big fella!

Right. OK!

How many pallets on a truck?

- Anything from 14 to 26, depending on the truck.

- So, roughly, how many of my snack pork pies

are leaving here every day?

- Oh, 20,000 to 40,000.

- And are you sure the jelly set properly on each and every one?

- 100%.

- Right. Have we got to get this off and on the truck?

Get the truck away. - Absolutely.

- Job well done.

There, Mark, I think that's yours.

- It is. Thank you very much. - Thank you so much.

- Great job, Gregg. Thank you very much.

- Today, this truck is loaded with 20,000 mini pork pies.

Six hours and 28 minutes after the start of production...

..they're heading off to stores throughout the UK.

Midlanders are thought to be the biggest pork pie fans.

Pork pies are a traditional British snack, loved by millions,

and now I know exactly what it takes to make them.

From hot water pastry to oversized ovens and injections of jelly.

But what really surprises me is the sheer number of workers

doing hands-on jobs to perfect each pie.

Every element has been crafted to create a pocket-sized pork parcel

that you can enjoy anywhere.