Original subtitles

Flapjacks. Wholesome - oats, syrup.

Nailed on. Beautiful.

They are such a big part of my life,

because if I was doing really well at school I'd get a flapjack,

and it would be half dipped in chocolate.

Honestly, you've never had anything so delicious.

I have never heard that. That sounds like a match made in heaven.

It was. Come on!

And we're not alone in loving these golden bars.

As a nation, we munch our way through millions

and millions of them every year.

So where better to find out how to make these oaty treats...

..than a factory that makes flapjacks on a monumental scale?

Before I landed in the world of telly,

I worked in a few factories myself.

You're doing a great job.

And today I'm bringing some of the glitz...

I tell you what, I see a Saturday night game show in this.

..as I learn how they make the perfect bite every time.

I could spend all day just eating these.

And while I'm here grafting,

Cherry's in Ireland, finding out about oats.

Don't worry, Paddy, I'm doing my bit,

finding out how gorgeous grain...

This is like a great big windmill going at an incredible speed.

..becomes a cereal staple.

Oh, what a beautiful sight!

It's like a snowstorm of oats.

And historian Ruth Goodman's in Staffordshire...

This is an amazing-looking machine.

..discovering a local delicacy...

That is good.

...with a surprising history.

And a husband-and-wife team would basically then sell oat cakes

from a window such as this.

It is just somebody's front window. Absolutely.

This factory churns out an astonishing 46 million

flapjacks every single year.

And we're going to find out exactly how they do it.

Welcome to Inside the Factory.

This is the Graze factory in Hayes, West London,

where every year they go through a weighty one million kilos of oats.

A lot of oats. Are we doing a selfie?

It's not an iPad.

The mixers, ovens and conveyors here run around the clock,

turning out more than 170,000 flapjacks every day.

I like that. Keeping it clean.

Very good.

Flapjacks are a traditional flat cake, made of oats and syrup,

but in this factory they come in 16 varieties,

from cocoa vanilla to lemon and blueberry,

and even cherry Bakewell.

It truly is a brave new world of flapjack flavour.

But today I'm learning how they make their sticky toffee oat boost.

Sticky toffee.

Can it get any better?

I want to know how these snack sorcerers have put that

toffee magic into a flapjack.

And it all begins at the intake bay...

..where I'm meeting manufacturing director Tim Palmer...

Tim, how are you, sir?

..who's just taken a delivery.

Look at that.

Oh, there we go, a lorry load of oats.

If I know anything about flapjacks, these are a key ingredient.

So, how many oats have we got on there?

We've got 22 tonnes. A lot of flapjacks.

In fact, there are enough oats on this truck to make a mouth-watering

1.5 million flapjacks.

And this is coming in day in, day out, how many wagons a day?

We're doing one on a Monday and one on a Wednesday.

You know, I love a bowl of porridge.

Are these the same oats? They're exactly the same.

Oh, love that.

What size have we got on there?

I'm a big oat geek fan.

These are our jumbo oats.

Oh, look at these.

As I remember 'em.

The biggest oats on the market,

these jumbos are made from the whole oat grain.

You hold that, Tim.

I'm just going to speak to the people at home.

You lot, I'm going to put the timer on screen. Here we go.

As the forklift moves in to shift 22 tonnes of jumbo oats,

production on my batch of flapjacks begins,

and I'm left wondering, whether it be for flapjacks or porridge,

how are oats like these made?

Luckily Cherry's on the case - well, bridge - to find out more.

I'm in the Republic of Ireland, in the County of Waterford.

Oats love plentiful rain to ripen slowly and plump up,

so it's no surprise, then, that here in Ireland, the climate is perfect.

The countryside here around Kilmacthomas

gets an average of 160 rainy days a year.

And nestled below the hills is Flahavan's Mill.

It's one of the oldest family food businesses in Ireland,

milling oats for more than 235 years.

80 tonnes are delivered to the mill from grain stores every day,

and checking today's load is Johnny Flahavan,

a seventh generation miller.

Johnny Flahavan, lovely to meet you.

Cherry, very nice to meet you. Welcome.

So what you don't know about oats isn't really worth knowing.

Well, you're very generous. But, yes.

These are some oats that have been harvested last year.

So is it a kind of grass?

Yeah, it's a cereal grass.

And the oat is what's right inside one of those heads.

So is that the bit you want?

That's the bit we want.

Is that edible? Can I eat that now?

It wouldn't be very nice. OK.

Is that an oat?

Well, that is an oat, but it's a seed of the plant.

How do you turn that, which is inedible,

into something not just edible, but really delicious?

Well, follow me and I'll show you. OK.

The oat seeds are sent to a giant kiln.

Up? That's where we go. OK.

It's 30 metres up, above a furnace

heated entirely by waste from the milling process.

This is like a great big windmill going at an incredible speed.

Why is there such a delicious, like, toasty,

nutty smell coming from there?

Well, that's because we're roasting the oats with the shell on.

It's a flavour profile that comes from that process.

And so that interaction of heat between the amino acids

and the fatty oils is creating that dark colour, rich texture

and nutty flavour.

The oats are roasted at 100 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes.

Back to the ladder.

You really should have a slide in here.

I would be so happy!

After a good roasting, the skins, called husks,

are removed in a shelling machine, which uses centrifugal force

to separate them from the heavier seeds inside.

And what you're left with is called a groat.

It's not the most attractive of words, is it?

It's not the most, but...

What do you do with the groats?

So this is a table separator.

Woohoo! Why are you shaking the groats?

So what we're doing here is, we're identifying

whether or not the oat has been shelled correctly.

Oats that still have their shells are heavier than the unshelled

groats, so they fall through the separator.

They're then returned to the start of the process for another go

through the shelling machine.

Does absolutely everything oaty, whether it be milk

or porridge or flapjacks... It all starts with a groat?

Absolutely. All of our oat products start with a groat.

To turn a groat into an oat, they're sent to be rolled.

Jumbo oats, like Paddy's delivery,

are rolled straight from this machine.

But the flapjack factory also uses smaller oats,

and for that, the groats need to be a finer texture.

So, Cherry, these are the groats.

Those are the groats, off they go!

Off they go! Where are the groats going?

So they're going into this machine, which is called a pinhead cutter.

That doesn't sound good for the groat.

They're getting chopped.

So how fine are they getting chopped?

So they're typically chopped into two or three parts.

And how do you chop them?

So this is it here.

Woohoo!

So they're coming in here...

Coming in here, and they're sitting into the wheel, and the wheel

is adjusted by a blade and it's chopping it as it passes through.

The chopped groats travel through a steamer, which cooks them

at 100 degrees Celsius to make them

flexible for the one metre wide roller.

Then, at the rate of 3.5 tonnes an hour,

the groats emerge as perfectly rolled oats.

Oh, look, there they are.

They're lovely and flat.

They're kind of like the oats that I recognise.

Why are you blowing them about?

So we've had to put steam so we can roll them.

Now what we're doing is using air to extract some of the moisture

that we've applied earlier in the cooking stage.

But why do you flatten them? Why do you bother rolling them?

So the whole purpose of rolling means that they can cook

a lot more quickly. OK.

Makes it easier, more convenient, more consistent.

It just means that when you're at home making your breakfast,

it's ready in 2 minutes rather than 20.

So this is the finished product.

This is it? This is it.

You don't add anything? That's it.

Just oats in oats? Just oats.

Oats are oats.

In one week here, they can prepare 300 tonnes of oats.

That's enough for seven million bowls of porridge

or 15 million flapjacks.

Oh! What a beautiful sight.

It's like a snowstorm of oats.

There's something very beautiful about their simplicity.

Just a bit of roasting and squishing.

All we need is some milk and some golden syrup, and we're done.

That's all you need. OK.

Oh, we've no time for porridge, Cherry.

I'm cracking on with flapjacks.

Love that.

My delivery of oats has been shifted from the intake bay to the bakery.

And amidst this hive of activity, I'm meeting head of food

Eleanor McClelland.

Hello, El. Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Welcome to our bakery.

This is where we make all of our flapjacks.

We start off here with our weighing station, where we

weigh all of our ingredients out.

Like, if you were making a flapjack at home,

that's where you'd start, getting all your ingredients ready.

Do you know, this feels like the hub to me.

Because sometimes you can go in places, you don't really see

many people, cos it's automated,

but there's loads of people in here, which is always good.

I've noticed these oats about.

Are they all jumbo oats?

So we actually use a combination of oats. We use two different sizes.

So we use the jumbo and we use the small oats.

So the small oats bind the product together really well.

They give it that kind of soft chewy texture. Yeah.

But if you use just small oats, then it would probably end up

being quite stodgy and quite sticky and a bit dense.

So jumbo oats help bring the texture a little bit of bite,

and also a really nice visual look to the final product.

El's team has already weighed out the jumbo oats.

Now it's my turn with the small ones.

Are you feeling strong? Stand back, El!

The oats may be petite,

but each of these massive bags weighs a whopping 25 kilos.

Right, there we are. That's that.

Let me...

Oh, this is awkward.

Stanley would have been handy here.

Are you sure that's the right way?

Give it some welly.

That can't be right. It's the special technique.

Oh, there we are. You've got it. You've got it.

Wheel it forward a bit. That's it.

There we go. Perfect!

Oh, in we go. Look at that.

That's a lot of oats.

Plenty there, in't there? Great.

Top tip. Get a sharp knife.

Unbelievable.

HE LAUGHS

I'm not getting on well here.

There. How's that?

It's good enough.

It's fine. It'll be all right, won't it?

Luckily, the scales to weigh the oats are far more high-tech.

This is our weighing screen.

It's like an electronic cookery book.

So now it's telling us

that for these small oats, we need 11kg in here.

So quite a lot.

What will that equate to?

The full stack of dry ingredients makes 2,600 of the flapjacks.

My word!

It's really important at this point to get this accurate,

cos we've got to make sure we've got the right blend of ingredients.

If we don't get this right now,

then the product won't taste right at the end.

All right, El, no pressure.

I've only got several thousand flapjacks to ruin.

I tell you what, we need quite a bit here.

I know, yeah. I'm going to try that full scoop.

Let's try that.

Oh! So close.

I tell you what, I see a Saturday night game show in this.

This is quality.

Oh, come on.

Oh! So close.

Come here, you little rascal.

There we go, good.

Done it. Nailed it.

I'm sweating.

Next ingredient is our dates.

Critical ingredient when you're making a sticky toffee pudding.

Of course they are. Really important.

They bring that kind of natural toffee flavour.

Can I try one of them? Go for it.

Oh, that's a lovely date.

So we're ready to weigh these now.

Pop it on here...

Sorry, I don't want to rush you!

Let me enjoy that, El.

It's been a while, let me tell you.

What weight is this, El?

So we've got 3.499 kilos, very specific, here. My word!

Really important to get the right amount of dates.

I struggled with 11.

Dates are the fruit of the date palm tree.

And they arrive at the factory dried and ready-chopped,

which should make it easier for some precise weighing.

Too many dates, it's going to be too soft, it's going to be too sticky.

So we try 50, 60, 100 versions of a recipe to make sure we've got

the right balance of flavours and ingredients.

I am available for taste testing... OK, good to know.

We can send some in the post. ..if you ever need anyone,

and I've got a very discerning palate.

Oh, here we go. We're getting close. We're getting there now

I've never known pressure like it.

499. 499.

Come on. There you go, that's it.

Are we happy with that? Yeah, we're happy.

I'll just test one more of them.

Just to check they're good.

Yeah, that's a date.

So we've done all of our dry ingredients,

so now we have to go and weigh our wet ingredients.

All right, I'll follow you. Go on.

Follow me, let's go.

Just realised, I've eaten quite a lot of dates

and the toilet's quite far away.

So...

Going to be in a little trouble today.

So far, I've won the weighing challenge

and had the best date of the year.

And now me and El are halfway to sticky toffee heaven.

So, what's next?

So this is where we do our weighing of our wet ingredients.

These are big old drums, these, aren't they?

So what have we got here, then, El?

So we start with our golden syrup. Classic.

Golden syrup, first name on the team sheet. Exactly.

Really important ingredient for us, helps bind everything together.

It also doesn't crystallise after the product's baked,

so it gives that moist texture even after you've baked it,

so it's not dry or brittle.

How do you keep that consistency?

Cos I'm at home and I'm getting a bit of golden syrup

out of tin, it's always a bit hard or it won't come out. Yeah.

So we put the syrup onto, like, a heat mat,

a bit like underfloor heating, if you imagine.

Keeps that nice and warm,

means that when we get it out of the tank, it's nice and free-flowing.

So it just keeps the consistency, but it's not actually bubbling?

Exactly, yeah, like a very gentle heat.

Yeah, exactly.

Keeping the golden syrup warm and free-flowing

makes it easier to weigh out the exact amount

from my batch of more than 2,500 sticky toffee beauties.

Can I have a little sample? Absolutely.

We've got some for you here.

You came prepared. Do not ask me where I kept that,

but I've been waiting to use this all day.

Now's your chance. Here we go.

Oh.

I do apologise, El, but this happens.

That is so gorgeous.

Coats your mouth, but not in a claggy way.

It's so smooth. A little bit of nuttiness in there as well.

But that flavour when it hits you... Absolutely. ..it's just dreamland.

And you can't make a good flapjack without golden syrup. Oh!

Oh!

So next we've got our treacle.

You can't make a delicious sticky toffee pudding without using

black treacle, so that's why we use it in our flapjack to give it

that cooked caramel notes that you would expect from a sticky toffee.

Where does it come from?

The black treacle comes from cane molasses, which is

actually a by-product of sugar production.

They evaporate it using heat to refine it down.

Black treacle, I've got to say, that's a great name for a rock band.

I'm all over that.

And so you can see it looks quite different to the golden syrup.

Much, much darker.

It's got a more intense aroma. Oh, yeah, that's very powerful.

And a little goes a long way.

This has got a slight bitterness to it,

but, I mean, have a try and see what you think.

I'm not going to go as mad as I did with the golden syrup. No.

Wow!

Wowsers!

Put hairs on your chest.

My God, that's intense! It is.

How much of that goes in? Because that is really, really...

Yeah, not much.

You only need a few percent in the recipe.

It's lovely, it leaves a nice aftertaste.

But that first spoonful... I know.

What I'll need to do here is just get another little bit

of golden syrup... To wash it down?

..just to wash it down.

To coin a phrase, I'm going to need a bigger spoon.

Honestly, I just want to hang about round here all day.

And while I snaffle the samples,

Ruth's finding out that the history of syrup

hasn't always been sweetness and light.

20 miles east of Paddy's flapjack factory is Silvertown,

in London's famous Docklands.

This now quiet stretch of the river was once a thriving port.

Every available bend in the river was put to use,

and thousands of ships, boats and wherries plied their trade,

bringing millions of tonnes of cargo from all around the world.

One product in particular gave this area a sweet reputation.

By 1870, 650,000 tonnes of raw cane sugar was being imported from

mills overseas, giving this area of the docks

its nickname, Sugar Mile.

And two names came to dominate the sugar business -

Tate and Lyle.

Their names may now be inextricably linked,

but once upon a time, Henry Tate and Abram Lyle

were the fiercest of rivals.

To find out how these competing empires came together,

I'm meeting Tate & Lyle's Claire Crill.

Wow, this is sugar?

We're just looking at a mountain of sugar?

This is raw cane sugar.

And there's about 40,000 tonnes of raw cane sugar in this

shed at the moment.

So this sugar has come in from Australia and Fiji.

It's this raw material that makes all of our sugar and syrups.

Raw cane sugar, like these huge mountains,

is brown in colour as it contains molasses and impurities.

To make white sugar, they're removed during a process called refining,

in huge factories or sugar cane refineries,

like this one, built by Henry Tate in 1878.

So who exactly was Henry Tate?

So, Henry Tate was a grocer-turned-sugar-refiner

and he changed the way that sugar was sold, with these - sugar cubes.

So, there were no cubes before?

There were no cubes before.

Before cubes, sugar was sold in these cones called loaves.

And grocers would kind of chip some of the sugar off using

what we called nippers.

It was very messy.

It was very inconvenient.

So the advantage of a sugar cube was that it was pre-weighed.

And as you can see, they're in a cube shape

and therefore stackable and easy to transport.

Cones and cubes were both made by compressing refined sugar

into moulds, but Henry Tate's cubes were revolutionary

and made him a fortune.

However, his success brought competition.

We're heading to the other end of Sugar Mile, where another

sugar magnate would create a product to rival Tate's invention.

So this is Abram Lyle, and he built his cane refinery in 1882.

So almost next door to Tate, just on the same river bank?

Exactly. Five years later, and a mile up the river. Mm.

SHE LAUGHS

So originally, Abram Lyle built his factory to be a cane refiner,

just like Henry Tate.

The year after his factory was finished, there was a global

sugar shortage, which caused prices to dramatically increase.

And so Abram Lyle sent his scientists off to try and work out

how they could make the most value out of every granule of sugar.

And they worked out that the molasses by-product of cane refining

could actually be turned into a very sweet syrup,

and Lyle's golden syrup was born.

The thick, sticky liquid was like no product before,

so Lyle had to create a whole new market.

Originally, it was sold in wooden casks to employees and local

East London residents, and, really, it was marketed as a cheap spread

for your bread instead of butter,

which was very expensive at that time. Or jam. Yeah, or jam.

But word spread about how tasty it was, so volume increased,

and then it went from being served in a wooden cask

to dispensed in something like this. Oh, this is great!

So you'd go into your local shop and there'd be...

You'd go to your grocer and you could open it,

and the syrup would be poured out there into whatever...

Bring your own container. Exactly.

Early refills.

In 1885, Lyle started selling golden syrup in the familiar

green and gold tins.

And within a decade, they were selling 200 tonnes of it every week.

SHE LAUGHS

Oh! Oh, this is great.

With their massive factories squaring off

at each end of the Sugar Mile, Henry Tate and Abram Lyle

were locked in a contest for Britain's sweet tooth.

So these days when we talk about Tate and Lyle,

it's always together, Tate & Lyle. It's true.

So they were bitter rivals during their lifetime.

There are rumours that they never really spoke, that they

even went as far as sitting on different carriages on the same

train from Fenchurch Street to the East End, to their refineries.

But shortly after their deaths, discussions started

between their two families about merging the two businesses.

It was all down to the impact of the First World War.

Attacks on the ships that supplied Britain with sugar

devastated the industry.

So to ensure their survival, the two firms merged in 1921.

This coming together created a business behemoth which

produced a staggering 50% of all refined sugar in Britain

at the time, as well as Lyle's signature product, of course.

So we make 250,000 Lyle's Golden Syrup tins here every week,

all to the exact same recipe as in 1885.

Wow! And the tin hasn't changed?

No, the tin is exactly the same.

Little could Abram Lyle have imagined that 140 years later,

his creation would look and taste the same,

and all with the help of his greatest rival.

I wonder if the syrup factory is looking for taste testers?

Back at my factory, I'm all about the sticky toffee flapjacks.

I'm 1 hour and 30 minutes in,

and my gorgeous golden syrup has been joined by dark treacle.

And we've got vegetable oil to bind the dry ingredients

and keep the flapjack moist when it's baked.

And now it's time for the great sticky toffee mix-off.

So we've weighed all of our wet ingredients now.

The only slight challenge is that we've got water-based

ingredients like these two.

We've also got oil-based ingredients.

So we've got to go and see how we combine them all.

Let's do it.

For the perfect sweet and chewy flapjack,

we need to mix this lot together.

And that's where this shiny bit of kit comes in.

In our vessel here, it's got a shear head, which is

a bit like a stick blender that you'd use at home.

It's got blades, so when it's in here,

all of our lovely ingredients are well mixed together.

So that means we get a really nice, consistent product.

But getting that perfect mix isn't easy with our fatty oil-based

ingredient and the syrups, which are water-based.

Stand by for a demo.

Do you want to pour a bit of the oil on top of there?

Oil in water...

Yeah, that one on. Yeah.

...do not like each other, these two. No.

And you can see immediately, the oil is sitting at the top.

Separated. Even if you tried to mix it...

Oh, glad you said that.

I haven't got any more of these spoons left.

Don't ask me to do anything else. That's fine.

And then if we leave it, it doesn't take long...

You can see already.

It's just not mixing, is it? It separates.

But why?

The oil molecules want to stick together

and the water molecules want to stick together.

They don't want to combine with each other. Yeah.

A bit like if you had two magnets

and you put the wrong ends together, they pull apart.

And that's where this vessel comes in.

The big blades break down the molecules

and mean that they start combining with each other.

First, the oil's poured into the mixer and blended thoroughly,

followed by the treacle...

Oh, that is fantastic!

Oh, this is so good!

..and the golden syrup.

Do you know what? That smells gorgeous.

Inside the vessel is a small shear mixer.

The blades inside pull the ingredients into the mixer head.

Then the liquids are forced under high pressure

against the outer housing of the mixer, called the stator.

The oil and water molecules are broken down between the blade

and the stator, forming similar-sized globules

which can blend together.

A natural additive derived from soya beans then coats the molecules

to stop the mix from separating.

And that's all very clever indeed.

So this is all finished up now, so we just need to open it up

and check everything's all mixed together and really well combined.

If I can just pass that to you. Oh, yeah, certainly.

Take it back there.

Oh, that smells good in there, you know.

So we've got our massive ladle, so you can see that's perfect,

nice, rich, dark colour. Beautiful.

What I'm not seeing is oil and water underneath, yeah.

It's really well mixed and combined.

Ready to go in with the dries. Fantastic!

I've really got the urge to have some chips and gravy. Yeah!

So I put the lid back on. That's it. Perfect, thank you.

Keep that safe in there. Let's go. Right.

Once it's perfectly combined,

the sweet oil and syrup mix is held at 80 degrees Celsius.

It's then pumped along pipework to the mixing area.

These enormous rotating drums are called tumblers.

So, strictly speaking, I'd call this the tumbling area.

So this is where we come to do our final part of the mixing process.

First, in go our dry ingredients -

the oats, followed by the dates.

Do you know, I spent years in front of a cement mixer on building sites

and this does take me back.

It's similar, isn't it? Yeah. It's so similar.

Loading it up, mixing it round, out it comes.

Exactly. It does the job.

The dates and oats get a quick tumble

and then it's the moment I've been waiting for.

In goes the treacly syrup mix,

our liquid gold.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it.

I cannot wait for this to come out.

And just one minute later, we've got flapjack mix.

Oh, there we go.

Oh, the smell when he lifts that off as well is gorgeous.

Look at that!

But there's no hanging about.

Now we want to make sure that we can get it quite quickly into the trays,

because as the mix cools down, it gets harder and harder to spread.

So now we've got to get it all into the trays as quickly

as possible to get it through to the oven.

And it's surprising how it's all kind of done by hand.

You know, you just presume everything's done with machinery.

It's great to see.

We don't want to go too heavy-handed.

And again, with the mixer, you don't want to over-mix it.

We're not trying to make porridge.

You've got to keep that consistency of the oats.

So for us doing it all by hand,

it's still feels like a home-made flapjack.

Every tray is weighed to check that we're not putting in too much

or too little. What's the weight we want?

It's 2.70. Oh, look at that, 2.7.

Now, they do an initial spread by hand just to try

and get it evenly across the tray.

Then he'll pass it on to Vita

and she'll start using her spatula to spread it out and get a nice

smooth top, make sure it's even.

We use a height measurer to check

there's not really deep sections and really shallow sections.

Oh, now, this is proper now.

Why is it important to check all those depths?

Once it's baked, it'll be cut into 81 flapjacks

and we want each of those pieces to be consistent size.

You don't want some bits that are really thin

and some bits that are thick.

Obviously when it goes into the oven,

we want to make sure it's a nice, even bake.

Do you want to have a go?

I certainly do. all right, OK.

Right, here you go. All right.

Start with the hands. That one? Yeah.

Yeah.

That's nice and warm, isn't it?

Oh, that's lovely.

While it's still warm. I can see why you've got a smile on your face.

Right, there we are.

The old spreader.

Right, this way first.

That way out.

Come down.

Oh.

I'm under a bit of pressure here.

This way, down here? This way. Come down. Yeah.

Each tray needs smoothing out in less than 45 seconds

before it hardens.

I'm not as quick as you, Vita, but I'm just trying to get it neat.

Turn your tray. Turn the tray.

Vita's quite full-on with it.

I'm more gentle with my flapjacks, but, you know...

All right. Got to do the checks now.

Yeah.

Yes.

Ha, five yeses!

You're going through to boot camp.

It takes Vita just 25 minutes to fill 32 trays with my batch of mix.

Enough for more than 2,500 flapjacks.

Lovely stuff.

And next station is the oven.

Oh, right, OK.

Coming through!

Oh, yeah.

In they go.

So this is our big oven room.

The smell in here, it's beautiful,

but it's really strong compared to being out there.

Yeah, so we've got three ovens in here.

We put four trolleys in each one.

So when these are all full,

that's over 37,000 flapjacks in all of our ovens.

Should we get that in? Yeah, let's go.

The custom-built ovens were designed

to let the trolleys wheel straight in...

So I'll let you do the honours.

Here we go.

..a crucial time saver to get the flapjacks in to bake

as quickly as possible.

Let's close it up.

And it's ready to go.

That is mass baking.

Each of our ovens is on a rotating plate, so you can see that

the trolleys are spinning round, that makes sure that we get a really

nice, even bake across every single tray and every single trolley.

You've seen how we've been quite precise through the process,

making sure we get everything right and accurate.

So the bake is really the critical final step.

We want to make sure that we don't bake it too hot or too quickly,

and we keep that lovely soft, chewy texture.

But also we've got to bake it long enough

so it doesn't crumble apart when we pack it.

Now, all ovens have what's known as hot spots.

It's usually hotter towards the metal sides, top and bottom,

and that's why we often turn things round in the oven

halfway through cooking.

This clever kit does the job automatically, ensuring all

the flapjacks get that crucial, even bake.

I love that, a rotisserie of oats.

Quite hypnotic, really, looking through there,

just watching it gently going around, baking away.

And I think the really important part about all this process

is while that's baking, we have a sit down and a cup of tea.

Come on, El, lead on.

And while we do that, get ready for Ruth,

who's been finding out about the history of another oaty treat.

She's in Staffordshire in the West Midlands...

Oh, lovely pink wellies!

..on the trail of another hearty snack.

I'm here to explore an unlikely food hero that has been keeping

the people of this county going for centuries.

The Staffordshire Oatcake.

It looks a bit like a pancake, made from batter, typically containing

yeast and milk or water, but always containing finely ground oats.

Alex Povey's family have been selling oatcakes in Biddulph,

near Stoke-on-Trent, since 1994.

This is an amazing=looking machine.

And what is the difference between a pancake and an oatcake?

Pancakes don't have oats in.

I'd say the oatcake is more versatile, you know,

it could go on the side of a full English breakfast,

or it could just be a breakfast on its own.

It's cooked on a hot plate, commonly called a baxton or bakestone,

as they were once baked on a hot flat stone, heated on a fire.

Oat flour doesn't rise, so it results in a hearty,

flat bread which warms the cockles of its regular devotees.

Last night we had 'em for tea with bacon, cheese, mushrooms,

the whole shebang. Lovely.

Nothing better.

Other parts of the country don't eat them.

Are they missing out?

They're missing out on all this lovely happiness...

SHE LAUGHS

When people do buffets in Stoke-on-Trent,

you've always got cold oat cakes on them.

It's a very traditional thing.

To find out how this oaty staple became a Staffordshire institution,

I've enlisted the help of food historian

Dr Mukta Das.

Hello, hello, hello!

We're meeting outside Middleport Pottery,

one of the historic factories that made Stoke-on-Trent world famous.

This whole region is called the Potteries

because a lot of pottery was made here.

And their industry

and their work was fuelled by the Staffordshire Oatcake.

OK.

It was so fit for purpose.

It was cheap, it was fast, it was fresh and it was...

Well, filling, I suppose. Absolutely.

Oats have been grown in the moorlands around Stoke

for hundreds of years.

Compared to wheat, they could tolerate rain,

wind and short summers, so it was the perfect cheap crop

in the 18th century for rural labourers to make oat flour pancakes

cooked on bake stones in farmhouses across the Pennines.

So this is genuine real working people's food?

Absolutely. But need the nutrition,

need the protein to sort of drive their industry, drive their labour.

So how does this move from being a rural tradition into being

such an urban thing?

So the potteries industry sucked in tens of thousands of farmers

and agricultural workers from the surrounding regions

right here to work in these factories.

And so as they came, they brought in the oatcakes with them.

By the beginning of the 20th century,

micro-businesses selling oatcakes had popped up

in and around Stoke-on-Trent, with people working from their

Victorian terraced houses in the streets near the busy factories.

Somebody's front room turned into a production kitchen,

and a husband-and-wife team would basically then sell oat cakes

from a window such as this.

Selling oat cakes out of their domestic windows?

Absolutely.

So these were known as hole-in-the-walls.

As you can see.

Yeah, OK, I get that, a hole in the wall.

I mean, that really is just somebody's front window, isn't it?

I mean, there's an awning outside, but that's it.

It is just somebody's front window. Absolutely.

To find out more about these unusual shops,

I'm meeting Sue and Glenn Fowler.

Hello.

Well, this is cosy, isn't it?

So you two used to operate a hole in the wall?

The Hole in the Wall Oat Cake Shop.

We bought it in 1981, and we succeeded for 30 years.

A lot of locals used to come to us.

We had them queuing all the way down the road and back.

We used to have a lot of chatting going on.

We knew everybody's business.

Everybody's!

I have a little surprise for the Fowlers...

What do you think about this?

..an archive film from 1984.

Oh, that's us.

So this is you? Yeah.

That's us there.

Yeah.

"Let us pay homage to the oatcake,

"or ootcake or wood cake,

"as the old men called them."

There you are, that's you. That's me. That's you there.

And that's Glenn doing the mixes.

Look how perfect that oat cake is.

Well, I could just eat one of those.

This is a gentleman coming for his breakfast,

by the looks of it, there.

Down there, duck. How many, Jim?

Six, duck. Lovely to watch that.

Yeah, I think we'll have to have 'em for tea now.

Oh, yeah!

In the last quarter of the 20th century,

many potteries were forced to close, unable to compete with cheap imports

from abroad, and more than 32,000 jobs were lost.

Home businesses like these were a casualty of the area's decline.

Glenn and Sue's Hole in the Wall was the last to close in 2012.

But thankfully, oatcakes are thriving once more,

with new businesses focusing on takeaways and home deliveries.

Any sauces on any of them? OK.

Be about 10, 15 minutes.

Oho!

One cheese and mushroom double. Thank you very much.

Enjoy!

That is good.

Mm.

Now, those look good enough to make your mouth water.

Anyone fancy a trip to Stoke?

But first, I'm 4 hours and 15 minutes into flapjack production,

and it's time to see how my sweet and sticky treats are getting on.

Am I this week's star baker or the flapjack flop?

So they've finished baking now, ready to get out of the oven.

Lovely.

Whoa, El, just hang on a minute, I've always wanted to do this.

Here's one I baked earlier.

Oh, ho-ho! My word!

Out you come. These look amazing.

So, through to the cooling room now.

OK, El, this is it.

My show stoppers are coming through.

Someone shut that oven door.

Oh, perfect.

Look at that.

Golden brown, packed full of dates and oats

and smelling like a party in a syrup factory.

These are the flapjacks of my dreams.

But they're not quite ready to meet their public just yet.

So this is our cooling room, where everything comes once it's baked.

So we have a special air circulation system in this room.

It basically pumps in room temperature air

every six minutes, and it draws out the hot air.

So we keep the air flowing.

We've got gaps between each of our trolleys to help cool down

the product to room temperature in a really efficient way.

It's like if you were baking at home and you were to take

something out of the oven, you'd leave it on a cooling tray.

It's a similar system here.

Why do you not want to cool them too quickly?

Because if you cool them too quickly,

then you don't get that lovely soft texture, which is what we want.

Oh.

It'll take a couple of hours for this lot to cool down

from an oven-hot 125 degrees Celsius

to under 35 degrees Celsius.

And as they cool,

the flapjacks firm up as some of the sugar crystallises,

but the gooey syrups stop them setting too hard and going brittle.

And this is where I'm parting company with El.

Let's do a fist bump. Thank you. Look at that.

For the kids. All right. See you later.

Bye! Look after them flapjacks.

After chill-out time for the flapjacks and a couple of brews

for me, I'm wheeling the trolleys to the next stage

of the flapjack journey.

We're heading from the cooling room to the packing hall,

where I'm meeting up with Tim again.

Good to see you, Tim.

Bit of sticky toffee goodness here.

Baked and cooled to perfection, sir.

Welcome to our cutting and packing room.

Some set-up, this. Yeah.

So this was specially designed to deal with the kind of sticky,

oaty flapjacks that we have.

I'm a little bit obsessed by those cutting arms there.

Can I have a closer look? Absolutely. Come on over.

First thing I've noticed is there's no cutting marks on that blue mat.

It kind of just gets it exactly spot-on.

So, Paddy, the special thing about these blades is they're ultrasonic.

So they're vibrating really small amounts up and down

at 20,000 times a second.

And that means it doesn't actually have to go all the way

onto the belt to get a really nice, clean cut through.

So as I'm looking at that now, that is vibrating?

Exactly.

That is mind-blowing,

cos no matter how close I look at that, that looks totally still.

It will do.

You can't see any of those movements in the naked eye.

Using a conventional knife to cut the soft flapjacks could mean

they crumble or get squashed out of shape.

First, the ultrasonic blade slices the giant flapjack

in nine strips, spreading them as it goes.

A second blade cuts each strip into nine.

The crisscross cuts create 81 identical flapjacks,

each a uniform four centimetres by five.

Look at that!

It'll take just 11 minutes for my batch of 2,600 flapjacks

to pass through the cutting machines, and I reckon...

Oh, ho-ho ho-ho!

..it's high time I put one to the test.

This is fresh off the production line.

Absolutely.

So you're looking for that really soft texture.

Yeah?

Hang on, Tim.

That's so good.

Do you know what's nice?

That sticky toffee with the dates really comes through.

A little bit harder on the top,

which is what you want, nice and soft underneath.

And what I like about these, which is a test I do

with all my little treats, the old shiny fingers.

Yep!

That is the sign of a good snack, if your fingers are shiny...

What a treat!

Oh!

I could spend all day just eating these.

What's the next bit, Tim?

We need to go to packing. Let's get them wrapped.

So, they're ready? Ready. Whoa.

Off you go.

Straight from the cutting line, the flapjacks travel under

a row aligner, which uses laser sensors to space the rolls.

Then a pusher arm nudges them onto the packing line.

Here, they pass on to a faster moving conveyor belt,

which spaces them out again.

Look at them go.

Ah! So, Paddy, what we've got here is a visual inspection system

that's got a laser beam that checks exactly the dimensions

and the orientation of the flapjack, so they're ready for wrapping.

So if it goes in on the wrong orientation,

a compressed air jet fires it off the line.

It therefore doesn't make its way downstream.

Right, OK, so do you mind if I test this theory?

Absolutely.

The flapjacks aren't perfect squares,

so they need to be facing the right way round when they're wrapped.

But at this rate, it's almost impossible to see with the naked eye

if any of them are on sideways.

So I'll pop that on the wrong way.

There's a gap. Go on.

Get off! Love it.

Doesn't mess about, does it?

There's just enough pressure in the tiny blast of compressed air...

Wahey!

..to shoot the sideways flapjacks off the line without breaking them.

Oh, there's another one.

They are then sent back to the start of the line

and get another go at passing the test.

And when they're all pointing the right way,

it's on to the next stage.

Now, Paddy, this is our wrapping machine.

At this point here we've got a forming shoulder which takes

that film and forms a tube around the product.

What's that giant nail brush for?

The brush keeps the film from kind of wrinkling.

It's really important that we get a really tight seal, and if

we've got wrinkles in those seals,

then that product doesn't stay so fresh.

And then the film is sealed together with three

sets of rollers at the bottom here, that form that heated seal.

These jaws at the end of the line are doing three things at once.

They're sealing the end of the first package.

They're cutting the distance between the two,

and then they're sealing the front of the next package.

And how many rascals are being cut and sealed every hour?

We're doing about 15,000 every hour. Wow.

Clever wrap-around cartoning machines

take four flapjacks at a time and assemble a box around them.

Now, it's the oats in these flapjacks that I've always

thought was a pretty healthy thing to eat.

But am I right, Cherry?

Yes, Paddy, you are bang-on.

We all know that oats are super-tasty in porridge

and flapjacks, and they're healthy too.

But what I didn't realise is that they may also be great for your gut.

I'm at the University of Reading, heading to the Food

and Nutritional Sciences department,

where they're researching foods that can benefit our gut health.

Associate Professor of Gut Microbiology is Dr Gemma Walton.

Gemma, you must introduce me to your friend.

This is Hannah. Hannah!

Gemma, when we talk about the gut, what do we actually mean?

So, most people will refer to the intestines as the gut.

The gastrointestinal tract is technically mouth to anus,

so all the way.

So entrance to exit?

Yes, exactly.

My research I focus more specifically on the large

intestine, this region here.

And that's because we've got billions of bacteria.

But most of the bacteria

that we have are housed in our large intestine.

That's what I'm interested in, the bacteria and what they do

and how they affect our health.

The billions of microorganisms in the gut that include positive

or friendly bacteria is known collectively as our gut microbiota.

If we looked at all the bacteria we have in our large intestine,

they'd weigh about 400g, typically.

So that's about the weight of that.

That's really heavy. Yeah.

So we are essentially just a walking hotel for bacteria.

That's how I think of us.

So are there different types of bacteria?

Absolutely. If we have a look at this, they're really active.

So the microorganisms that are in us,

they're actually breaking down undigested foods,

and by doing that they're producing these things

we know as short chain fatty acids.

These are created as the bacteria ferments fibre in our gut.

And they're proven to have a positive effect on digestion

and our overall wellbeing.

How much do they affect our health?

They very much affect our health.

It's estimated that 70% of the cells

of our immune system are found within our guts.

So our friendly bacteria are incredibly important

to how we fight infection and how healthy we feel.

About 95% of our serotonin, which is known as the happy hormone,

is produced within our guts.

How do we look after our bacteria?

The diet is the easiest way to look after your gut bacteria.

Now, we've all seen the adverts for probiotics,

which are things like fermented yoghurts containing friendly

bacteria that claim to improve our gut health.

But Gemma is studying something called prebiotics.

A prebiotic is a food that we can eat,

but it's not completely digested by our own enzymes.

It gets down to our gut, and then it's used by our gut bacteria,

and then you get a boost in positive bacteria.

So, there are small amounts in foods that we eat, bananas,

for example. Garlic. Onion.

What about oats? They like oats?

They've got fibre in them and fibre is really important to us.

Fibre can actually get down to our large intestine

and they become food for the bacteria.

And Gemma has a special project on the go that aims to show how

fibre-rich foods like oats could help promote friendly bacteria.

Let me introduce you to my gut model.

Wow.

Oh, wow. SHE COUGHS

This is a model of the large intestine.

This gut model is a lot smellier than the last one.

It's designed to test how beneficial different

foods could be for gut bacteria.

We've got the proximal, transverse, and distal colon.

So that's the beginning of the large intestine, that's the middle

of the large intestine and that's the end of the large intestine.

Exactly. So this is a robo gut.

You could call it that.

To replicate the substance that travels through the stomach

and into our large intestines, the team takes a sample of human

faeces and mixes it with a saltwater solution.

They then add it to the model, which contains nutrients,

and then a test substance like oat fibre.

So we're literally growing up faecal bacteria in here

and giving them some food.

Carefully timed pumps slowly feed the mixture through the three

stages of the robo gut over a 48-hour period.

And just like in our human gut, microorganisms like bacteria

feed on the fibre, creating products like short chain acids and odour.

The more fibre passing through the machine can lead to more good

bacteria producing short chain fatty acids,

and the more of those there are, the better.

And how did oats do?

Oats actually did really well.

So oats led to positive changes in bacteria all the way through.

But obviously this is only a model,

so we do need to take it forward into a human trial to confirm.

So when you're eating your flapjack or you're eating your porridge,

what you're doing is giving your gut bacteria the five-star treatment.

And that's really important.

That's what we're hoping for, yes.

Much obliged, Cherry.

In my sweet smelling factory

it's almost the end of the line...

Never grow tired of that.

Lovely stuff.

..as I'm following my flapjacks from wrapping and packing to dispatch.

And what a massive place this is.

Here we go, Tim.

There they are.

Ready to go.

Look at the forks on that.

This is our sticky toffee flapjacks being loaded onto our trailers,

ready to go into store. How many pallets are on there?

There are 26 pallets on that lorry. 26 pallets. A lot of flapjacks.

And they're going out every single day?

They're going out every day.

Load it on, pal. Load it on.

Each pallet holds 2,100 packs of flapjacks.

Fantastic.

So, each lorry is carrying

a whopping 218,400 individual bars.

Keeping everyone satisfied with the cups of teas, including me.

I used to work in a warehouse many years ago, so it all comes

back to me, just telling people, "You're doing a great job."

Right. Let's send 'em off, pal.

OK. Farewell, my loves!

There they go.

Lovely action on the door as well. I like that.

And they're gone.

Lights out, all out.

Come on, Tim. Love a catchphrase.

Just ten hours after we took delivery of the jumbo oats,

my sticky toffee flapjacks are leaving the factory.

From here, they head out to be

scoffed from lunch boxes and

on tea breaks across the country,

with Londoners munching the most.

And it's no surprise to me

there are flapjack fans as far away as the Orkney Islands.

So there you have it. It was great seeing the team here,

getting hands-on making the flapjacks

and introducing sticky toffee pudding in the mix.

Who'd have thought it?

And that meant I could get stuck in with the sticky stuff too.

That is so gorgeous.

Oh, that's lovely.

This is fresh off the production line.

That's so good. I could spend all day just eating these.

And it's given me some ideas of me own.

What about an ice cream sundae one?

That would probably melt in the packet.

Got to be summat.