Today we came here to Pouso Alegre, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, to show you how the snack chips is made. The history of the snack chips will start in the warehouse and it is made from one ingredient, which is corn. Of course, it's not the whole grain, they'll use two different things, the cornmeal, which is a fine powder, looks like cornstarch, and the gritz, which is a little thicker, looks like beach sand when you take it in hand.
The cool thing about gritz is that it will give the snack chips its texture. If it were made only from cornmeal, it would look a bit like Styrofoam. The grits and cornmeal arrive in these 25 kg bags and will be placed here in the right proportion.
This machine is mixing the ingredients to be very homogeneous and will transfer to another. And this is where the secret of salgadinho will happen. The flours will be mixed with water, and this mass will be heated and compressed.
At the end, it will go through some special holes that will give it the shape of a snack chips. And a knife cuts through everything. At this point, the snack will expand.
It was under a lot of pressure and hot, and, suddenly, it is released. It happens more or less like popping popcorn. Let's get some in the waterfall here that just came out of the extruder.
It's really hot. What does it the taste in this stage, huh? It tastes like corn.
It's more sticky too, it doesn't break in the mouth. But if you put some salt on, I would eat it. They've just dismantled a machine, so we can see what it's like inside.
Look how cool, this screw will push the dough. This whole machine is called an extruder, so here at the end there will be some pieces all punctured through which the dough comes out, as if it were more or less those syringes that we put dough inside, we squeeze it so that it comes out in the specific shape. Here at the end there is a knife that rotates and cuts the snack.
From this stage, the snack is already fragile, so it needs to be transported through these tubes using a fan. Arriving here at the oven, there is this cyclone that works as if it were a brake. It cannot hit any hard surface, because it will spoil.
Then, it slowly spins down until it lands on a conveyor belt and enters an oven. The idea of this oven is to remove all the moisture and also give the snacks crunch. It uses natural gas and the temperature reaches around 180 to 200 degrees, but the snacks only pass through there for five seconds.
And, yes, it is roasted. It's not fried. Here it is much more crunchy.
Completely different. Melt in the mouth. Then you feel the difference that the oven makes, it gives an absurd crunch.
It tastes less like corn too, it already tastes like something different, which is more roasted. It's time to give the snacks chips a differentiator by adding the aroma. This is where the salt, the flavor, the smell come in.
. . At first, the aroma is a powder, and it's an industrial secret, we don't know exactly what goes in there, the amount of each thing, but this is mixed with olein, with palm oil, to be able to stick to the snack and be distributed evenly.
The mixture of the aroma with the snacks will be done inside this machine which is the flavoring drum, it will rotate very slowly so that the mixture is perfect. Every hour a sample is taken from the production line, and they bring it here to the laboratory to do an analysis, to see if the crispiness is good, if there is the right amount of ingredients, but also a sensory analysis is carried out. So Tamiris tries the snack every hour.
What do you have to realize when you eat? We see if the salt and crispness are evenly distributed, and we also do chloride and moisture analysis. And when you're out of the factory, do you eat snacks chips too?
Yes. Let's try it, then. It has nothing to do with what I experienced at the beginning.
Now it has flavor! But I won't be able to tell if it's the right crunch, if it has moisture, nothing. .
. Those who don't work with this can't do it, right? No, you can't.
I better get out of here otherwise I'll eat everything. How many snacks do you have to try at each stage? 3 I can see that I'm not good for this profession.
And finally, here on the other side, we'll have a mountain of snacks chips ready. But wait, it doesn't end here. The product still needs to be packaged.
It will go through a scale that works in a really cool way. So, imagine that each flake has a different weight, so how are you going to weigh it accurately? There are 16 mugs, the snacks fall into these mugs, and the machine makes a calculation.
It will add the weight of 3 different mugs to give the ideal weight in the bag. When itreaches that number, it will open three mugs while the others are filling. Then it will take three more little mugs, calculate, see what the ideal weight is and let go.
So, at all times these little mugs fill up and release. It can weigh a hundred bags a minute. The scale has to be super synchronized with this vertical filler.
Here a roll releases the packaging that looks like a ribbon, at the same time, the validity, the batch, everything else are printed on the packaging, then it will be put together in a tube and the snack will fall inside. At the same time, the machine is already sealing the separation between the bags and cutting. There are many people who complain that the packaging is full of air, but this is important to protect the snacks inside.
It works like an airbag. Here at the end of the production line, a robot will pick up the packets by vacuum and separate them into batches of 36. They will put everything inside a box, which will be closed, and then several boxes will form a pallet, which will be transported by trucks.
Look, you can't see it, but there are about 25 people here behind the camera telling me not to try the plain aroma that way, because it's made to be put very little in the snack food, to be eaten with corn. . .
It's not to take this thing plain, but I know that there are people who are watching this video who haven't given it a thumbs up yet, so don't forget the thumbs up, because I'm going to try this thing. I thought it was worse. It's good.
I was imagining a horrible thing. Another really cool video that we also made in a food industry is the one where we showed how chewing gum is made.
