How It's Made: Blueberry Turnovers
Vocab level: C1
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A fruit turnover is probably your best bet if you're eating on the go.
It satisfies a sweet tooth, it's portable, and it requires no utensils.
The dough, typically flaky, is folded over, usually into a triangle or rectangle,
and the edges are sealed, trapping the fruit filling neatly inside.
These all natural blueberry turnovers may look and taste like homemade,
but believe it or not, they come frozen in a box.
You just bake them and eat them.
The manufacturer is willing to reveal the ingredients.
But the critical proportions, mixing and heating times are top secret.
Workers begin making the filling by heating blueberries.
Next, they combine lemon juice and starch in a container.
Then, add this mixture to the blueberries.
The starch is white now, but will become transparent as it cooks.
They mix some more.
Then add salt.
When the starch is opaque, they add sugar
and mix some more.
As soon as the temperature of the ingredients reaches 170 degrees Fahrenheit,
the filling is done.
To make the dough, workers first pour flour into the mixer.
Then salt.
After a few minutes of mixing, they add butter, lots of butter.
Once it's well blended, they add some water.
After a bit more mixing, the dough is ready.
This type of dough is called pate au beurre,
the French term for a butter-based pastry that's extremely light and flaky
due to its high ratio of fat to flour.
Now, workers weigh out 12 pound portions
and put them one at a time into a dough press
with a sprinkling of flour to prevent sticking.
The press compresses the dough into a 10 by 16 inch block that's one inch thick.
Then they line up the blocks on a floured conveyor belt,
joining them together to form one continuous sheet of dough.
The dough sheet now enters a press.
Inside, rollers compress the sheet to about a quarter of its original thickness.
The next machine layers the thin dough sheet.
This flower press and layer process repeats over and over again
until the sheet is just a tenth of an inch thick, yet contains 24 layers.
These layers are what will make the pastry exceptionally light and flaky.
Trimming wheel's on the sides make a neat edge.
Diagonally bladed wheels score the dough with small cuts.
And cutting wheel's divide the sheet into five strips,
each of which will become a row of turnovers.
The next station deposits a line of water droplets along one edge of each strip.
This creates a line of sticky dough.
The preparations are all done and assembly can begin.
First, with precision spacing, nozzles squirt one ounce of blueberry filling per turnover.
Then a device called a folding plow, because it looks like a farm plow,
lifts one edge of the dough and gradually folds it over.
A smooth wheel then presses that edge down onto the sticky line on the other edge.
This seals the open side of the strips.
The culinary choreography ends with a bang, or rather, a chop,
as a guillotine descends cutting the strips into individual turnovers,
and simultaneously sealing the front and back ends of each pastry.
The assembled turnovers now go on a 6-minute ride through a nitrogen flash freezing tunnel.
Temperature, minus 183 degrees Fahrenheit.
Under a shower of sugar crystals, they exit the tunnel, frozen, hard as a rock.
Packaged, four to a box,
the turnovers remain frozen until you bake them in your oven and serve them up.
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