How It's Made: Waffles
Vocab level: C1
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The waffle started out in the Middle Ages as a flat wafer made not from wheat flour, but from oats or barley.
As its popularity spread, many variations of shape and recipe developed.
The introduction of leavening ingredients gave rise to the waffle as we know it today.
It's enjoyed across Europe as a type of cake,
but in America they have them for breakfast.
The introduction of frozen waffles in the 1950s
marked the dawn of a new era for those that liked eating them, but not cooking them.
Knocking up a plate of waffles was suddenly a snap.
All the main preparation work takes place at the factory.
They add flavourings like berries to a flour-based waffle mix
and then turn to liquid ingredients.
Water, canola oil and liquid cane sugar.
They pour them into a big tank and mix thoroughly.
They're then ready to thicken it into a batter with the flour-based waffle pre-mix.
It also includes baking powder,
which reacts with water to cause pockets of carbon dioxide to form
for a leavening effect that will continue during baking.
After adding more berries, this batter is complete
and there's enough in this one tank to produce 3,600 waffles.
Hot waffle irons are sprayed with a mist of non-stick coating.
Down the line, an automated pump deposits measured amounts of batter onto each grid plate.
The top grid plates encase the batter.
This production line is computerized,
which ensures the plates are filled quickly and without any spills.
As they move towards the oven, the waffle irons rotate,
allowing the batter to reach all the crevices inside.
They now move through a long gas oven.
It takes about two minutes for them to cook.
They emerge from the oven piping hot,
where a machine called a picking drum removes them from the irons.
As the picking drum revolves, needles grab the waffles and pull them off the hot grid plates.
The picking drum transports the waffles up to another level.
The needles retract, transferring them to a series of conveyors.
At the other side of the factory, the waffles enter a blast freezer.
The temperature inside is -7 degrees Celsius.
Fans blow frigid air onto the waffles as they spiral through the freezer.
It takes just 20 minutes to freeze and preserve these freshly baked waffles.
The frozen waffles now merge into lanes to be sorted for stacking.
A trapdoor system releases them, three at a time,
to grippers that move them onto a conveyor.
The conveyor lane narrows, which forces the waffle stacks into a single row.
A sensor-activated gate releases the stacks, two at a time, to the packing station.
It takes just a second for the two stacks of frozen waffles to be wrapped and sealed in a tight cellophane packet.
Then it's into a metal detector.
To demonstrate how it works, a coin was placed on one of the packages.
The system senses it immediately and a blower blasts the package off the conveyor.
Suctioning fingers now pick up the outer box
and open it as they place it on the conveyor.
A ram shoves the waffles into the box.
And that merits a toast. Or indeed a toaster.
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