Tast Cherry

Gregg Wallace is in Cornwall at an enormous bakery where they produce 180,000 Cornish pasties a day. He follows the production of the pastry snacks from the arrival of two tonnes of swedes right through to dispatch. Gregg learns that there are very specific rules to creating a Cornish pasty. They must be made in Cornwall, the filling can only contain onion, potato, swede, beef and some seasoning - and each ingredient must be cooked from raw within the pastry parcel.

In the UK over £9 billion a year are spent on beauty products that promise to improve and transform us. But how much of what these products promise is based in scientific evidence, and how much is simply marketing manipulation? Cherry Healey teams up with independent scientists to put everyday cosmetics to the test like never before. In a groundbreaking study carried out by the University of Sheffield, and with the help of 25 volunteers, she discovers that moisturisers might not have the benefits people think they do.

As the cherry blossoms bloom in spring, our cyclist Bobby Judo rides through Tokushima Prefecture from the coast to its hidden mountain valleys. At the Naruto Straits, famous for their whirlpools, he goes out with a team of fishermen to catch cherry sea bream. High in the mountains at Kamikatsu, he finds a town where the elderly population have a thriving business cultivating plants to decorate Japanese cuisine. And in an even deeper valley, he discovers a village with an unusual approach to attracting visitors.

In this Christmas special, Gregg Wallace, Cherry Healey and Ruth Goodman explore the fascinating factory processes and surprising history behind favourite festive treats. Gregg follows 24 hours of production at a cake factory in Oldham, near Manchester, where they make two million Christmas cakes for Marks and Spencer. As he helps to mix dried fruit and spices, Meanwhile, Cherry is given special access to Britain's largest marzipan factory, which produces two thousand tonnes of almond paste every year, and visits one of our largest sprout farms where, during the two weeks before Christmas, they pick 190 million sprouts.

In 1965 Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Greasers are a gang of tough, low-income teens. They include Ponyboy Curtis (Howell) and his two older brothers, Sodapop (Lowe) and Darrel (Swayze), as well as Johnny Cade (Macchio), Dallas Winston (Dillon), Two-Bit Matthews (Estevez), and Steve Randle (Cruise). Their rivalry is with the Socs (pronounced "soashes")…

Gregg Wallace is in Derbyshire at an enormous coffee factory where they produce 175,000 jars of instant coffee every day. He follows the production of freeze-dried instant coffee, from the arrival of 27 tonnes of Brazilian green coffee beans right through to dispatch. Along the way he chills out in a freezer cooled to -46 degrees Celsius and discovers how they give you that hit of freshly brewed coffee smell when you pierce the foil lid. They extract the aroma and put it back in just before the instant coffee granules head into the jars.

In Wigan, Gregg Wallace visits an enormous soup factory, which produces two million tins a day. He follows the production of vegetable soup, from a pea harvest in Yorkshire right through to the finished soup going into cans and being dispatched. Along the way, Gregg watches as a five-tonne avalanche of peas – around a million individual peas – is frozen within two hours of being picked. He mixes up three tonnes of veg and 500 gallons of tomato sauce and watches as they are combined and packed into 10,000 tins. Gregg is astonished by a 27.4m-tall pressure-cooking tower and surprised to learn that for every one degree drop in temperature in winter, the factory observes a 3.5% increase in soup sales.

Gregg Wallace is in Essex at an enormous cereal bar factory, which produces 400,000 fruit- and nut-packed treats a day. Gregg follows production from the arrival of two tonnes of macadamia nuts all the way through to dispatch. Along the way, he gets hands on with all the ingredients, from nuts to cranberries and sultanas to puffed rice. He learns that it takes a carefully balanced blend of honey and glucose to bind the ingredients together. Too much honey and the bar would be too chewy. Too much glucose and it would set rock solid. A mix of both produces the ideal texture.

Gregg Wallace, Cherry Healey and Ruth Goodman investigate the origins and production of more household staples, beginning with tea. Gregg looks at the factory that produces one quarter of all the tea drunk in Britain. Meanwhile, Cherry Healey examines an African tea processing plant, and Ruth Goodman sheds light on how Second World War troops risked their lives to brew up.