Inside the Factory: In the waffling world of Gregg Wallace, the humble spud has never felt so loved

BBC Two, 8pm
Looking around: Gregg Wallace
BBC
26 February 2019

It is no criticism of Gregg Wallace to suggest that he understands his role in this food documentary series.

In MasterChef, Gregg brings the common touch to the elite sport of fine dining. Fine dining is nonsense, as Gregg surely knows, and his position as the punters’ pal at the posers’ table is cemented by his infectious love of puddings. As a presenter he is instant gratification, insatiable appetite, all sweet tooth. What you see is what you eat.

The factory setting is slightly different. Here, Gregg is like a Ruritanian man from the ministry whose job it is to prove that - despite the fuel shortages and the preponderance of shoes with two left feet - everything is awesome.

Gregg’s fascination with industrial processes is almost royal in its application, if not North Korean. He does not see anything that is less than amazing. It could be missiles or tractor parts that are rolling off the production line in heroic quantities but today it is potato waffles.

Let’s pause for a moment, to rid ourselves of that flash of cognitive dissonance. No prospective MasterChef could expect to get anywhere with a waffle, unless it was deconstructed and made of Scandinavian sea-mosses punctured with holes containing the distilled atmosphere of the dark side of Uranus. But inside the factory, Gregg is freed from the need to demonstrate his fine palate.

He is figuratively naked, apart from the hairnet on his billiard-ball bonce. “You have to make tonnes of mashed potatoes first?” he exclaims. “This is my kind of place!” Watching spuds hurtle down a chute, he observes “a mountain of gently cascading potatoes” and finds it beautiful. He meets the factory’s manufacturing manager, “Mr Waffle”, and flatters him. “What you don’t know about waffles you couldn’t write on a waffle!”

Let’s not pretend Gregg is unaware of the multiple meanings of the word “waffle”. It is not just a potato-based snack invented in 1974 by a man from Birds Eye who borrowed the extrusion technology involved in the manufacture of aerated ice cream and applied it to a Belgian speciality, bringing savoury, where once there was only sweet, binding it together with the addition of starch and a “spice mix” involving cellulose derived from tree fibres.

Though it is certainly that, it also means to talk nonsense. But that, too, is a great skill, and Gregg’s waffle is just daft enough, which is a kind of science in itself. Whether boiled, mashed, chopped or fried, his vocabulary is reliably palatable and calorie-free. “I’ll stop waffling on,” he promises, before noting that the process of manufacturing these frozen potato tiles is overseen by a robot croupier, and the production line is “like a crazy game of dominoes”. It’s like circle time at Wafflers Anonymous.

Away from the potato casino, Gregg’s glamorous assistants Cherry Healey and Ruth Goodman provide the science and history bits. Cherry discovers that potatoes (especially when baked) are quite nutritious, with three times the vitamin C you find in carrots, and more potassium than a banana (the nutritional value of the industrial waffle is overlooked, which is an unfortunate omission).

Ruth, meanwhile, examines the history of the potato, and discovers that Sir Walter Raleigh was a red herring.

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