You've probably had countless fortune cookies after Chinese meals, but have you ever wondered how they're made? Discover the "food technology" behind those prescient little cookies in this episode of BrainStuff.
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Episode Transcript
Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where
smart happens. Hi, I'm marshall brained with today's question, how
do they make fortune cookies? If you want to think
about it this way, you could call a fortune cookie
(00:21):
a food technology. Bread, cheese, and ice cream are all
food technologies. They use special biological, chemical, or mechanical processes
during their creation. In the case of a fortune cookie,
what you're trying to create is a hard, hollow shell
around a sheet of paper, so that nothing sticks to
the paper and no grease transfers to it. Cooks create
(00:45):
hard shells in several different ways. For example, taco shells
are hard, so are dried noodles, so are sugar cones.
At the ice cream parlor. Of these three, of fortune
cookie is most like a sugar cone. Taco shells are
d fried and therefore greasy, and noodles don't taste very
good when they're dry. You may have noticed that many cookies,
(01:07):
including ginger snaps and chocolate chip cookies, are soft when
they come out of the oven, but they harden as
they cool. The batter of a fortune cookie, made up
of flour, sugar, oil, and so on, has this property
In spades. It acts something like a heat sensitive plastic.
Fortune cookies start out is flat four inch circles. When
(01:28):
they're just out of the oven. While they're still hot,
the cookie is very flexible, so you place the fortune
inside the cookie and folded into the proper fortune cookie shape,
which means that you fold it in half over the
fortune and then draw the tips together over a rod
or the edge of a plate. Once it cools, the
(01:49):
cookie becomes extremely hard and crunchy. If you look on
the web, you can find recipes for fortune cookies. You
can make up your own fortunes on little sheets of paper.
There are great for parties. Do you have any ideas
or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me
an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(02:10):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, go
to how stuff works dot com and be sure to
check out the brain stuff blog on the how stuff
works dot com home page.
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