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Announcer
Welcome to Brain Stuff from www.HowStuffWorks.com where smart happens.
Marshall
Hi, I’m Marshall Brain with today’s question.
How do they make fortune cookies?
If you want to think about it this way, you can call a fortune cookie 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 are 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 hard shells in several different ways. For example, taco shells are hard, so are dried noodles, and sugar cones at the ice cream parlor. Of these three, a fortune cookie is most like a sugar cone. Taco shells are deep fried, and therefore greasy, and noodles don’t taste very good when they’re dry.
You may have noticed that many cookies, 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 flour, sugar, oil, and so on, has this property in spades. It acts something like a heat-sensitive plastic. Fortune cookies start out as flat, 4-inch circles when they are just out of the oven. While they are still hot, the cookie is very flexible, so they place the fortune inside the cookie, then fold into the proper fortune cookie shape, which means they 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 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. They are great for parties.
Do you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me an E-mail at Podcast@HowStuffWorks.com.
Announcer
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