How do they make fortune cookies? - podcast episode cover

How do they make fortune cookies?

Dec 14, 20152 min
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Episode description

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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Transcript

Speaker 1

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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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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