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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where

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Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi, I'm marshall brained with today's question, how

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Speaker 1: do they make fortune cookies? If you want to think

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Speaker 1: about it this way, you could call a fortune cookie

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Speaker 1: a food technology. Bread, cheese, and ice cream are all

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Speaker 1: food technologies. They use special biological, chemical, or mechanical processes

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Speaker 1: during their creation. In the case of a fortune cookie,

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Speaker 1: what you're trying to create is a hard, hollow shell

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Speaker 1: around a sheet of paper, so that nothing sticks to

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Speaker 1: the paper and no grease transfers to it. Cooks create

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Speaker 1: hard shells in several different ways. For example, taco shells

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Speaker 1: are hard, so are dried noodles, so are sugar cones.

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Speaker 1: At the ice cream parlor. Of these three, of fortune

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Speaker 1: cookie is most like a sugar cone. Taco shells are

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Speaker 1: d fried and therefore greasy, and noodles don't taste very

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Speaker 1: good when they're dry. You may have noticed that many cookies,

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Speaker 1: including ginger snaps and chocolate chip cookies, are soft when

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Speaker 1: they come out of the oven, but they harden as

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Speaker 1: they cool. The batter of a fortune cookie, made up

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Speaker 1: of flour, sugar, oil, and so on, has this property

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Speaker 1: In spades. It acts something like a heat sensitive plastic.

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Speaker 1: Fortune cookies start out is flat four inch circles. When

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Speaker 1: they're just out of the oven. While they're still hot,

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Speaker 1: the cookie is very flexible, so you place the fortune

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Speaker 1: inside the cookie and folded into the proper fortune cookie shape,

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Speaker 1: which means that you fold it in half over the

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Speaker 1: fortune and then draw the tips together over a rod

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Speaker 1: or the edge of a plate. Once it cools, the

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Speaker 1: cookie becomes extremely hard and crunchy. If you look on

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Speaker 1: the web, you can find recipes for fortune cookies. You

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Speaker 1: can make up your own fortunes on little sheets of paper.

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Speaker 1: There are great for parties. Do you have any ideas

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Speaker 1: or suggestions for this podcast? If so, please send me

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Speaker 1: an email at podcast at how stuff works dot com.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, go

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Speaker 1: to how stuff works dot com and be sure to

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Speaker 1: check out the brain stuff blog on the how stuff

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Speaker 1: works dot com home page.