We Finally Know How Fortune Cookies Get Their Messages Inside

Whether you're ordering takeout or sharing dishes around a lazy Susan, Chinese meals are often completed with a fortune cookie. Even if you're too full to eat the crunchy, delicately sweet cookie, you'll still crack it open to read the phrase printed on the ribbon of paper inside. If you've ever wondered how those strips get inside a fortune cookie's origami-like half-moon-half-butterfly shape, the answer has finally been revealed.

Originally made and formed by hand, fortune cookie dough is a simple mixture of eggs, sugar, flour, and water. The dough is a thin, crepe-like batter poured into circular cookie tins three inches in diameter before being baked. Like most cookies fresh out of the oven, hot fortune cookies are soft because their sugars remain liquid, only hardening as they cool. In this small window, cookie makers place the printed fortune paper in the center of the cookie before quickly folding the flexible, soft, hot cookie into its characteristic shape. As the folded cookies cool, the shape solidifies and effectively traps the paper until an eager customer is ready to crack it open and read their fortune.

Cookie makers initially used chopsticks to fold the dough, but as demand increased and industrial technology advanced, the entire process became mechanized. You can take tours of fortune cookie factories in San Francisco and Oakland for a mesmerizing look into how machines crank out thousands of cookies every hour, but most of the world's fortune cookies come from a single company in NYC.