The Fortune Cookie
At the end of a nice meal, dessert is what most people look forward to. If the meal is to go Asian cuisine, then it is likely the fortune cookie that most look forward to. Members of my family love Panda Express and to be honest, their Chicken Breast and green beans are damn tasty, but this post is about the fortune cookie.
In a very strange twist, there is something that you buy in America that isn’t actually made in China, The Chinese Fortune Cookie isn’t actually Asian at all and was actually made in of all places California. There are two competing claims as to who invented the modern cookie (Makoto Hagiwara of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco and David Jung, founder of the Hong Kong Noodle Company in Los Angeles. Regardless of the origin, they offer a nice treat at the end of the meal and are largely an American item. (Wikipedia)
Inside the cookie is a small slip of paper that contains a “fortune” and often the reverse is your “lucky” numbers.
There are many factories that make fortune cookies in the U.S. and there are just as many videos showing how they are made, but the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory in San Francisco is an actual factory (making 10,000 cookies a day) and a tourist destination rolled into one. Owner Kevin Chun makes his money off of the tourism trade and visitors to his small family-owned and operated factory. Check out this video from Food Insider.
The difference between being hand-made and compared to a factory is very stark, as this “How-Its Made” video shows.
Locally, I favor two local Asian-themed restaurants and the one in this post is Panda Express, You guessed it, Panda Express is an American company founded in 1973 in Pasadena, California. However, unlike the fortune cookie, Panda is more closely tied to Asian Culture as it was founded as the Panda Restaurant Group, the parent company of Panda Inn, Panda Express, and Hibachi-San was founded by Andrew Cherng, Peggy Cherng, and Andrew’s father, Master Chef Ming Tsai Cherng. Andrew Cherng and his father are from the Yangzhou region of China’s Jiangsu province, while Peggy was born in Burma and raised in Hong Kong. Both Andrew and Peggy Cherng are alumni of Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas (where they first met). (Wikipedia).
Our local Panda Express has a habit of normally shorting you one cookie when you order meals for the family, but periodically you get this. The double cookie is from a few years ago, at the local Panda Express. The crumbs and no cookie are from this week at the same Panda Express.
If you are a geek like me, then you thought about “I wonder who writes the fortunes” and sure enough, a quick search shows that Bustle has a video about “Meet the Guy Who Writes Your Fortune Cookies”
The Evolution Of Fortune Cookie Writing
If you are, a Jimmy Kimmel fan (can’t say that I am, in fact, have never watched a single show). However, this YouTube video is an interesting view inside another Fortune Cookie factory.
In addition, it would not be my blog unless I had some offensive humor in it. If your humor is sick and twisted like mine (I was actually called sick and twisted once, but that is for another post on another day), then you probably wondered if there are offensive sayings on any of the cookies and sure enough, you can order cookies just like that (https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.
