This narrow and rather long shop located in Ross Alley employs three people who work from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day of the week, making fortune cookies and wrapping them for special occasions, regular costumers and tourists.
Many people think that fortune cookies find their origin in China, but the reality is far from that. Indeed, according to the Fortune Cookie Co. Ltd., located in Britain, fortune cookies are the invention of the Chinese 49ers to make the life of those who worked on building the great American railways through the Sierra Nevada into California more colorful.
The Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Co. has passed on the tradition to two generations, said Chan.
The owners of the company would never tell their secret recipe for making the cookies, said Chan. However, the “good-luck cookies” are made of quite simple ingredients, such as eggs, flour, sugar, milk, butter and vanilla.
The secret mixture is put into a bucket that pours into a dispenser. Then the dough goes through a machine that doses the right amount of mixture for each cookie and deposits it on small round pans that spin around an axis. The cookies go around while baking and look like hosts used in catholic masses. Then someone picks them up while they are still hot to fold them while placing the so-important fortune inside.
Some of the round baked circles never get to be folded because the person in charge of that can’t go as fast as the machine that spins and bakes the secret paste. Those host-like cookies are then offered to tourists and customers, said Chan.
The shop offers a variety of cookies including regular fortune cookie, Big Almond ones, and flat chocolates. All of them are priced around $3.50 and $4.50 per bag of about 35 cookies, said Chan.
The factory, which opened in 1962, also bakes custom cookies on special orders beside their regular production. Those cookies are bought for weddings or parties but are also bought by companies that put advertising as fortune notes. The factory also produces French Adult cookies that contain “little spicy talking,” said Chan.
When entering the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Co., people can smell the sweet scent of the cookies baking on the pans that fills the place with heat, hear the noise of the cooking machines, and customers and the owner chitchatting in Chinese.
Although the factory is not mentioned in most tourist guide books, tourists get to know the place through walking tours like the one that Susan and Betty Querengesser, who come from Canada, took. Betty Querengesser said it was “amazing to see how they make the cookies.” Her daughter, Susan Querengesser, said they wouldn’t have known about the factory if it weren’t for the walking tour.
Many tourists ignore the sign that says “Hello! If you take a picture please pay 50 cents. Thank you.” Chan said “it’s just as a tip.”
A tourist from Ontario, Canada, Terri Kalbfleisch, asked Chan: “You don’t burn your fingers”? “You tell me,” answered Chan, handing a cookie right off the pan to the lady. The cookies are in fact very hot and need to be malleable to be folded in the proper way.
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
No comments:
Post a Comment