I assumed the question was how to achieve the proper preconditions for cooking a chicken while avoiding any animal cruelty charges.
Clearly, we could simply knock its head off with a bat, since today I learned you can physically cook chickens with bats and professional batters, via a method well suited to humanity's eminent migration to outer space.
But I expect with some years of strength training and finesse, a very hard flick to the back of the chicken's lower noggin could dislodge the first cervical vertebrate from the skull, severing the spinal cord's integration with the brain stem.
Whether actually dead, or merely in a persistent vegetative state, the chicken may now be cooked.
However, if the chicken is merely headless [0], but in good health, one should not cook it.
> The charges were filed in April [2023] after police received reports that Prince Ssenteza-Woodson cooked a baby chicken in an air fryer while streaming it live on social media.
Chicken sized 74C object radiates at 2kW? Probably cools rather fast, but still feels like high number...
Energy in general really feels weird, when you look at the numbers. Like potential energy or kinetic on relatively low speeds... And then compared to chemical energy...
Edit: Also how do you get it there? Wouldn't you need to hit it with higher frequency to start with to get to temp?
Your intuition is right in this case. A 2kW oven is more than enough to heat small chicken up to temperature. The author lazily took the 165F temperature and put it into a blackbody calculator without converting the units. Anything but the metric system...
Assuming the chicken has a surface area A=1m^2 (corresponding to a perfectly spherical chicken of radius=25cm/diameter=50cm, a little bigger than usual) and is a perfect blackbody (just going to handwave this one).
with the incorrect temperature:
A blackbody with T=165°C (438 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=2090 W.
with the correct temperature:
A blackbody with T=74°C (347 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=824 W.
Also neglected is the incoming radiation from the ambient environment. Without this, the "power loss" is closer to measuring the chicken in deep interstellar space.
from a room temperature environment:
T=20°C (293 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=419 W onto the chicken.
The net power loss of the cooling chicken on the kitchen counter is therefore something like 824-419 = 405W, rapidly decreasing as the temperature drops towards room temperature. e.g. at 50°C it's around 200W.
But ideally you could stuff it with a dozen thanksgiving turkeys themselves stuffed with ducks stuffed with regular chickens stuffed with sausages. Be prepared: there will probably be leftovers.
> In his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomist Grimod de La Reynière presents his rôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")—a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, the rôti sans pareil was not entirely novel.
The cooking-by-force does seem unintuitive, but kitchen gadgets like cooking blenders for soups do exactly this by pushing blades through high-viscosity mixtures in order to achieve the desired effect.
I thought the FDA guideline was once the internal temperature reaches 160 or 165 or something it didn't need to sustain that temperature? it was only the lower temperatures that required some duration to achieve the same log reduction as reaching 160/165?
That gets you your log7 reduction of salmonella, so it is safe to eat, but I don't know if it would be "cooked" (changing to an acceptable texture) if you could instantaneously bring it to 165 F.
I have no idea what that cooking process is like. In a water bath, I run chicken breast at 62C instead of 60C because the texture is better for dicing and putting in kid's lunches or wraps. I might try 60C if I was searing and serving whole. I haven't done dark meat this way, but I suspect it'd need a higher temperature or time to break down connective tissue. And I know that for lower temperatures (58C? - I haven't made that in years), you need to hold short ribs for a couple of days.
I can say I've cooked chicken sous vide incorrectly before that had cooked long and hot enough to be safe, but the texture and feel of the meat could only be described as a meat gusher, if you've ever had those candies. Every bite exploded with liquid and the meat itself was squishy, it was very disgusting
Spiritual successor of this is how many slap's it take's to cook a chicken. There was a viral video on this a few year's ago rather funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
Anyone here play the RPG Dink Smallwood as a kid? There was a side quest where you hit (holy) ducks with your sword so hard that they cook: https://youtu.be/zWxXWG-U0Uo
I still need to know how fast I need to ride my bike to not freeze my hands, when biking during the winter without mittens. There has to be some sweet spot where my hands a warm, but not burning.
Close to mach Jesus I think. At which time you might have other more pressing problems than cold hands. Remember to maintain the brakes on your bicycle.
> quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if your body were doing that much work, your core temperature would reach fatal levels in a matter of seconds.
Disappointed they didn’t factor in other inputs to the propulsion (e.g. battery assist, etc).
If we're considering unconventional cooking methods, what about orbital re-entry cooking, or atmospheric friction cooking in general? What speed/altitude would a plane need to be travelling at to lob a chicken out the window and have it perfectly cooked when it hit land?
SR-71 external temp reached 600F or so at Mach-3, so that might result in a charred chicken.
The actual NASA chicken cannon just used gelatin blobs because at muzzle velocity the effects were the same but there was a lot less bones and feathers to clean up.
You're advocating hitting it hard quickly and then insulating it for a while? That makes a lot of sense, as long as you hit it hard enough to handle the losses and still be over cooking temp.
Of course, overheating might have negative effects on the eating satisfaction test.
I don’t think I agree with the assertion that instantly bringing the chicken up to temp wouldn’t result in it being cooked. Especially since the classic solution got the chicken up to 400F. I don’t care how fast it cools off, if we assume magic uniform heat distribution from the slap, starting at 400 F, all the proteins are gonna be denatured and the diseases killed.
I was going to post the same thing, so I'll upvote your post instead. I think there's a misunderstanding here that for meat to be done, it needs to stay above temperature X for Y minutes. In reality, the chemical reactions occur in milliseconds once you reach the required temperature.
The post doesn't really answer it either - it changes the premise to N people hitting it repeatedly, and it doesn't even say how many minutes it would take. With the stuff about vacuum chambers and pressure suits it's just muddled nonsense...
Used to joke in the kitchen that I worked in that if we were pressed for time, instead of baking something for an hour at 300°, we can just bake it for 6 minutes at 3,000°. It's such a fun concept and always makes me giggle
It was an epiphany for me watching a blacksmith at work. After the piece of metal is pulled from the furnace, it can be kept red hot if hit hard and often enough.
If I had bothered to think I would have known this theoretically = being a physics and mecheng guy.
To be fair, I'm not hugely annoyed about saying "sous-vide it" as short for "vacuum-seal it and cook it in a water circulator (or steam oven)" since it is, after all, a very common use case for vacuum sealing beyond just storage.
But in OPs context, I don't even know what it was supposed to mean. Like... just cooked? Are we including a final sear after the circulator?
Edit: and actually, "sous-vide" means "vacuum sealed" (or even more literally "in a vacuum"), so you technically "cook it sous-vide", you don't "sous-vide it", because it's not a verb. But also yes: language is how people use it.
The question posed is not "how hard" but "how many times and how hard". You can't cook a chicken in one hit because that amount of heat requires a large amount of force which then obliterates the chicken. There's a video on youtube that tries to answer this question.
Motion is relative, so firing a chicken at a static target is also a possibility.
The trouble would be imparting and spreading enough energy through the entire mass uniformly enough to have something remain.
It likely wouldn't work in the real world because the result would obliterate bones resulting in something worse than Chicken McNuggets, and not cook it sufficiently long to be safe from bacterial contamination.
If attempting such a feat, it would generate visible light. There's a good chance of generating some long-wave UV at the energies involved (several MJ, which would be a chicken flying at about 2 km/s. It would instantly disintegrate.)
That would be difficult to serve. Maybe shoot it into something like a bucket with a rim that’s curved inward, to direct the meals momentum back into the bucket.
And, since the volume is more confined, it should have the benefit of slightly reducing the required kinetic cooking energy.
Ok, now I feel silly. Cooking the serving individually makes so much more sense. The lower forces will significantly reduce all required material thicknesses, especially in the serving area blast shield!
Ladies and gents, please help yourself to breakfast. Bread is by the toaster, butter and jam is on the table. The chicken pâte will be on the large wall once the chef finishes loading up the howitzer.
I assumed the question was how to achieve the proper preconditions for cooking a chicken while avoiding any animal cruelty charges.
Clearly, we could simply knock its head off with a bat, since today I learned you can physically cook chickens with bats and professional batters, via a method well suited to humanity's eminent migration to outer space.
But I expect with some years of strength training and finesse, a very hard flick to the back of the chicken's lower noggin could dislodge the first cervical vertebrate from the skull, severing the spinal cord's integration with the brain stem.
Whether actually dead, or merely in a persistent vegetative state, the chicken may now be cooked.
However, if the chicken is merely headless [0], but in good health, one should not cook it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken
When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?
> The charges were filed in April [2023] after police received reports that Prince Ssenteza-Woodson cooked a baby chicken in an air fryer while streaming it live on social media.
https://www.wdrb.com/news/crime-reports/uofl-student-sentenc...
Yeah that’s fucked up.
Cannot believe they did all the math..
Then made it impenetrable to non-Americans by using imperial.
Chicken sized 74C object radiates at 2kW? Probably cools rather fast, but still feels like high number...
Energy in general really feels weird, when you look at the numbers. Like potential energy or kinetic on relatively low speeds... And then compared to chemical energy...
Edit: Also how do you get it there? Wouldn't you need to hit it with higher frequency to start with to get to temp?
Your intuition is right in this case. A 2kW oven is more than enough to heat small chicken up to temperature. The author lazily took the 165F temperature and put it into a blackbody calculator without converting the units. Anything but the metric system...
Assuming the chicken has a surface area A=1m^2 (corresponding to a perfectly spherical chicken of radius=25cm/diameter=50cm, a little bigger than usual) and is a perfect blackbody (just going to handwave this one).
with the incorrect temperature: A blackbody with T=165°C (438 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=2090 W.
with the correct temperature: A blackbody with T=74°C (347 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=824 W.
Also neglected is the incoming radiation from the ambient environment. Without this, the "power loss" is closer to measuring the chicken in deep interstellar space. from a room temperature environment: T=20°C (293 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=419 W onto the chicken.
The net power loss of the cooling chicken on the kitchen counter is therefore something like 824-419 = 405W, rapidly decreasing as the temperature drops towards room temperature. e.g. at 50°C it's around 200W.
"a little bigger": it would weigh 65 kg.
But ideally you could stuff it with a dozen thanksgiving turkeys themselves stuffed with ducks stuffed with regular chickens stuffed with sausages. Be prepared: there will probably be leftovers.
Or birds all the way down:
> In his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomist Grimod de La Reynière presents his rôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")—a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, the rôti sans pareil was not entirely novel.
points for'a perfectly spherical chicken'.
And later put it in an interstellar space, no less!
How many interstellar spaces are there?
For the uninitiated https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
My personal favorite.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3j96p1/a...
> The author lazily took the 165F temperature and…
Where did they even get 165F from in the first place? The “classic solution” article uses 400F, a much more appropriate oven temperature.
165F is the safe eating temperature recommended for most meats here in the U.S.
The cooking-by-force does seem unintuitive, but kitchen gadgets like cooking blenders for soups do exactly this by pushing blades through high-viscosity mixtures in order to achieve the desired effect.
Someone made a Youtube video about this. He created a machine to slap the chicken and measured its heat.
I thought the FDA guideline was once the internal temperature reaches 160 or 165 or something it didn't need to sustain that temperature? it was only the lower temperatures that required some duration to achieve the same log reduction as reaching 160/165?
Yeah, table 3 (path 37) here: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...
That gets you your log7 reduction of salmonella, so it is safe to eat, but I don't know if it would be "cooked" (changing to an acceptable texture) if you could instantaneously bring it to 165 F.
I have no idea what that cooking process is like. In a water bath, I run chicken breast at 62C instead of 60C because the texture is better for dicing and putting in kid's lunches or wraps. I might try 60C if I was searing and serving whole. I haven't done dark meat this way, but I suspect it'd need a higher temperature or time to break down connective tissue. And I know that for lower temperatures (58C? - I haven't made that in years), you need to hold short ribs for a couple of days.
I can say I've cooked chicken sous vide incorrectly before that had cooked long and hot enough to be safe, but the texture and feel of the meat could only be described as a meat gusher, if you've ever had those candies. Every bite exploded with liquid and the meat itself was squishy, it was very disgusting
Spiritual successor of this is how many slap's it take's to cook a chicken. There was a viral video on this a few year's ago rather funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
I should have checked the comments first: I currently have the URL for this video on my clipboard, ready to paste into a comment, but you beat me :-)
Assuming an infinitely malleable chicken...
This reminds me of the old blacksmithing trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I68Cik7ywg
one must be strong to hit 2kg hammer this fast
I love that when I opened this article i already knew some elements, from having read it months ago on HN
So now I will remember it a bit better and for longer
Hackernews is actually like Anki cards for nerd (and in this case useless) Internet stuff
Anyone here play the RPG Dink Smallwood as a kid? There was a side quest where you hit (holy) ducks with your sword so hard that they cook: https://youtu.be/zWxXWG-U0Uo
Yes! thanks for the memory haha.
I still need to know how fast I need to ride my bike to not freeze my hands, when biking during the winter without mittens. There has to be some sweet spot where my hands a warm, but not burning.
Close to mach Jesus I think. At which time you might have other more pressing problems than cold hands. Remember to maintain the brakes on your bicycle.
In all seriousness: handlebar muffs. They're a game changer.
I knew there was an What If? from xkcd about this. It's the fifth question in this short answer collection:
https://what-if.xkcd.com/23/
> quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if your body were doing that much work, your core temperature would reach fatal levels in a matter of seconds.
Disappointed they didn’t factor in other inputs to the propulsion (e.g. battery assist, etc).
If we're considering unconventional cooking methods, what about orbital re-entry cooking, or atmospheric friction cooking in general? What speed/altitude would a plane need to be travelling at to lob a chicken out the window and have it perfectly cooked when it hit land?
SR-71 external temp reached 600F or so at Mach-3, so that might result in a charred chicken.
An amateur rocket enthusiast did this on YouTube, also going at mach 3.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4
I like that these guys did it in style, wearing chef's hats!
I guess even cooking a rare steak (beyond just searing the outside) takes a couple of minutes, so maybe it'd need some Mach-3 horizontal flying time.
XKCD did a piece on this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/
This is exactly why I like hanging out with math & physics types. It has big "assuming a spherical, frictionless horse" energy.
Chicken Gun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun
I’m pretty sure NASA used a version of this to test the resiliency of the space shuttle tiles. Not fast enough to cook tho.
The actual NASA chicken cannon just used gelatin blobs because at muzzle velocity the effects were the same but there was a lot less bones and feathers to clean up.
Nah. Those just cook on reentry ;)
I first heard the Australian version of the urban legend: a chicken fired into a jet engine to test for bird strikes
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/catapoultry/
Could aim it at the space station. Would be nice to receive a fresh cooked chicken in orbit I imagine.
Wait. Orbital chicken coops w drop delivery..
Ahab had his whale, and James Simon apparently has his chicken.
Someone did build himself a chicken slapper to he could slap himself some chicken dinner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
"Mom, where are the hitters in the oven?"
"We call them heaters in that one case."
> To keep an object at a given temperature, you have to continuously give it the same energy it’s radiating away.
Or put it in mirror chamber - a bit less trouble than windmilling baseball bats ...
You're advocating hitting it hard quickly and then insulating it for a while? That makes a lot of sense, as long as you hit it hard enough to handle the losses and still be over cooking temp.
Of course, overheating might have negative effects on the eating satisfaction test.
See also: https://www.sportslingo.com/sports-glossary/h/heater
OT, but the site of that author looks very interesting in general: https://james-simon.github.io
Interestingly, the author includes their social security number with their contact info at the bottom of the page.
Those are the first digits of π.
And the experimental evidence…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
That chicken would be obliterated long before cooking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
I don’t think I agree with the assertion that instantly bringing the chicken up to temp wouldn’t result in it being cooked. Especially since the classic solution got the chicken up to 400F. I don’t care how fast it cools off, if we assume magic uniform heat distribution from the slap, starting at 400 F, all the proteins are gonna be denatured and the diseases killed.
I was going to post the same thing, so I'll upvote your post instead. I think there's a misunderstanding here that for meat to be done, it needs to stay above temperature X for Y minutes. In reality, the chemical reactions occur in milliseconds once you reach the required temperature.
The post doesn't really answer it either - it changes the premise to N people hitting it repeatedly, and it doesn't even say how many minutes it would take. With the stuff about vacuum chambers and pressure suits it's just muddled nonsense...
Sounds more like a recipe for chicken soup ...
Used to joke in the kitchen that I worked in that if we were pressed for time, instead of baking something for an hour at 300°, we can just bake it for 6 minutes at 3,000°. It's such a fun concept and always makes me giggle
It's somewhat used for milk pasteurization. You can heat it to 61°C (145°F) for 30 minutes or to 72°C (162°F) for 15 seconds (yes, 0.25 minutes). More info https://www.idfa.org/pasteurization and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
This is used in software engineering too, people will say things like "you can't make a baby in a month with 9 women"
Are we making a joke about software developers chance of getting any of the nine to sleep with them?
You can't give birth to a baby in one month using 9 women.
It takes a tough man to hit a tender chicken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z789aLNfXo
Incredible. Was not expecting an answer that felt reachable.
It was an epiphany for me watching a blacksmith at work. After the piece of metal is pulled from the furnace, it can be kept red hot if hit hard and often enough.
If I had bothered to think I would have known this theoretically = being a physics and mecheng guy.
I raise the bar higher - how hard and how long do you need to hit the chicken to make it sous vide
Sometimes I wish the anglophone cooking world hadn't forgotten that "sous-vide" actually refers to the vacuum sealing.
Thank you, francophone, I will now be that one annoying guy who uses it correctly in English
To be fair, I'm not hugely annoyed about saying "sous-vide it" as short for "vacuum-seal it and cook it in a water circulator (or steam oven)" since it is, after all, a very common use case for vacuum sealing beyond just storage.
But in OPs context, I don't even know what it was supposed to mean. Like... just cooked? Are we including a final sear after the circulator?
Edit: and actually, "sous-vide" means "vacuum sealed" (or even more literally "in a vacuum"), so you technically "cook it sous-vide", you don't "sous-vide it", because it's not a verb. But also yes: language is how people use it.
"if you slap a chicken at 3726 mph, it will be cooked."
Certainly holds true for the Gen Z sense of the word.
Because if something “slaps” then it’s “cooked”? I thought slaps was good.
I guess the “slap” in regular English, “cooked” in Gen Z English.
Does anyone know why does the footer of the page have a “ssn”?
It's just the digits of pi, likely not their real SSN.
Are we assuming perfectly spherical chickens in vacuum?
Yeah, lets go with that
https://showcase.nano-banana.ai/ai-generated/fal_nano-banana...
It's not perfectly spherical though.
The question posed is not "how hard" but "how many times and how hard". You can't cook a chicken in one hit because that amount of heat requires a large amount of force which then obliterates the chicken. There's a video on youtube that tries to answer this question.
I thought this was xkcd's What If? series from the title.
By the way, it's got a Youtube channel now and it's as good as ever: https://www.youtube.com/@xkcd_whatif
Motion is relative, so firing a chicken at a static target is also a possibility.
The trouble would be imparting and spreading enough energy through the entire mass uniformly enough to have something remain.
It likely wouldn't work in the real world because the result would obliterate bones resulting in something worse than Chicken McNuggets, and not cook it sufficiently long to be safe from bacterial contamination.
If attempting such a feat, it would generate visible light. There's a good chance of generating some long-wave UV at the energies involved (several MJ, which would be a chicken flying at about 2 km/s. It would instantly disintegrate.)
"Assume a spherical chicken..."
Conspicuously, this is from June 2020
is it cooked or vaporized?
You don’t have to hit a chicken hard to cook it you just shoot it at a wall.
That would be difficult to serve. Maybe shoot it into something like a bucket with a rim that’s curved inward, to direct the meals momentum back into the bucket.
And, since the volume is more confined, it should have the benefit of slightly reducing the required kinetic cooking energy.
So, shoot it at the plate instead.
I don't know what plates you're using but I'm pretty mine would shatter upon chicken impact.
Ok, now I feel silly. Cooking the serving individually makes so much more sense. The lower forces will significantly reduce all required material thicknesses, especially in the serving area blast shield!
I think it would negatively affect the visual appearance and texture of said chicken.
Purely a matter of personal taste. Chicken pate on toast is popular in many regions.
Ladies and gents, please help yourself to breakfast. Bread is by the toaster, butter and jam is on the table. The chicken pâte will be on the large wall once the chef finishes loading up the howitzer.
Indeed. It would turn into McNuggets :-/
But McNuggets are delicious. And the only non-self-made nuggets worth eating...
This is really disgusting. Chickens are feeling animals as well.
To better control environmental variables, you'll probably want to kill the chicken before you start whacking it with baseball bats.
How hard do you have to hit a human, to cook it, the chicken asks?
Sora, show me this.