Nevermark 2 days ago

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

  • schwartzworld 2 days ago

    When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?

    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 days ago

      > 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...

      • BriggyDwiggs42 2 days ago

        Yeah that’s fucked up.

        • userbinator 2 days ago

          That tells me the police have nothing better to do.

        • notaurus 2 days ago

          Honestly par for the course for human treatment of chickens. See chick culling [1]. Billions of baby chicks are macerated live because they are not commercially useful.

          > Worldwide: As of 2015, approximately 7 billion male chicks were culled annually around the world

          [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

          • AngryData a day ago

            Hard disagree. Burning something alive in a slow and agonizing death for zero purpose other than cruelty is nowhere near the same thing as near instantaneously killing an animal for animal husbandry purposes.

            Could we do better or have better practices? Sure. Is there an argument for not eating meat at all? Sure.

            But if you were going to die you would have a lot bigger problem being slowly roasted alive versus instant brain destruction.

Ekaros 2 days ago

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?

  • hakken306 2 days ago

    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.

    • petters 2 days ago

      "a little bigger": it would weigh 65 kg.

      • bregma 2 days ago

        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.

        • dunham 2 days ago

          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.

    • pansa2 2 days ago

      > 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.

      • CitrusFruits 2 days ago

        165F is the safe eating temperature recommended for most meats here in the U.S.

  • xattt 2 days ago

    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.

  • adhamsalama 2 days ago

    Someone made a Youtube video about this. He created a machine to slap the chicken and measured its heat.

KadenWildauer 2 days ago

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

  • gcanyon 2 days ago

    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 :-)

wpasc 2 days ago

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?

  • dunham 2 days ago

    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.

    • thatguy0900 2 days ago

      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

oofbey 2 days ago

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.

  • codeflo 2 days ago

    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.

  • rendaw 2 days ago

    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...

mrweasel 2 days ago

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.

  • foofoo12 2 days ago

    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.

  • AngryData a day ago

    Its an unusual solution but you can train cold acclimation to your hands. Ice climbers do it to prevent their hands from freezing up during a climb. It essentially boils down to sticking your hands in ice cold water for long enough periods of time, like 30-45 minutes once or twice each day is what I remember reading for a week or two before a climb/cold weather. And after you do it enough times your body learns to increase blood flow to your hands along with increasing your base rate of metabolism as a response to cold hands, versus the default unacclimated response of slowing blood flow to your hands to preserve core temperature. And the effect will get stronger the more often and longer you do it.

    The effect will diminish over time if you don't use it, but not completely until over a year or more of not using it, and you can do it before cold weather hits. It probably happens somewhat to you already if you are experiencing it enough, however you might not really get the effects naturally until we are already nearing spring, or if you only ever experience it for 15 minutes at a time and then go roast your hands on a heater, versus training it in the fall so when deep winter hits you are already very well acclimated to it.

    Its the same effect that lets people wear shorts or kilts or whatever in the winter and snow. They aren't unusual or weird or got warm blood, they just exposed their legs often enough to cold for the body to learn and adapt until it no longer bothered them. It can even go pretty extreme to people being barefoot in the snow for hours at a time, when someone unused to it would have frost bite in 20 minutes.

  • andrewflnr 2 days ago

    In all seriousness: handlebar muffs. They're a game changer.

  • sphars 2 days ago

    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/

    • mrexroad 2 days ago

      > 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).

cadamsdotcom 2 days ago

Cannot believe they did all the math..

Then made it impenetrable to non-Americans by using imperial.

kstrauser 3 days ago

This is exactly why I like hanging out with math & physics types. It has big "assuming a spherical, frictionless horse" energy.

aubanel 2 days ago

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

  • klipt 2 days ago

    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

    • viksit 2 days ago

      Yes! thanks for the memory haha.

whycome 2 days ago

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.

  • bregma 2 days ago

    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.

    • whycome 2 days ago

      Nah. Those just cook on reentry ;)

  • thebruce87m 2 days ago

    Could aim it at the space station. Would be nice to receive a fresh cooked chicken in orbit I imagine.

    • olelele 2 days ago

      Wait. Orbital chicken coops w drop delivery..

HarHarVeryFunny 2 days ago

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.

burnt-resistor 2 days ago

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.)

flowerthoughts 3 days ago

"Mom, where are the hitters in the oven?"

"We call them heaters in that one case."

  • B1FF_PSUVM 2 days ago

    > 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 ...

    • flowerthoughts 2 days ago

      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.

xg15 2 days ago

OT, but the site of that author looks very interesting in general: https://james-simon.github.io

  • alphan0n 2 days ago

    Interestingly, the author includes their social security number with their contact info at the bottom of the page.

    • vulcan01 2 days ago

      Those are the first digits of π.

kylecazar 2 days ago

"if you slap a chicken at 3726 mph, it will be cooked."

Certainly holds true for the Gen Z sense of the word.

  • bn-l 2 days ago

    Because if something “slaps” then it’s “cooked”? I thought slaps was good.

    • serial_dev 2 days ago

      I guess the “slap” in regular English, “cooked” in Gen Z English.

      • jaakl a day ago

        And “chicken” in which one?

bobson381 2 days ago

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

  • walthamstow 2 days ago

    This is used in software engineering too, people will say things like "you can't make a baby in a month with 9 women"

    • mgilroy 2 days ago

      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.

burnished 2 days ago

Incredible. Was not expecting an answer that felt reachable.

  • emmelaich 2 days ago

    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.

5xpB7n8tdbtoP 2 days ago

Does anyone know why does the footer of the page have a “ssn”?

  • PokeyCat 2 days ago

    It's just the digits of pi, likely not their real SSN.

amelius 2 days ago

Sounds more like a recipe for chicken soup ...

p0w3n3d 2 days ago

I raise the bar higher - how hard and how long do you need to hit the chicken to make it sous vide

  • rkomorn 2 days ago

    Sometimes I wish the anglophone cooking world hadn't forgotten that "sous-vide" actually refers to the vacuum sealing.

    • walthamstow 2 days ago

      Thank you, francophone, I will now be that one annoying guy who uses it correctly in English

      • rkomorn 2 days ago

        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.

anigbrowl 2 days ago

Ahab had his whale, and James Simon apparently has his chicken.

xivzgrev 2 days ago

That chicken would be obliterated long before cooking

slowhadoken 2 days ago

You don’t have to hit a chicken hard to cook it you just shoot it at a wall.

  • nomel 2 days ago

    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.

    • cwillu 2 days ago

      So, shoot it at the plate instead.

      • rkomorn 2 days ago

        I don't know what plates you're using but I'm pretty mine would shatter upon chicken impact.

      • nomel 2 days ago

        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!

  • foofoo12 2 days ago

    I think it would negatively affect the visual appearance and texture of said chicken.

    • bregma 2 days ago

      Purely a matter of personal taste. Chicken pate on toast is popular in many regions.

      • foofoo12 2 days ago

        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.

    • actionfromafar 2 days ago

      Indeed. It would turn into McNuggets :-/

      • rkomorn 2 days ago

        But McNuggets are delicious. And the only non-self-made nuggets worth eating...

hkt 2 days ago

Conspicuously, this is from June 2020

knowitnone3 2 days ago

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.

zakki 2 days ago

is it cooked or vaporized?

nullzzz 2 days ago

This is really disgusting. Chickens are feeling animals as well.

  • decimalenough 2 days ago

    To better control environmental variables, you'll probably want to kill the chicken before you start whacking it with baseball bats.

  • childintime 2 days ago

    How hard do you have to hit a human, to cook it, the chicken asks?