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.
When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 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.
That tells me the police have nothing better to do.
notaurus 22 hours 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
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 1 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.
10 hours ago [-]
fifticon 2 days ago [-]
points for'a perfectly spherical chicken'.
ptero 2 days ago [-]
And later put it in an interstellar space, no less!
> 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 1 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.
wpasc 1 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?
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 1 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
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 1 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 :-)
It helps having a good anvil, as it bounces back most of the way
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.
AngryData 9 hours 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.
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.
andrewflnr 1 days ago [-]
In all seriousness: handlebar muffs. They're a game changer.
sphars 1 days ago [-]
I knew there was an What If? from xkcd about this. It's the fifth question in this short answer collection:
> 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 1 days ago [-]
Cannot believe they did all the math..
Then made it impenetrable to non-Americans by using imperial.
aubanel 1 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 1 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 1 days ago [-]
Yes! thanks for the memory haha.
kstrauser 2 days ago [-]
This is exactly why I like hanging out with math & physics types. It has big "assuming a spherical, frictionless horse" energy.
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 1 days ago [-]
Nah. Those just cook on reentry ;)
robocat 1 days ago [-]
I first heard the Australian version of the urban legend: a chicken fired into a jet engine to test for bird strikes
Could aim it at the space station. Would be nice to receive a fresh cooked chicken in orbit I imagine.
olelele 1 days ago [-]
Wait. Orbital chicken coops w drop delivery..
HarHarVeryFunny 1 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.
margalabargala 1 days ago [-]
An amateur rocket enthusiast did this on YouTube, also going at mach 3.
> 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 1 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.
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 1 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...
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
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.
amelius 1 days ago [-]
Sounds more like a recipe for chicken soup ...
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.
dvh 2 days ago [-]
Are we assuming perfectly spherical chickens in vacuum?
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 1 days ago [-]
Thank you, francophone, I will now be that one annoying guy who uses it correctly in English
rkomorn 1 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.
kylecazar 1 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 1 days ago [-]
Because if something “slaps” then it’s “cooked”? I thought slaps was good.
serial_dev 1 days ago [-]
I guess the “slap” in regular English, “cooked” in Gen Z English.
jaakl 6 hours ago [-]
And “chicken” in which one?
anigbrowl 1 days ago [-]
Ahab had his whale, and James Simon apparently has his chicken.
1 days ago [-]
1 days ago [-]
xivzgrev 1 days ago [-]
That chicken would be obliterated long before cooking
1 days ago [-]
sph 1 days ago [-]
I thought this was xkcd's What If? series from the title.
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.
burnt-resistor 1 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.)
2 days ago [-]
hkt 2 days ago [-]
Conspicuously, this is from June 2020
zakki 2 days ago [-]
is it cooked or vaporized?
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 1 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...
handfuloflight 2 days ago [-]
Sora, show me this.
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 1 days ago [-]
How hard do you have to hit a human, to cook it, the chicken asks?
TheOtherHobbes 1 days ago [-]
"Assume a spherical chicken..."
2 days ago [-]
Rendered at 00:24:16 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
https://www.wdrb.com/news/crime-reports/uofl-student-sentenc...
> Worldwide: As of 2015, approximately 7 billion male chicks were culled annually around the world
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3j96p1/a...
Where did they even get 165F from in the first place? The “classic solution” article uses 400F, a much more appropriate oven temperature.
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.
This reminds me of the old blacksmithing trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I68Cik7ywg
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.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/23/
Disappointed they didn’t factor in other inputs to the propulsion (e.g. battery assist, etc).
Then made it impenetrable to non-Americans by using imperial.
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
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.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/catapoultry/
SR-71 external temp reached 600F or so at Mach-3, so that might result in a charred chicken.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4
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.
"We call them heaters in that one case."
Or put it in mirror chamber - a bit less trouble than windmilling baseball bats ...
Of course, overheating might have negative effects on the eating satisfaction test.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
You can't give birth to a baby in one month using 9 women.
If I had bothered to think I would have known this theoretically = being a physics and mecheng guy.
https://showcase.nano-banana.ai/ai-generated/fal_nano-banana...
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.
Certainly holds true for the Gen Z sense of the word.
By the way, it's got a Youtube channel now and it's as good as ever: https://www.youtube.com/@xkcd_whatif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z789aLNfXo
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.)
And, since the volume is more confined, it should have the benefit of slightly reducing the required kinetic cooking energy.