How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)

https://james-simon.github.io/blog/chicken-cooking/

by jxmorris12 • 10 months ago

190 109 10 months ago

james-simon.github.io

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI

kstrauser• 10 months ago

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

flowerthoughts2• 10 months ago

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

"We call them heaters in that one case."

nielsbot• 10 months ago

B1FF_PSUVM• 10 months 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 ...

flowerthoughts2• 9 months 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.

whycome2• 10 months 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.

thebruce87m• 10 months ago

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

olelele• 10 months ago

Wait. Orbital chicken coops w drop delivery..

bregma3• 10 months 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.

whycome2• 10 months ago

Nah. Those just cook on reentry ;)

robocat• 10 months ago

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/

oofbey• 10 months 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.

rendaw• 10 months 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...

codeflo• 10 months 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.

Ekaros• 10 months 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• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

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

fifticon• 10 months ago

points for'a perfectly spherical chicken'.

pansa2• 10 months 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.

adhamsalama• 10 months ago

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

xattt• 10 months 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.

userbinator2• 10 months ago

Assuming an infinitely malleable chicken...

This reminds me of the old blacksmithing trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I68Cik7ywg

p0w3n3d2• 10 months ago

one must be strong to hit 2kg hammer this fast

spookie• 9 months ago

It helps having a good anvil, as it bounces back most of the way

slowhadoken• 10 months ago

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

foofoo124• 10 months ago

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

actionfromafar• 10 months ago

Indeed. It would turn into McNuggets :-/

bregma3• 10 months ago

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

nomel2• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

So, shoot it at the plate instead.

5xpB7n8tdbtoP• 10 months ago

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

PokeyCat• 10 months ago

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

handfuloflight• 10 months ago

Sora, show me this.

dvh• 10 months ago

Are we assuming perfectly spherical chickens in vacuum?

majkinetor• 10 months ago

Yeah, lets go with that

https://showcase.nano-banana.ai/ai-generated/fal_nano-banana...

rossant• 10 months ago

It's not perfectly spherical though.

xg15• 10 months ago

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

alphan0n• 9 months ago

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

vulcan01• 9 months ago

Those are the first digits of π.

mrweasel• 10 months 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.

foofoo124• 10 months 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.

sphars• 10 months 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• 9 months 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).

andrewflnr• 10 months ago

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

AngryData2• 9 months 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.

neilwilson• 10 months ago

And the experimental evidence…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI

foofoo124• 10 months ago

Someone did build himself a chicken slapper to he could slap himself some chicken dinner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI

bobson381• 10 months 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

walthamstow2• 10 months 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• 10 months 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.

gus_massa• 10 months ago

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

burnished• 10 months ago

Incredible. Was not expecting an answer that felt reachable.

emmelaich• 10 months 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.

Nevermark• 10 months 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• 10 months ago

When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 9 months 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...

zakki• 10 months ago

is it cooked or vaporized?

hkt• 10 months ago

Conspicuously, this is from June 2020

nullzzz• 10 months ago

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

decimalenough• 10 months ago

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

childintime• 9 months ago

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

KadenWildauer• 10 months 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• 10 months 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 :-)

p0w3n3d2• 10 months ago

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

rkomorn4• 10 months ago

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

walthamstow2• 10 months ago

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

sph• 10 months ago

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

kylecazar• 10 months ago

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

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

arresin• 10 months ago

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

serial_dev• 10 months ago

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

HarHarVeryFunny2• 10 months 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.

mikkupikku• 10 months ago

Joe Barnard of BPS.Space cooked a piece of meat in the nosecone of a high power model rocket he built for this purpose.

trenchpilgrim• 10 months ago

XKCD did a piece on this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/

margalabargala• 10 months ago

An amateur rocket enthusiast did this on YouTube, also going at mach 3.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4

HarHarVeryFunny2• 10 months ago

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.

wpasc• 10 months 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?

dunham2• 10 months 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• 9 months 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

amelius• 10 months ago

Sounds more like a recipe for chicken soup ...

burnt-resistor• 10 months 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.)

aubanel• 10 months 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• 9 months 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• 9 months ago

Yes! thanks for the memory haha.

knowitnone3• 9 months 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.

xivzgrev• 9 months ago

That chicken would be obliterated long before cooking

TheOtherHobbes• 9 months ago

"Assume a spherical chicken..."

anigbrowl• 9 months ago

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

DonHopkins• 9 months ago

It takes a tough man to hit a tender chicken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z789aLNfXo

cadamsdotcom• 9 months ago

Cannot believe they did all the math..

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

How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)

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