189 pointsby jxmorris123 days ago41 comments
  • Nevermark2 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

    • schwartzworld2 days ago
      When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?
      • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF2 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...

        • BriggyDwiggs422 days ago
          Yeah that’s fucked up.
          • userbinatora day ago
            That tells me the police have nothing better to do.
          • notaurus2 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

            • AngryDataa 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.

  • Ekaros2 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?

    • hakken3062 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.

      • petters2 days ago
        "a little bigger": it would weigh 65 kg.
        • bregma2 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.
          • dunham2 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.

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      • fifticon2 days ago
        points for'a perfectly spherical chicken'.
      • pansa22 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.

        • CitrusFruits2 days ago
          165F is the safe eating temperature recommended for most meats here in the U.S.
    • xattt2 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.
    • adhamsalama2 days ago
      Someone made a Youtube video about this. He created a machine to slap the chicken and measured its heat.
  • KadenWildauer2 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
    • gcanyon2 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 :-)
  • wpasc2 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?
    • dunham2 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.

      • thatguy09002 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
  • oofbey2 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.
    • codeflo2 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.
    • rendaw2 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...
  • userbinator2 days ago
    Assuming an infinitely malleable chicken...

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

    • p0w3n3d2 days ago
      one must be strong to hit 2kg hammer this fast
      • spookiea day ago
        It helps having a good anvil, as it bounces back most of the way
  • mrweasel2 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.
    • foofoo122 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.
    • AngryDataa 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.

    • andrewflnr2 days ago
      In all seriousness: handlebar muffs. They're a game changer.
    • sphars2 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/

      • mrexroad2 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).

  • cadamsdotcom2 days ago
    Cannot believe they did all the math..

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

  • kstrauser2 days ago
    This is exactly why I like hanging out with math & physics types. It has big "assuming a spherical, frictionless horse" energy.
  • aubanel2 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

    • klipt2 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
      • viksit2 days ago
        Yes! thanks for the memory haha.
  • whycome2 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.

    • bregma2 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.
      • whycome2 days ago
        Nah. Those just cook on reentry ;)
    • robocat2 days 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/

    • thebruce87m2 days ago
      Could aim it at the space station. Would be nice to receive a fresh cooked chicken in orbit I imagine.
      • olelele2 days ago
        Wait. Orbital chicken coops w drop delivery..
  • HarHarVeryFunny2 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-resistor2 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.)

  • foofoo122 days ago
    Someone did build himself a chicken slapper to he could slap himself some chicken dinner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
  • flowerthoughts2 days ago
    "Mom, where are the hitters in the oven?"

    "We call them heaters in that one case."

    • B1FF_PSUVM2 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 ...

      • flowerthoughts2 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.

  • xg152 days ago
    OT, but the site of that author looks very interesting in general: https://james-simon.github.io
    • alphan0n2 days ago
      Interestingly, the author includes their social security number with their contact info at the bottom of the page.
      • vulcan012 days ago
        Those are the first digits of π.
  • neilwilson2 days ago
    And the experimental evidence…

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

  • kylecazar2 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-l2 days ago
      Because if something “slaps” then it’s “cooked”? I thought slaps was good.
      • serial_dev2 days ago
        I guess the “slap” in regular English, “cooked” in Gen Z English.
        • jaakla day ago
          And “chicken” in which one?
  • bobson3812 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
    • gus_massa2 days 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
    • walthamstow2 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"
      • mgilroy2 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.

  • burnished2 days ago
    Incredible. Was not expecting an answer that felt reachable.
    • emmelaich2 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.

  • 5xpB7n8tdbtoP2 days ago
    Does anyone know why does the footer of the page have a “ssn”?
    • PokeyCat2 days ago
      It's just the digits of pi, likely not their real SSN.
  • amelius2 days ago
    Sounds more like a recipe for chicken soup ...
  • dvh2 days ago
    Are we assuming perfectly spherical chickens in vacuum?
  • p0w3n3d2 days ago
    I raise the bar higher - how hard and how long do you need to hit the chicken to make it sous vide
    • rkomorn2 days ago
      Sometimes I wish the anglophone cooking world hadn't forgotten that "sous-vide" actually refers to the vacuum sealing.
      • walthamstow2 days ago
        Thank you, francophone, I will now be that one annoying guy who uses it correctly in English
        • rkomorn2 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.

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  • anigbrowl2 days ago
    Ahab had his whale, and James Simon apparently has his chicken.
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  • xivzgrev2 days ago
    That chicken would be obliterated long before cooking
  • slowhadoken2 days ago
    You don’t have to hit a chicken hard to cook it you just shoot it at a wall.
    • nomel2 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.

      • cwillu2 days ago
        So, shoot it at the plate instead.
        • rkomorn2 days ago
          I don't know what plates you're using but I'm pretty mine would shatter upon chicken impact.
        • nomel2 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!
    • foofoo122 days ago
      I think it would negatively affect the visual appearance and texture of said chicken.
      • bregma2 days ago
        Purely a matter of personal taste. Chicken pate on toast is popular in many regions.
        • foofoo122 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.
      • actionfromafar2 days ago
        Indeed. It would turn into McNuggets :-/
        • rkomorn2 days ago
          But McNuggets are delicious. And the only non-self-made nuggets worth eating...
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  • hkt2 days ago
    Conspicuously, this is from June 2020
  • sph2 days 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

  • DonHopkins2 days ago
    It takes a tough man to hit a tender chicken.

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

  • knowitnone32 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.
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  • zakki2 days ago
    is it cooked or vaporized?
  • handfuloflight2 days ago
    Sora, show me this.
  • nullzzz2 days ago
    This is really disgusting. Chickens are feeling animals as well.
    • decimalenough2 days ago
      To better control environmental variables, you'll probably want to kill the chicken before you start whacking it with baseball bats.
    • childintime2 days ago
      How hard do you have to hit a human, to cook it, the chicken asks?
  • TheOtherHobbes2 days ago
    "Assume a spherical chicken..."
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