Let’s assume the chicken has to reach a temperature of 205C (400F) for us to consider it cooked.
Remind me never to let this guy cook for me.
😭 chicken dry as a bone. I think they were conflating the oven temp with the desired internal temp (165 F is the safe minumum for poultry for the curious, so 400 F would be well done to say the least)
Dry as a bone would be an understatement, it would be charcoal in a puddle of fat at that temp
“It’s a single-celled protein combined with synthetic aminos, vitamins, and minerals. Everything the body needs.”
Tbf, he doesn’t account for the loss of heat at all, so it’s good that he’s taking a big margin.
Oh, in that case it only needs 9,213 slaps (delivered near-simultaneously) or a single slap at 1,490 mph.
Julia Child did some 400° cooking, for a science-oriented TV series called “The Ring of Truth”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ3mjb9BSaU&t=850s
Later in the episode, she got to cook a diamond to amorphous carbon. “I’ll remember that recipe – one carat diamond, two and a half hours, three thousand degrees”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ3mjb9BSaU&t=1458s
What I learned from this is never let a physics major cook you dinner, unless you want charcoal for chicken (200C !?!)
Luckily, it’s a linear relationship and they gave us the temp change per slap. So, if we assume the chicken has thawed in the fridge (40°F) and we want to reach 165°F for food safety, we only need
(165 - 40)°F * (5°C / 9°F) / (0.0089 °C / slap)
= 7803 slaps
Although, to be honest I think this would only work for a spherical chicken in a vacuum, as otherwise you’d be losing too much heat between slaps. And even in a vacuum, you’d lose some heat via radiation… So really, you should stick a temperature probe in there and just keep slapping until it reaches 165°F. Don’t even bother counting.
Sorry for the silly units, I only know food safety temperatures off the top of my head in °F.
But it only needs to reach 165°F, about 74°C.
Basically every food package says so.
Don’t forget, the chicken is frozen, so you also have to take into account the latent heat of fusion to melt the chicken before you can raise the temperature
This calculation also assumes that this is an inelastic collision where all the energy is absorbed into the chicken and not into your hand or into the air as sound or other kinetic energy.
Further the chicken is frozen solid, and, presumably, your hand is not. Of the two objects in this collision that could deform inelasticity and absorb the larger fraction of the energy, my money would be on the 0.4 kg slab of raw meat rather than the 1kg frozen billiard ball.
One must also consider the thermal conduction of the chicken. Slapping it, either once or multiple times, on a single area will impart energy to that area, raising the temperature there, but it will take time for that to disperse throughout the fowl. Thus will inevitably lead to the slapped area/areas being overcooked and the rest being dangerously undercooked. Losses to the environment must additionally be taken into account unless sufficient insulation is employed to mitigate this.
So would you say that a rotisserie slapping technique would optimal in this scenario?
Since we’re being pedantic, the feeezing point of unbrined chicken is -3 C. Most meats are not frozen at exactly 0 C since the water contained in the cells is far from pure.
But yeah, slapping will be a super lossy process and this analysis will be off by quite a bit.
