A Novel Means Of Cooking A Steak
on January 16, 2013 at 9:27 amNot a very effective one, though:
To break the sound barrier, you’ll need to drop the steak from about 50 kilometers. But this isn’t enough to cook it.
We need to go higher.
If dropped from 70 kilometers, the steak will go fast enough to be briefly blasted by 350°F air. Unfortunately, this blast of thin, wispy air barely lasts a minute—and anyone with some basic kitchen experience can tell you that a steak placed in the oven at 350 for 60 seconds isn’t going to be cooked.
From 100 kilometers—the formally defined edge of space—the picture’s not much better. The steak spends a minute and a half over Mach 2, and the outer surface will likely be singed, but the heat is too quickly replaced by the icy stratospheric blast for it to actually be cooked.
I think I’ll stick to my IR grill. Though it might be fun to apply for a NASA grant as a suborbital research payload.
I think I’ll stick to my IR grill.
I’d suggest switching to something like mesquite, but since California classifies wood-burning fires as a crime against the state…
All the cool kids use liquid oxygen, combined with the fuel of one’s choice.
That’s just to start the grill. I think the cool kids pre-cook the steak by keeping it in a pure nitrogen (purists might use helium) atmosphere at 330 K for a few hours (depending on the thickness of the steak), then drop it through a hydrogen/oxygen flame to put a nice sear on the outside. Extra cool points for using a converted rocket engine for a flame source.
Hmm a medium rare steak that has been chilled actually tastes pretty good.
Summer sidewalks in Phoenix. Don’t leave it there too long.
Randall is being a bit optimistic about “pilots have ejected at supersonic speeds”; there have been a few, but in general, it’s seen as a more painful death than just riding the airplane to the ground.