The Conversation (0)
Have you ever wondered whether it’s possible to cook something just by hitting it?
No, neither have we.
However, in 2019, a Reddit thread posed the question: "If kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy, how hard do I have to slap a chicken to cook it?"
And one man was inspired.
Two years later, YouTuber Louis Weisz decided to find out once and for all if heat generated from slapping a whole raw chicken thousands of times could render it edible.
Read more:
- Snow sweeps UK on Easter Monday as Twitter shares Christmas card scenes
- Five popular films that have aged very badly
- Chinese takeaway goes viral for savage responses to customers
- Fitness influencer spots man’s sinister behaviour in gym mirror – and TikTok is horrified
- Restaurant manager under fire for praising staff who called customers ‘two very annoying Asians’ on receipt
In a video titled I Cooked a Chicken by Slapping It, Weisz revealed that it took him two months to successfully carry out his culinary experiment.
Having created a special slapping device – featuring a wooden paddle attached to a motor-powered arm – he was forced back to square one when the contraption collapsed.
Back to the drawing board, he realised his design needed three core elements: “a faster slap rate; more impact control, and minimal heat loss from the chicken.”
He then made a stronger “oak core aluminium” arm which could hit the chicken at speed without reducing it to a messy pulp.
The slapper required a number of redesigns and fixes before it finally did the job
Eventually, it took a staggering 135,000 slaps over the course of eight hours to slap-roast the meat.
This amounted to a whopping 7,500 Watt Hours of energy – around two to three times the amount needed for your oven to carry out a similar job.
Weisz also cooked a steak using the same slapping method and, while he admitted the texture was “kind of bad” and tasted like “you’ve been chewing it for a minute already”, he added: “If you can get past that, it actually tastes pretty good.”
Weisz digging into his rare (in more ways than one) slapped steak
He didn’t, however, tuck into the chicken. Because, although it was cooked through by the slapper, a tear in the bag in which it was contained meant the meat was contaminated by fibreglass and aerogel during the process.
So, in sum, you can cook chicken – and steak – with slaps alone but… do you really want to?
Top 100
