[HN Gopher] How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2...
___________________________________________________________________
How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)
Author : jxmorris12
Score : 172 points
Date : 2025-10-11 02:06 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (james-simon.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (james-simon.github.io)
| refactor_master wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
| kstrauser wrote:
| This is exactly why I like hanging out with math & physics types.
| It has big "assuming a spherical, frictionless horse" energy.
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| "Mom, where are the hitters in the oven?"
|
| "We call them heaters in that one case."
| nielsbot wrote:
| See also: https://www.sportslingo.com/sports-glossary/h/heater
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > 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 ...
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Could aim it at the space station. Would be nice to receive a
| fresh cooked chicken in orbit I imagine.
| olelele wrote:
| Wait. Orbital chicken coops w drop delivery..
| bregma wrote:
| 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.
| whycome wrote:
| Nah. Those just cook on reentry ;)
| robocat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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=165degC (438
| K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=2090 W.
|
| with the correct temperature: A blackbody with T=74degC (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=20degC (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 50degC it's around 200W.
| petters wrote:
| "a little bigger": it would weigh 65 kg.
| bregma wrote:
| 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.
| dunham wrote:
| Or birds all the way down:
|
| > In his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomist Grimod
| de La Reyniere presents his roti 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 roti sans pareil was
| not entirely novel.
| fifticon wrote:
| points for'a perfectly spherical chicken'.
| lelandfe wrote:
| For the uninitiated
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
| willis936 wrote:
| My personal favorite.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3j96p
| 1/a...
| ptero wrote:
| And later put it in an interstellar space, no less!
| nandomrumber wrote:
| How many interstellar spaces are there?
| pansa2 wrote:
| > _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.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| 165F is the safe eating temperature recommended for most
| meats here in the U.S.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Someone made a Youtube video about this. He created a machine
| to slap the chicken and measured its heat.
| xattt wrote:
| 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| Assuming an infinitely malleable chicken...
|
| This reminds me of the old blacksmithing trick:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I68Cik7ywg
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| one must be strong to hit 2kg hammer this fast
| slowhadoken wrote:
| You don't have to hit a chicken hard to cook it you just shoot it
| at a wall.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| I think it would negatively affect the visual appearance and
| texture of said chicken.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Indeed. It would turn into McNuggets :-/
| rkomorn wrote:
| But McNuggets are delicious. And the only non-self-made
| nuggets worth eating...
| bregma wrote:
| Purely a matter of personal taste. Chicken pate on toast is
| popular in many regions.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| Ladies and gents, please help yourself to breakfast. Bread
| is by the toaster, butter and jam is on the table. The
| chicken pate will be on the large wall once the chef
| finishes loading up the howitzer.
| nomel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So, shoot it at the plate instead.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I don't know what plates you're using but I'm pretty mine
| would shatter upon chicken impact.
| nomel wrote:
| 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!
| 5xpB7n8tdbtoP wrote:
| Does anyone know why does the footer of the page have a "ssn"?
| PokeyCat wrote:
| It's just the digits of pi, likely not their real SSN.
| handfuloflight wrote:
| Sora, show me this.
| dvh wrote:
| Are we assuming perfectly spherical chickens in vacuum?
| majkinetor wrote:
| Yeah, lets go with that
|
| https://showcase.nano-banana.ai/ai-generated/fal_nano-banana...
| rossant wrote:
| It's not perfectly spherical though.
| xg15 wrote:
| OT, but the site of that author looks very interesting in
| general: https://james-simon.github.io
| alphan0n wrote:
| Interestingly, the author includes their social security number
| with their contact info at the bottom of the page.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Those are the first digits of p.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| foofoo12 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| andrewflnr wrote:
| In all seriousness: handlebar muffs. They're a game changer.
| neilwilson wrote:
| And the experimental evidence...
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
| foofoo12 wrote:
| Someone did build himself a chicken slapper to he could slap
| himself some chicken dinner:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
| bobson381 wrote:
| 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
| 300deg, we can just bake it for 6 minutes at 3,000deg. It's such
| a fun concept and always makes me giggle
| walthamstow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's somewhat used for milk pasteurization. You can heat it to
| 61degC (145degF) for 30 minutes or to 72degC (162degF) for 15
| seconds (yes, 0.25 minutes). More info
| https://www.idfa.org/pasteurization and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
| burnished wrote:
| Incredible. Was not expecting an answer that felt reachable.
| emmelaich wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > 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...
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Yeah that's fucked up.
| zakki wrote:
| is it cooked or vaporized?
| hkt wrote:
| Conspicuously, this is from June 2020
| nullzzz wrote:
| This is really disgusting. Chickens are feeling animals as well.
| decimalenough wrote:
| To better control environmental variables, you'll probably want
| to kill the chicken before you start whacking it with baseball
| bats.
| childintime wrote:
| How hard do you have to hit a human, to cook it, the chicken
| asks?
| KadenWildauer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I raise the bar higher - how hard and how long do you need to hit
| the chicken to make it _sous vide_
| rkomorn wrote:
| Sometimes I wish the anglophone cooking world hadn't forgotten
| that "sous-vide" actually refers to the vacuum sealing.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Thank you, francophone, I will now be that one annoying guy
| who uses it correctly in English
| rkomorn wrote:
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "if you slap a chicken at 3726 mph, it will be cooked."
|
| Certainly holds true for the Gen Z sense of the word.
| bn-l wrote:
| Because if something "slaps" then it's "cooked"? I thought
| slaps was good.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I guess the "slap" in regular English, "cooked" in Gen Z
| English.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| XKCD did a piece on this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/
| margalabargala wrote:
| An amateur rocket enthusiast did this on YouTube, also going at
| mach 3.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| dunham wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sounds more like a recipe for chicken soup ...
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes! thanks for the memory haha.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That chicken would be obliterated long before cooking
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| "Assume a spherical chicken..."
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Ahab had his whale, and James Simon apparently has his chicken.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-11 23:01 UTC)