Energy can take different forms and be converted from one form to another via certain mechanisms, as Antoine Lavoisier’s famous adage reminds us. It is therefore quite natural that Youtuber Louis Weisz (an engineer specializing in the implementation of experimental protocols intended to test various phenomena) wondered if the conversion of kinetic energy into thermal energy made it possible to cook a chicken. In other words, can hitting a chicken fast enough and long enough replace a frying pan or an oven?
Have you ever wondered if you could cook a chicken just from the heat generated by slapping it? That’s the question YouTuber Louis Weisz asked himself, and the verdict is: yes, it is possible. As can be seen in the video, the effort took a lot of work — two months in total — from setting up the testing protocol to building a lightning-fast (and customizable) chicken slapper to make cook the animal.
At the end of the experiment, Weisz gets a cooked chicken. The two key parameters were maintaining slapping speed and striking force to heat the meat without disintegrating it, and limiting heat loss — and as the video shows, both conditions were met. The physics supporting the phenomenon is relatively simple.
It’s possible that a Reddit post from 2019 was the inspiration for the video, as it originally posed the question of whether converted kinetic energy (movement) into thermal energy (heat) could cook a chicken.
Slapping Fast and Long Enough: The Key to Cooking
Among those who answered this initial question was a physics student who suggested that a single slap would be enough; if this slap had a speed of 1666 meters per second or 6000 km/h. Possible then, but not exactly viable — and other solutions have come to the same conclusion. It was only with a lot of mechanical help and a specially configured support structure that Louis Weisz was able to cook his chicken.
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Using a board of Modernist Kitchen, Weisz figured that keeping the chicken at around 55-60 degrees Celsius, for at least an hour, would be enough to cook it; or at least kill the same amount of bacteria as cooking at a higher temperature for a shorter time.
After several failed attempts — mostly on the mechanical side — Weisz finally succeeded. In the final calculations, it takes a minimum of 135,000 slaps over no less than 8 hours to cook a chicken, using around 7500 watt hours of energy (twice or three times what your oven would need for the same job) . Weisz was even able to cook a steak using the same method.
