His number are off due to the idea that chicken is cooked at 400F. Yikes!
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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Hi there and welcome back to another episode of Bitch Slap Kitchen, where we cook food like it owes us money. Today we're making some delicious backhand chicken.
Suspend a whole chicken in midair form some string or something, haul back, and swing at about mach 5, a little less. You're probably not going to have any intact glass anywhere in your house and you'll probably set off some car alarms in the shopping district but you'll have a table ready main course in milliseconds.
A guy on YT actually tried it experimentally a few years ago (how many slaps, not how fast one slap); and it works to some degree! The main problem becomes to make a slapping machine that can survive long enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI&pp=ygURc2xhcCBjb29rIGNoaWNrZW7SBwkJzgkBhyohjO8%3D
He also did a turkey a couple years after that for "slapsgiving"
Typical physicist, ignoring enthalpy of phase changes. Starting from 1C defrosted makes a huge difference from 0C as the melting takes up a ton more energy/slaps. Their underslapped chicken would give you salmonella
Also completely neglecting that not all the energy in a slap will be transferred to thermal energy in the chicken.
Assume a spherical chicken...
tbf modern commercial chickens are basically spherical, the poor bastards
They haven't considered rate of slap. Significant heat transfer to environment even at 10 slaps per second.
They're also assuming sea level standard atmospheric conditions. You may need to reduce rate of slap at altitude.
Also only about half the heat goes into the chicken and the other half into the hand used for slapping
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And the phase change from uncooked to cooked.
Where do I find cooked in the phase diagram?
🤔
Bro really wanted his chicken well done at 400°F
Naw, that’s burnt.
Maillard reaction where things brown starts at 350f.
More than 165/175 in the center and that’s dried out.
The mallard reaction is only relevant when cooking duck.
If you spatchcock your bird then you’ve only gotta slap your cock to about 150°F at the thickest part of breast
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Gotta love how everyone forgot about Newton in all this. Enjoy your instantly well-cooked hand, which is also made of meat.
Double the food. Sweet!
recycling!
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Lord have mercy on folks cooking their chicken to 400 F. Those birds will come out as dry as the sands of the Sahara.
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The chicken has to exceed the boiling point of water for it to be cooked? Unless we’re making chicken caramels, I don’t think so.
Doing some math, I think it works out to 6,242 slaps or a single slap at 1,939 mph. Much more attainable.
That 205C would just be the surface temperature of the chicken, not the average. Note that the calculation doesn't take into account the volume or radius
EDIT: No, I'm wrong. The calculation is for boiling the whole chicken. Who was this written by, a Brit?
Who was this written by, a Brit?
Nope. Likely an American.
When cooking, people in general like to use round numbers, like "200°C", since a difference of 5°C in oven temperature is not a big deal.
And yet they went with some oddly specific 205°C. That only makes sense if they're used to Fahrenheit, eyeballed a round value (like 400°F), converted it into Celsius (204.4°C), and then rounded it up to discard the decimal.
I'm also going to say they're completely clueless when it comes to cooking - 200°C is the oven temperature. The chicken itself reaches a far lower temperature, in the 70~80°C range. By the time the chicken reached 200°C, it's already dry and close to catching fire. (The self-ignition temperature for biological stuff is typically between 200°C and 250°C.)
Are you sure? The numbers in the ~~tweet~~ reddit post talk about total mass and heat capacity. So I think that means the entire bulk has that average temperature.
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As your friendly neighborhood person with knowledge about food and cooking, 2 pounds is an absurd weight for an uncooked rotisserie chicken, that is a very small and cooked weight, 4-6 pounds is going to be typical. Also, more importantly, you cannot cook something faster by increasing the temperature past a pretty quick point, meat is an excellent insulator. No slap can cook the inside of a frozen chicken unless the entire chicken disintegrates.
Tbf though, a slap at 3700 mph would absolutely disintegrate the chicken.
Also, if you cooked it to 400 degrees it would be disgusting. You just need to cook it to 165. This guy might know about physics but he has never cooked anything before.
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But how do you get the chicken back from the stratosphere once you've slapped it that fast?
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Yeah yeah we get it, Newton will fry your hand and pls don't cook a chicken to 205°C core temp.
BUT! What kinda physics major forgets Newton AND the fact that you won't convert kinetic energy into heat with 100% efficiency?
I know, three math majors in a trench coat, that's who'll forget it.
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At this point we have to consider the ambient temperature as well, as the chicken will slightly cool between two slaps once it exceeds it
Assume the chicken is spherical an in vacuum.
I think we should put more consideration into the fact that slapping the chicken this much will dissipate a lot of energy into deforming the chicken.
In general, chicken needs to be heated to 74C or 165F for a few seconds to kill off dangerous pathogens.
Here is a list of other times and temperatures for chicken to be considered safe
Also at room temperature, the average speed of atoms in the material is at 400 m/s, at least for a gas. That might give you a hint.
Fucking nerds in the comments^l^ ^love^ ^it^
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