Hey guys! Welcome back, thanks for joining us today on The King Of Random.
There are a lot of ways to cook things, and today we're going to try one of the least conventional ones.
We're going to run a high electric current directly through our food, to see how it reacts. The general setup is pretty simple:
We'll have electricity attached to two different nails, and our food spiked onto the top of it, connecting the bridge.
When we turn on the electricity we'll see what happens to the food. I do want to be doing this with food that is somewhat
conductive or nothing's gonna happen when we plug in the electricity, so the two foods
I'm gonna try this with are hot dogs and pickles, both have high water and sodium content,
so they should conduct electricity fairly well. Alright here we go,
I'll drive the nails through this board to hold them steady as we run the electricity through them. First
let's cut off a small piece. That's easier to manage.
With our board cut we want to drive the two nails through, pointing straight up.
Far enough apart that they have some space between them,
but not so far that we can't fit a hot dog on them. I could just drive the nail in using hammer,
but it doesn't actually need to be in all that tight, since it's not holding any two pieces of wood together,
so I'm just gonna pre-drill it with a drill bit that's slightly smaller than the width of the nail.
With the holes drilled, now
let's press the nail all the way through the board so that the head of the nail is flush with the bottom.
With the nails driven through the board, we need to add a source of electricity.
I have here a cord that I cut off of an old broken fan.
I'm going to split the wire in half and then strip off about the top two inches of each side of the wire.
Now let's take these wires and wrap each one around the base of one of the nails.
And there we have it. Now our electric cooking device is ready to be used. All we have to do is impale our food onto
it and then plug it in.
Let's start trying to cook a hot dog.
Now the outlet I'm using actually does have a switch installed, so no electricity is going to start flowing into the outlet until I turn
It on. This is a good safety measure in case something goes wrong.
You can just hit the switch without having to pull the plug out from the wall. All right safety glasses on
and I'm gonna flip the switch.
I can smell it. I don't know if I could smell it before,
maybe and I'm just close to it or if it started cooking and doing something.
Ooh, I can hear it, it's making fizzling noises and it's sort of bubbling up down here at the bottom.
I think it might be boiling. Some of the water inside the hot dog, possibly burning it as well.
Mmm. That's smelling great, and I'm gonna turn it off and see what's happened so far.
Well, I've got a nice charred
Spot on one side of my hot dog, the other side doesn't seem very affected, and I thought more of it would get warm.
I've been told that doing this setup
you can actually cook the hot dog all the way through and it will often get so hot that
it will split open from the heat. Kind of like if you microwave it.
But I'm not really getting any of that result it's not cooking,
all the way through. It's not really getting hot. It's just sort of heating up the one spot
that's actually in contact with the nail and a little bit of heat is radiating out from that,
But it doesn't seem to be running much current through the hot dog. Well cooking a hot dog didn't work all that well,
but I do have another experiment
that I want to try and that is to see what happens if we impale a pickle on our nails and run electricity through it.
I've heard there can be some interesting results so let's test it out. All right, we need a pickle that is long enough
to reach between the spikes pretty well. It'll work.
All right, electricity is off, stab my pickle on to the nails.
All right, our pickle is spiked. We've got wires running to it. Let's turn on the electricity and see what happens to our pickle.
Oh, It's dripping pickle juice is down again.
Oh!
That is, an electric arc burning its way through the pickle. Look how much that's lighting up all around that nail.
Alright, you know what? I'm gonna turn the electricity off for a second.
I want to try turning off the lights and seeing what that looks like with a little more darkness around here.
Now we've got a new pickle,
we've dimmed the lights quite a bit,
so we're gonna put this one on, turn on the electricity and see how much that sparking shows up.
Ooh!
Oh on both sides, that's exciting.
A glowing pickle.
It's glowing! That is one electric pickle.
Let me try and pin the other side the other side first.
And touch the other side.
See if I can switch which side- Yeah. Now, that's the side, that's sparking.
Just to see if it makes any difference
I'm gonna try drilling a new hole and moving one of the nails closer so that we only have about an inch and a half
in between the two to see what happens.
There's a shorter pickle for this.
All right, Electricity on. Three, two, one.
[sparking]
We got glowing again.
There is little bit of ozone smell too. That's interesting.
The nail has hollowed out, just burned it's way through
the trough in the pickle. That's exciting!
Well there you have it, cooking directly with electricity. I'm gonna say that this does not actually work very well,
We got some good glow out of the pickles,
and I was pretty amused how much it would carve a path through the pickle, wherever it was in contact with the nail.
I've got some ideas of how we could amp this project up to the next level,
including hooking it up to a microwave transformer, that same setup has made metal glowing red hot, or even liquefying,
very quickly. So I'm curious,
what would happen if you ran that much power through a hot dog or a pickle. It might just explode,
which would be pretty great. Overall if you want to try this, it's a fun experiment,
you can cook little bits of a hot dog at a time,
you can get the pickles glowing, it looks pretty cool, but there's not a lot of practical applications to it.
This been a fun project, thanks for joining us today, and we'll see you in the next one. Talk to you then.
ARGHHH!
Overall, I would say that on the scale of how to cook hot dogs, this is probably near the bottom,
I'd say. Goes cooking on a campfire,
then on a BBQ, then on a skillet, on the stove and then
boiling it. And then somewhere down near the floor,
would be impaling your hot dog on nails and plugging those nails into the wall, It's just a terrible way to cook a hot dog.
Hey guys, if you are on Twitter come follow me on twitter at The King Of Random,
It's a great place to connect with me, one on one.
That's all I'm gonna say about that because if you want to you will, and if you don't, you won't. So I will see you
there. Or maybe I won't.
[Subtitled by LBSi UK]