Baking bread with a hot car | Hacker News Reader

Baking bread with a hot car

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34 pointsjsnell10 comments

Robi

Always got a kick out of the book ‘Manifold Destiny”, I have the original edition. Never did any of the recipes, but seems like it would be fun.

Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1662735.Manifold_Destiny

Used to do this when we were driving up and down the AlCan. Not while we were driving so much but an 80s Suburban has plenty of thermal mass to cook a loaf of garlic bread once you've parked at the campground.

Mythbusters and Alton Brown teamed up in 2012 to try cooking a thanksgiving dinner with a car:

https://youtu.be/tqABijWMlxA

Alton Brown was recently asked about this and replied simply: "inedible", but Adam Savage also recently discussed it and said it was cold by the time they got to it, due to "the vagaries of television" but quite edible:

https://youtu.be/Dd5pb_mzk14

In the same spirit there was a Japanese guy (found it [0]) who tried to cook roast beef in a car in Japan, as a warning to people leaving their kids/pet in the car under hot summer conditions. (which unfortunately happens every summer, with tragic outcomes)

[0] https://youtu.be/G7OE3H4L5f0

I spent a summer in Texas interning at a bank and baked chocolate chip cookies on my dash one day. Tan car with heavily tinted windows, so far from optimal from a heating perspective, but it still got up to 180F in the back seat.

The cookies baked decently but it wasn't hot enough to brown them properly so the flavor was a bit lacking.

An impressive project, even if failed. What’s even more impressive is that he managed to decode the Los Angeles parking signs accurately enough to park 24 hours without getting a ticket.

tl;dr - there is a kind of bread that is traditionally baked in geothermally active areas by leaving it in a hot hole. This guy tried to make the same bread by leaving it in his hot car, but it didn't work so he finished it in a normal oven.

A fun experiment to be sure, but not particularly interesting results. Whether or not it's worth reading the entire thread probably depends on how interested you are in repeated updates about how much some dough has risen.

There is a group of American Private pilots who go on regular trips in their aircrafts and cook lunch in their aircraft engine bays.

Sorry could not find a link..

Not going to work when the northern hemisphere sunlight is blocked by 70%.

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