😭 chicken dry as a bone. I think they were conflating the oven temp with the desired internal temp (165 F is the safe minumum for poultry for the curious, so 400 F would be well done to say the least)
0 C wouldn't quite be frozen solid for chicken since it's not pure water. According to a quick search, chicken (unbrined) freezes at -3 C. So technically it is defrosted, but it should start out closer to 10 C for good results.
Luckily, it's a linear relationship and they gave us the temp change per slap. So, if we assume the chicken has thawed in the fridge (40°F) and we want to reach 165°F for food safety, we only need
Although, to be honest I think this would only work for a spherical chicken in a vacuum, as otherwise you'd be losing too much heat between slaps. And even in a vacuum, you'd lose some heat via radiation... So really, you should stick a temperature probe in there and just keep slapping until it reaches 165°F. Don't even bother counting.
Sorry for the silly units, I only know food safety temperatures off the top of my head in °F.
Don’t forget, the chicken is frozen, so you also have to take into account the latent heat of fusion to melt the chicken before you can raise the temperature
This calculation also assumes that this is an inelastic collision where all the energy is absorbed into the chicken and not into your hand or into the air as sound or other kinetic energy.
Further the chicken is frozen solid, and, presumably, your hand is not. Of the two objects in this collision that could deform inelasticity and absorb the larger fraction of the energy, my money would be on the 0.4 kg slab of raw meat rather than the 1kg frozen billiard ball.
One must also consider the thermal conduction of the chicken. Slapping it, either once or multiple times, on a single area will impart energy to that area, raising the temperature there, but it will take time for that to disperse throughout the fowl. Thus will inevitably lead to the slapped area/areas being overcooked and the rest being dangerously undercooked.
Losses to the environment must additionally be taken into account unless sufficient insulation is employed to mitigate this.
Since we're being pedantic, the feeezing point of unbrined chicken is -3 C. Most meats are not frozen at exactly 0 C since the water contained in the cells is far from pure.
But yeah, slapping will be a super lossy process and this analysis will be off by quite a bit.
It's expected there will be some heat loss over time in any scenario, I'm just explaining that the exact numbers to reach 200C chicken (way overcooked) in this very specific example only work if it happens near instantly.
You can still cook it over time, easily, just with different numbers than this example.
One thing to note, actually cooking something requires an application of heat over time. Instantaneous heat transfer will not cook, it will usually just burn.
Some people say you can use a nuke to cook a pizza if you put it in the right spot, but the same problem would apply.
Related, some guy did actually slap a chicken into being cooked. It was predictably disgusting:
Fun fact, 165F is often parroted for cooking chicken, but I urge everyone to go lower. 155-160F results in much juicier chicken. 165F corresponds to instantaneously killing all bacteria. 155F is about 60s, and 160F is 15s.
This isn't going to be accurate, it's ignoring a key aspect of the heat that will be generated, friction. When designing materials for prosthetics we have to be aware of how much friction occurs between the material and skin. If the amount of friction is too great, the material can create enough heat to damage tissue.
The formula for the skin friction coefficient is cf=τw12ρeue2, where ρe and ue are the density and longitudinal velocity at the boundary layer's edge.
It's also ignoring your hand would also heat up, ignoring the energy converted to sound, ignoring the heat loss to the environment, ignoring both your hand and the chicken would disintegrate if you hit it that hard, therefore transferring most kinetic energy without converting it, ignoring the enthalpy of fusion (they said it's frozen)...
I read once that the Mongolian warriors would place raw meat under their saddles and after riding all day would then consume it. Now I'm thinking that's not so far fetched.