Raw Bacon, Fresh Cucumbers And Safety Goggles
.jpg)
When we think about food safety, we tend to think about hand washing, wearing gloves, refrigeration and thorough cooking. Although these are important, safety goggles are rarely mentioned – until now.
When using fresh prosciutto or produce to slice through a frozen roast or tough steak, eye protection is a must.
Most of us, of course, like to eat food. In a recent article, published in Popular Science, Theodor Gray talks at length about other essential uses. I found his article, Bacon: The Other White Heat, a bit too interesting not to share:
I recently committed myself to the goal (Gray explains), before the weekend was out, of creating a device entirely from bacon and using it to cut a steel pan in half. My initial attempts were failures, but I knew success was within reach when I was able to ignite and melt the pan using seven beef sticks and a cucumber.
No, seriously. The device I built was a form of thermal lance. A thermal lance, typically made of iron instead of bacon, is used to cut up scrap metal and rescue people from collapsed buildings. It works by blowing pure oxygen gas through a pipe packed with iron and magnesium rods. These metals are surprisingly flammable in pure oxygen, releasing a huge amount of heat as they are consumed. The result is a jet of superheated iron plasma coming out of the end of the pipe. For sheer destructive force, few tools match a thermal lance. But iron isn’t the only thing that’s flammable in a stream of pure oxygen.
Bacon is fattening because it contains a lot of chemical energy tied up in its proteins, and especially in its fat. You can release that energy either by digesting it or by burning it with a healthy supply of oxygen. The challenge isn’t creating the heat; it’s engineering a bacon structure strong enough to withstand the stress of a 5,000°F bacon plasma flame.
I used prosciutto (Italian for “expensive bacon”) because it is a superior engineering grade of meat. I wrapped slices of it into thin tubes and baked them overnight in a warm oven to drive off all the water. Then I bundled seven of those together, wrapped them in additional slices, and baked the bundle again until it was hard and dry.
From Table To Torch
To make an airtight, less-flammable outer casing, I wrapped this fuel core with uncooked prosciutto before attaching one end of it to an oxygen hose. You can’t imagine the feeling of triumph when I first saw the telltale signs of burning iron: sparks bursting from the metal, and then a rush of flame out of the other side as I witnessed perhaps the first-ever example of bacon-cut steel. And the lance kept on burning for about a minute.
It turns out there are much easier ways to do this. For example, while researching how to build a vegetarian lance, I hit on the perfect pipe material – hollowed-out cucumbers. The pressure-containment capacity of a standard cucumber is remarkable, and the smooth skin makes it easy to create an airtight seal with the pipe delivering oxygen to the device. A cucumber packed with beef sticks will burn for almost two minutes, and a completely vegetarian version stuffed with breadsticks, though not quite as long-lasting, still produces a very impressive flame.
The lesson here is that food is a source of serious amounts of energy. Pure oxygen helps release it in a much shorter time than usual, but it’s really the chemical energy in the bacon that makes the steel pan burn. Whether it’s worth building a bacon lance to demonstrate this – well, only you can be the judge of that. –THEODORE GRAY
Oh, and one final thought. Because the author is trained in lab safety, please do not try this at home. If you insist, we beg you, at the very least, to use safety goggles...
