Food Theory: I Cooked A Steak In A DRYER... And It WORKED!

we've got pizza on the door we've got popcorn we've got egg taped to the back we've got wet laundry steak shrimp ladies and gentlemen into the dryer it goes timer 60 minutes on the clock ready set cook and now we wait for the most brilliant experiment that youtube has ever seen hello internet welcome to food theory where today it's laundry day we're hoping for a clean experiment but as usual we'll probably find ourselves all washed up have you ever found yourself wishing for more efficiency in your day-to-day life well i thought hey dryers are full of hot air ovens are full of hot air could you potentially cook while also doing the laundry we're throwing steaks into a dryer because this is one of those days that they're like hey matt pat choo's the topic and this is the topic i chose it's a bread gloves day everyone it's it's a bread gloves day so i've got my laundry basket here equipped with all the essentials got your new valkyrie merch that just arrived in the mail but then also i've got my raw steak i'm gonna open this dryer flopping mistake my hoodie is nice and toasty and my steak is ready to consume efficiency ready three two one [Music] yeah okay before we get into the actual experiment i think that there's a few things here that i've left unexplained why are we here why are we outside why does our dryer look like it was teleported straight out of the 1980s so let's rewind to the beginning of our story shall we the idea for today's episode actually came out of a random thought i had while doing laundry a couple weeks ago if you've ever watched our channels before you know that i'm all about optimization how to make things faster more efficient more effective so this random idea of cooking while doing the laundry seemed like a funny stunt that we could try for an episode and in principle the science of dryer cooking makes a lot of sense you see there are three main ways to transfer heat conduction radiation and convection conduction happens when two objects touch each other think about a steak hitting a hot grill or when a hot slice of pizza touches the roof of your mouth radiation is when heat transfers via electromagnetic waves when you're laying out the sun and getting all nice and toasty you're being warmed by the sun's electromagnetic waves this is heating by radiation and while we can't see it the heating element in your oven emits invisible infrared radiation to help cook your food but the one that matters to us today is convection where heat gets transferred through the warm movements of air what we're talking about is the principle behind convection ovens where air is being heated up using coils at the bottom of the oven which then causes that hot air to rise the cooler air then goes back down to the bottom of the oven where it's heated back up and you generate a nice convection cycle fun fact that's actually why they always tell you to place the food on the bottom rack of a convection oven it's because the air down there is always going to be the hottest another fun fact pretty much every oven qualifies as a convection oven to some extent whether or not they're explicitly marketed that way it's just what happens when you have a device that's built to heat things up the main difference with actual convection ovens tends to be that they have fans circulating the air faster but when you look at it from that standpoint a dryer is basically a convection oven for your clothes air is being heated up and circulated through the chamber via the turning of the drum you also have fans pumping the air out through vents in the back oh those vents are actually the reason we're outside with the experiment we weren't sure just how much odor this thing would be pumping out and we really didn't want our laundry room to be smelling like outback steakhouse for the next week it's just gonna be blowing hot air straight out the back just like someone else we know out the back thank you very much all my hot air comes out of the front other things come out the back end so overall everything seemed like it was in place for a dryer to work exactly like an oven except you know with the added bonus of also tenderizing the meat as it spins around inside the drum at least that's the thought i started with but there was only one way to find out for sure test it and then monetize the results of that test for the enjoyment of viewers on the internet i mean smooth so obviously this is gonna fail horrifically but i figured the way to start this episode is by just doing it the way that you would just think to naturally do this throw a couple of raw foods in there let them tumble around for a cycle or two see how well they cook i expect that once we get some experimental test results once we do some research off camera we're gonna realize that maybe something about them tumbling in the dryer is not gonna actually work and we'll need to modify it a little bit but for now step one just throw food in there and see what happens without any further ado ladies and gentlemen we have a couple of selections to tumble around in the dryer we've got ourselves some popcorn we gotta put this in a bag or something freezer pizza there you go we've got ourselves shrimp sometimes you just want a little surf with your turf poop in there we've also got ourselves egg i've seen a lot of bon appetit videos where there's like 100 different ways to cook an egg one of the ways they did not say that you could cook an egg was by throwing it in the dryer i beg to disagree boom hey yes i know we have the steak tumbling around i'm just gonna throw in bag steak too okay just for posterity yeah there we go for posterity steak [Music] i'm so ashamed i'm so ashamed of everything we do stephanie all that was left was setting the timer one of the unexpected benefits of buying a rehabilitated dryer off of craigslist was that our refurbisher actually knew an incredible amount about how this thing operated including its specific drying temperatures for this model its range was between 125 and 140 degrees fahrenheit that's about 51 to 60 degrees celsius and when you think about it it's actually quite a bit lower than your typical oven which you'd be setting somewhere around 350 degrees or 176 c as such we expected the dryer to act more like a slow cooker than a typical oven and so we figured a normal hour-long dry cycle would be the perfect place to start ready three two one yeah oh it's clunking around oh you can hear it clunking oh no an hour later it was time to check out the load immediately it was clear that doing this outside was a good call because the area around our garage smelled a bit like a seafood restaurant smells like lunch something had definitely cooked maybe fearing what awaited us on the other side we opened the door oh it looks like something died it looks like a murder scene a little bit in there a family-friendly murder sworth calling out those murder smears were just from that one stake that i had thrown in there for the laughs other than that small amount of juice the dryer was perfectly clean none of the other zipper seal bags we used had leaked in any way so early signs showed promise for the dryer cook but looks are just one thing the true test was in the actual food and immediately we were shocked by the results the steak i just threw in the drum it actually cooked just none the way that i had expected you can immediately tell that the part that was touching the side of the dryer has actually cooked not through convection this is actually cooked through conduction which is because it was touching the hot metal on the side of the dryer wow wow i can't believe we even got like a rendering on here yeah this is almost edible right can i eat this no it's not bad that gives me hope ladies and gentlemen and it wasn't the only surprise to come out of the dryer the steak in the bag left us totally speechless steak in a bag totally cooked steak in a bag i don't even think it leaked looks legit man oh 100 you could throw this in a sandwich right now it's hot film theory offers no medical or nutritional advice it's good it's cooked and it's great it is great it's not too hard it's it's like nice and tender it's still got moisture in it we could have done it in like half the time it's actually tender i can't believe this it's great it's good it's been beaten up in the dryers i'm gobsmacked i can't believe this worked and even more surprising the shrimp was just as good if not better than that's delicious it's fantastic it's so good fantastic it's so good the popcorn and egg meanwhile yeah nothing really happened though the egg was certainly warm it was still just a scrambled liquid and the popcorn identical to when it went in i think it had to do with the fact that the popcorn oil and scrambled egg being mostly liquid have a much higher heat capacity than solids like meat you've probably noticed something like this happen when you go for a swim outside you ever wonder why on a hot day the water in the pool is so cold while the pavement around the pool is hot enough to burn your feet well both the water and the concrete are getting hit by the same sun but the water takes much longer to heat up it has a higher specific heat which means that it's going to take more energy to produce a temperature change my guess is that our dryer just needed more time or a higher heat to make the changes necessary in those two food items so that was four out of the five foods that we had thrown into the dryer but there was still one item left over from our tumble cycle one that needed a bit of detective work to remember what it was can anyone tell me what this was maybe the smell will remind us all what this was it smells like pizza but it looks like radioactive waste the frozen pizza wasn't hand tossed it had been dryer tossed to the point of forming three perfectly sized dough balls because of the low heat the crust never got a chance to crisp up and brown resulting in a gooey mess of cheese sauce and dough but again looks aren't everything don't do it no no no no no no no this tastes a lot like a hot pocket it's not as bad as it looks i'll give it that it's even hot on the inside if you open up the inside it's it's very hot honestly i was shocked stephanie was shocked neither of us ever expected this to work without having to modify the test in any way and yet here we were with three perfectly edible items why do you keep taking bites of it and you keep taking big bites i actually think it's really good oh get out of here get get out of town you know what i'm gonna follow it up with the shrimp with a bite of mistake which only left us with one place to go taken this idea to its natural conclusion doing laundry while we cook drying wet laundry while also throwing in some shrimp some steak some frozen pizza could it all get done in one dryer cycle or would the wet cold clothes affect how everything cooked or worse would the bags explode and permanently ruin our clothes so that's exactly what we did we put a light load of laundry through the washer so it could be exactly as wet as they'd normally be getting into the dryer got my black shirt got some quality game theory merch from yesteryear lastly of course our game theory unmentionables are from 2017. they held up remarkably well we've also at the bottom of our laundry basket got our meal this time though we did make some adjustments since the shrimp and steak worked so well we just tossed them on in for the pizza in an effort to preserve at least some of its structural integrity we used heat resistant tape to attach it to the dryer door and for the eggs we actually strap them to the back hoping that some of the heat conduction from the warm dryer walls might actually help cook the eggs fast enough for a single dry cycle i was admittedly a bit excited for this one we could patent this stuff oh my god this has a chance to revolutionize the world why have two giant appliances one in your kitchen one upstairs when you confuse them together into the most brilliant hybrid that humanity's ever seen for years we have been stuck thinking about our laundry and our kitchen and our food prep in two separate worlds now the food basket and the laundry basket become one in one beautiful experiment and that is happening today see you in an hour i've got a meeting now with my laundry cooked i also wanted to look up whether this wound up being a huge waste of electricity i mean tumble dryers supposedly use a bunch of electricity each time they're run is this horrifically less efficient than using an oven well a typical tumble dry cycle uses between two and six kilowatt hours of electricity compare that to a conventional oven which typically uses about 2.3 kilowatt hours for an hour of baking now admittedly the oven is giving you a lot more bang for your buck you're cooking with a lot more heat in that circumstance but in both cases you're consuming about 30 cents worth of electricity per hour and hey if now you're able to do your laundry and cook at the same time well now you're really energy efficient hear that time to check out the results but did i have myself a nice delicious meal complete with dry clothes or did i just wind up with a big mess will i have dry clothes will i have a cooked meal will we have changed cuisine forever all is about to be revealed three two one bam okay first feedback oh okay yeah let me just empty out my logo very dry this is very wearable right now oh yeah very dry it smells a little bit like shrimp we could have used the drier sheet maybe fishy smell or no we had ourselves a dryer full of clean warm clothes so i call that half of the experiment to win but what about the food we started off with the proteins again this takes good still it's tender and everything and it doesn't taste anything like my underwear [Music] it's tender it's very good it's it's it's actually very nice plate this one up that's going on the dinner table oh look at that shrimp oh it is perfect you could sell this at a restaurant i know it's fairy's gonna be calling us tomorrow we tried our laundry and we cooked a wheel stephanie his channel is so weird this is the weirdest channel and it's great so that already was two huge wins the cooking seemed completely unaffected by the wet cold clothes that were circling around the bags if anything the food the second time around was juicier and moister maybe because the added laundry slowed the cooking process down even more as for our other foods the popcorn yeah no real progress there the egg was actually much closer to cook this time around needing probably another half cycle to get it to a nice soft scramble but the true winner for most improved went to the pizza we've got our surf we've got our turf but do we have our side of pizza my italian grandmother rolls in her grave stephanie on behalf of all italians does this pass muster as our resident italian no but it definitely is pizza there is no part of it that's still frozen it has all of the pizza flavors and you know what it doesn't have the consistency of mochi this time which i also really appreciate this was an absolute win across the board hands down we made literally an entire entire meal while also drying our laundry and just to really sell it steph and i retreated to the kitchen to plate these bad boys up was it a weird-looking plate you bet it was but i largely attribute that to pairing a frozen pizza with shrimp but could you have told that any one of those items were cooked in a dryer no no you could not giving us to date our biggest win on the food theory channel emboldened by success our minds started to reel with the possibilities my mind is now open could you sous-vide in a hot tub at the gym vacuum smoothie vacuum smoothie a whole world of food and cooking has opened up to us today we're like isabella in encanto she's like what else can i do and realize just like what else can we do and we're like we do if any one of those sound interesting by the way let us know down in the comments which one you'd like us to test cause you can bet we are doing this again it was so much fun to do and in the end the dryer ultimately cooked me up the most satisfying meal that i'd had in a long time not just because the food was delicious but because nothing tastes sweeter than success but hey are you looking for a great meal that isn't covered in dryer lint well then consider our sponsor for today's episode grubhub have you ever gotten so busy that you try to find insane ways of combining your cooking and your laundry just to save you a couple of minutes cooking takes time and effort and it gets your focus away from doing the work that you have to do or taking care of your kids or you know just relaxing or beating yet another herd tree avatar in elden ring there are so many of those darn things life shouldn't have to be full of trade-offs like that and getting meals delivered 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Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,363,455

Keywords: cooked in a dryer, cooking in a dryer, can you cook in a dryer, cook in dryer, dryer, cooking, can you cook, can you bake in a dryer, hacks, food hack, food hacks, tiktok hack, tiktok food, tiktok food hack, 5 minute food hacks, cooking a steak in a dryer, recipe, gmm dryer, will it cook, tasty, tasty dryer, tasty washing machine, cooking in a washing machine, cook in a dishwasher, babish, without a recipe, food theory, food theorists, matpat, film theory, game theory, steak

Id: 6Luv2M5xokA

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/NeoMegaRyuMKII]

This episode was such a delight.

Granted some meals probably won't work (like my family's casserole which needs to be cooked with consistent layers) but for the parts that DID work it was a huge hilarious win.

[u/oddeyelien]

Next video: I Cooked An Egg On The Roof Of My Car On A Hot Summer Day

[u/Sarah_Roberge]

Interesting episode, but I do have a critique of the video. While the foods did looked cooked in the video, Matthew didn’t take the temperature of the cooked dryer foods to make sure that they were actually safe to eat. For all we know, he could have gotten food poisoning from the shrimp cooked in the dryer. I wished that they had taken the internal temperature of the food they cooked to make sure that it was safe for human consumption.