This Clever Contraption Cooks a Floating Hot Dog in Mid-Air

It doesn’t matter how you cook a hot dog, I will enjoy it. Grilled? My favorite. In butter on the stove? Give it to me. In a slow cooker? Boiled? Baked? Deep-fried? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I’d even eat the lava dog. Despite my love of that backyard BBQ and baseball park staple, I never even considered the possibility you could cook one in the air. No, I don’t mean in an air fryer. I mean literally while it’s floating. Which is something you can actually do if you follow the instructions of a scientist who built a device to cook a levitating hot dog.

One of our favorite YouTubers, Ben of NightHawkInLight, is back with another video combining brilliant science with wonderful silliness. This time around he decided to answer a question most have never asked before: how do you cook a floating hot dog? He was inspired by one of his own favorite science channels, Bruce Yeany’s YouTube page. Yeany tried cooking a levitating hot dog first. He used a propane tank, in what was more of a display than a cooking show. Yeany wanted to display what happens with the airstream that keeps the hot dog floating, as an example of the Coanda effect.

That’s a great way to teach scientific concepts about airflow and generating lift. But knowledge only feeds the mind, not the belly. So Ben decided to make something that would serve as a real cooker. He used an air compressor blow gun to keep the hot dog in the air. Then he built an electric coil to serve as a miniature oven around the dog.

NightHawkInLight

This device is not perfect. The air gun was blowing away the heat of the top two coil rungs. And it’s wildly inefficient considering how much air is needed to cook just one hot dog.

But I wouldn’t change a thing about it. I still want to eat that hot dog.

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