Cooking With Electricity.

Lol that made me smile where do you think these things up?

Many years ago when I was sixteen I was helping a mate trying to get some of the old tick tock electric fence units with the swinging arms and solenoids in them working.


We ran out of WD40, so tried Plus Gas Formula A, we lost our eye lashes and eyebrows along with our fringes resulting in much hilarity when we went to the pub afterwards.

Long, long ago, when the earth was green, unicorns roamed and health and safety were just words in the dictionary.


As a 17 year old RN electronics apprentice our lab had (amongst others) 220V DC at terminals on the benches (what was that about health and safety). In those days experiments using bottles (valves or vacuum tubes) were very much part of the training, so having 220V DC on the bench was very handy. 


A couple of the guys decided that the 220 DC would be a good energy source for cooking a sausage. Said sausage was duly connected to the supply using a couple of bits of copper foil, one at each end. After a few minutes the smell of "cooking" sausage along with satisfactory sizzling noises permeated the lab. The sausage looked and smelled cooked, however due to the fact that it had gone green along half its length (probably due to copper migrating from the electrodes) nobody would actually try eating it. Experiment deemed a failure :( 


Slightly later in life we were training in one of the Radar test labs testing magnetrons. Said magnetrons obviously needed a load and in the absence of a microwave dummy load a simple matching horn was attached to the output and a warning sign installed. Broadcasting at 25kW PEP out of the lab window was considered OK. Placing a pasty in front of the horn did indeed result in the pasty getting warm (the average power was only a few hundred watts). Apparently at one point someone did actually walk in front of the horn whilst the magnetron was operating and suffered no ill effects, it didn't even fix his stammer.

Some foods can be heated or cooked by passing electricity directly through them. Needs to be AC.

In some countries one may purchase a horribly dangerous device for cooking hot dogs. It consists of several metal rollers with 120 volt mains between them. place hot dogs on rollers. The de-luxe version has a plastic lid interlocked with the supply.


"In cup water heaters" are popular overseas, the cheap ones are simply two electrodes on a stick and heat a cup of water by passing current through it. Very popular for heating water for instant noodles, particularly entertaining if the noodles in the now salted water become cold and reheating is attempted.

Two nails driven through a piece of wood and connected to the mains may be used to heat water. Connect between phases for quicker heating.

Somewhere I have a 'dangers of electricity' demo I use for scouts (or did ages ago, before lockdown when we could meet up) that is just a couple of scrap forks on a wooden board facing up, in series with a push button and key switch , that runs from mains with a socket for a series current limiting heater. (so if you short the forks and press the button, all that happens is the heater comes on full)


This will do hot dog sausages to a sizzle quite well,and hammers home the point about entry and exit wounds in a non-lethal but hopefully memorable way.


It is also quite fun to do a pickled gherkin with the lights out, as the salty vinegar water dries out, you get a lot of orange flashing from inside the pickle that I think, but have not verified, is the sodium D line spectrum of  older street lamp fame.


The key switch means it cannot be made live if I am not beside it, youngsters being  curious as they are.

M.