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What Would French Fries Taste Like If You Made Them On Jupiter?
sciencehabit writes "Hoping that studying deep frying in different gravitational conditions will help them improve space food for future astronauts, scientists with the European Space Agency chopped potatoes into thin sticks and deep fried them in extra-virgin olive oil, one side at a time, in a spinning centrifuge that created conditions of up to nine times Earth's gravity, akin to that seen on Jupiter. Higher gravity levels significantly increased the heat transfer between the hot oil and the potato, shortening frying time and resulting in thick, crispy crusts, the team reports. In fact, the scientists may have discovered the ideal gravitational condition for creating crunchy fries: The crust reached its maximum thickness when the potato was fried at three times Earth's gravity; any further increase in gravity levels did not improve the fries' crispiness."
French fries did not originate on Earth, but were brought here by benevolent Aliens in the past.
I, for one, would welcome the return of out benefactors!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Whirling hot oil around at high speed, in a kitchen.
What could go wrong?
Surely this research is a leading candidate!
Am I the only Slashdotter thinking of trying this? The clothes washer on spin would be too big. Maybe put a faster motor on my ice cream maker and pour in some hot oil...
So at work, they've got a food stand outside that does made-to-order liquid nitrogen ice cream. I think that a "Jupiter Fries" truck would fit in quite nicely.
What could go wrong?
I suspect that we'll read about more than one actualized possibility over the next few weeks.
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I'd be busy having the life squeezed out of me by the gravity.
Whirling hot oil around at high speed, in a kitchen.
What could go wrong?
But you know, the same people who deep fry turkeys would try this.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
even those you don't know about.
Every source I've found says it's 2.53, where did these people come up with 9? Nonetheless, I am looking forward to trying some high-gravity fries. Sounds delicious.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Deep frying, of course, is quite literally boiling in oil. As the boiling point is dependent on the pressure, they might want to consider putting the fryer in a pressure vessel that can handle several atmospheres. (No, I don't think a broaster is built for that.) Of course, that may well take the boiling point above the smoke point, so you may want to fill the container with nitrogen or possibly carbon dioxide.
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Fat lot of good it does if you can't *grow* potatoes in 9x Earth gravity.
If they can grow potatoes in their centrifuge... then we have a useful study. :)
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
I would think olive oil a poor choice for making french fries. In general, olive oil has too low of a smoke point; it just doesn't get hot enough to fry things well. Maybe the increased pressure made a lower oil temp better? I was always taught to use olive oil as a flavoring on pastas, salads, bread, etc. but never for actual hot-oil-cooking.
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
That's a good idea. So good that you could make millions of dollars from it, like Colonel Sanders did.
If ever there was an article begging for a "hot oil on Uranus" comment, this is it.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Eat that Heston Blumenthal!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Whirling hot oil around at high speed, in a kitchen. What could go wrong?
Can't wait to see how someone's frozen turkey will turn out in one of these next Thanksgiving. It'll be like an angry birds reality show.
I'm eagerly awaiting Alton Brown's commandeering of a playground roundabout with deep fryers lashed to the bars and an '01 Kia minivan's power wheel providing the input power.
But how to distribute the AC power - rotors and brushes?
My God, it's Full of Source!
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Gravity so strong that it collapses into a singularity, the sweet-potato fries get sucked in, and ordinary non-sweet potato fries are ejected from the fryer, fully done.
You could just use higher pressure.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...If you made them on Jupiter?
I suppose we can assume that there is somehow a way to remain on the "surface" of the atmosphere, since Jupiter obviously has no surface that we could build anything to withstand the pressures of. And overcome the issues with the 400 mph upper atmospheric wind speed. For the purpose of weight savings, we can also assume that the fryer will not be made of stainless steel like a normal fryer would be. This is also a good thing as the magnetic field at this distance is estimated to be at around 1 Tesla. It's probably still going to cause all kinds of issues.
But the real kicker is the radiation. A person who is exposed to 30 Sv or more in a short period of time will be dead in 24 to 48 hours. Io averages a little over 400Km distance from Jupiter. At that distance you would receive 36 Sv in a single 24 hour period. So the radiation and magnetic field are probably going to play hell with any kind of electronics, or electric heating element. And good luck using gas as an electrical arc will probably cause an oxygen tank to explode. But let's say we somehow find a way to work around all those problems. Just how do we keep the fries from getting cold and mushy in the time it takes to get them to us at our survivable distance from Jupiter? I can barely get fries home from McDonald's w/o my wife telling me I took too long and that the fries are disgusting.
Sanders' isn't a deep fryer though, or at least it wasn't. The whole point is he didn't want the chicken to be deep fried, but pan fried (which was too bloody slow)... Hence the compromise of pressure-pan frying.
Never worked at a KFC, so I'm googling it, and it sure looks like a deep fryer, though...
Sent from my PDP-11
And are onion rings better on Saturn?
Table-ized A.I.
Don't. You can get gas-powered friers. Use those, put a canister of propane in the middle.
Then turn it on by remote control from a safe distance. Such that you have to watch it through a telescope.
He looks a bit stringy to me.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
No! Not French Fries! Freedom Fries! Remember 9/11!
Also, not French Kissing! Freedom kissing! NO TONGUE, OR THE TERRORISTS WIN!
(Sorry...apparently I've been possessed by the ghost of Ann Coulter's career. I have someone with common sense and knowledge of facts coming to perform an exorcism later today.)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Well, this will definitely become the mayor incentive for the Human Colonization of Space: Building snack and fast food factories in Jupiter and Saturn...
Instead of a the a war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire we will end up with Doritos vs. Pringles and a Starbucks on every asteroid.
And the worst of it is that it perfectly fits all what already happened with each and every technology util now: Instead of intelligent supercomputers dedicated to advanced science and pure mathematics we have Facebook and porn, instead of flying in UFO at light speed in nice Starfleet uniforms we have fat moms driving their ugly kids to school in an SUV... shit, and the only Androids that we have are nothing more than crappy cordless phones with a few more functions. Shit, shit, shit.
We should be drinking Vulcanian ale right now in a Klingon tavern :_(
-- 29A the number of the Beast