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MNByChoice @midwest.social

Why don't we cook on car engines?

In the 1970's and 1980's there were several books the either had characters that did it or promoted it.

Why is there no cooking tray in my new car's engine bay?

Is it dangerous? (It would be less physically dangerous if there was a specific spot for it.)

49 comments

  • Considering the amount of cancers related to exposures to petroleum products, is this a real question asking why we don't cook on something that runs on vaporized petroleum products and is lubricated with petroleum products?

    • We have natural gas cooking.
      So, yes.

    • You can run it through a heat exchanger. I mean, if there was enough demand, you could do it. Probably are some aftermarket modifications out there to do it. People definitely have done it before.

      I can give a handful of plausible reasons why you wouldn't want to generally do it, though.

      • While car engines do produce a lot of waste heat, they normally do so when a car is moving. Your trip length probably isn't directly tied to the amount of heat you want to cook, or the times you want to cook. And cooking in a moving vehicle is going to either require you to work in sealed containers or deal with sploshing. Like, even in an RV, there's more to this than just "run heat exchanger off the exhaust, route heat up to oven".
      • You can use a car idling to produce heat, but then you're burning gasoline, not to mention adding some wear-and-tear to your car's engine, just to get a portion of what you would by taking a container of white gas and cooking on a camp stove.
      • Depending upon where this goes -- and it's probably gotta be pretty near the car -- you're liable to need to deal with grease spatters or whatever. Do you want to deal with bacon grease or whatever on the car?

      I mean, if I were going to cook a little bit with energy coming from a car, my first choice would be something like an Instant Pot insulated pressure cooker running off a lithium ion power station charged off a car's electrical circuits. That contains the food, is energy-efficient at the cooking stage (IIRC, only microwaves are more energy-efficient than an insulated pressure cooker), lets me move away from the car to cook if I'm camping, and lets you use other sources of power (like solar if you're in some kind of vehicle off-grid or charge via A/C if you're at the grid, which is cheaper than gasoline). Most of the time you're gonna be cooking near a car, I suspect you'd also like to have a source of electricity, so your power station serves multiple duties. If you have an electric car that can provide power while it's off, then you don't even need the power station, since you're already hauling one around.

      If I wanted to specifically grill, then there are propane (if you're in Europe, I understand that this is often commercially available as "LPG") grills.

      I think that most "serious" in-vehicle cooking (food trucks, RVs) use propane.

      If you want to cook with something akin to gasoline, there's Coleman camp stoves. The fuel basically amounts to gasoline without gasoline additives that might be an issue for cooking; I thought that this was "white gas", but according to the WP page, Coleman fuel has some additives aimed at stoves rather than cars that aren't in white gas. The fuel will cost more than gasoline; it looks like about 4x, checking online.

      EDIT: There are also denatured alcohol camp stoves. The US has a huge amount of non-food-grade ethanol production. Last time I looked, it was about 40% of global capacity. This is a subsidy to corn farmers and mostly gets mixed into gasoline, but I'd guess --- without actually comparing prices or how the subsidy gets applied --- that it probably also means that if you're in the US, you probably also effectively get subsidized denatured alcohol fuel, since if nothing else you can leverage economy of scale in the production infrastructure.

    • I don't think the vaporized petroleum is supposed to be on top of your engine block, but rather remain quite within it.

  • They did this on Top Gear (or Grand Tour maybe, can't remember). Personally, cooking doneness aside, I wouldn't want some exhaust leakage from the engine or burning oil that's seeping from a gasket to taint the flavor of the food even if there were a guarantee of no carcinogens from it.

  • Op, what's unsaid here is that there's planning and enough required knowledge that is a barrier to entry for most people.

    Planning: the engine will only get hot enough to do this after a drive of 30-45+ minutes, plus cook time. So for each person, each trip, it means specific planning of what to make, and when you can make it.

    Knowledge: engines vary in design, and people vary in their comfort in how much they trust themselves to do things in their engine bay without risking damage. Taking some wire, making a secure spot to hold something wrapped in foil, and it not being in the way of anything AND if it slips or comes lose won't get caught in a belt is something I feel fine doing, but I do a lot of janky redneck stuff all the time.

    Most people barely know how to change their oil, and since the 90s, more and more cars are complex such that they seem designed to be repaired and maintained by someone else not the owner. This makes the simple act of opening the hood intimidating for most people. One survey I found online puts comfort in doing basic cat maintenance at 20% of people. Extrapolate from there an increasingly small group that is comfortable doing weird stuff, ok doing risky weird stuff to their car, and who don't want to stop at a real restaurant to eat on a road trip (where my spouse will prefer to pee, not the side of the road), and you get a small enough number of people that is not surprising this isn't common.

  • I imagine the majority of the current crop of motor vehicle owners are not quite smart enough to realize that the hood even opens to allow access to the engine bay... Nor what parts of it get hot. Or too hot. Or are safe to access, etc. And in our modern litigious society there is simply far too much that can go wrong with this to make it worthwhile for any manufacturer to include as a deliberate feature. Like, rodent infestation in engine bays is already an issue. Imagine adding (potentially forgotten and abandoned!) food to the mix.

    Edit: Another wrinkle I thought of is a lack of consistent temperature control. Your engine is designed to move your car, not remain at a consistent temperature.

    The utility is also rather limited when you have access to a microwave or a convenience store. Or even a convenience store with a microwave in it, as many do.

    So yeah, you can do it to be clever if you like but it's not cut out to be mainstream activity.

49 comments