Cooking a Turkey: The 'Aventador Method'
Over the years, so many alternate ways of cooking a holiday turkey have proliferated that some now refuse to eat a conventionally roasted bird. A British car enthusiast, who goes by the YouTube handle of Shmee150, decided to broil his Christmas turkey using the flames that shoot from the exhaust pipes of a Lamborghini Aventador at full, ahem, boil.
Silly, perhaps, but not entirely stupid. Using the waste heat from a car engine to cook food likely goes back to the early days of the automobile age. A Google search shows numerous guides and tips on how to cook under the hood. Though my Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook does not have a miles per pound table in their cooking time charts, there’s a dedicated car cooking cookbook, “ Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine!,” that’s been in print for decades, with multiple editions.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not convinced that Shmee150 did all of the cooking with the Lambo, as his turkey doesn’t seem to be browning very quickly with his method. Though I suppose that if he set up the raw bird on some kind of stand, instead of trying to waveringly hold it in the exhaust with a pitchfork, the high temperatures of the exhaust gases would be high enough to roast poultry.
I’m also skeptical that the turkey tasted as “delicious” as the video host claimed. Those flames are created by unburned fuel making its way into the exhaust system (I’m guessing that regulatory emissions testing doesn’t include full throttle overruns), so in addition to flames, that exhaust undoubtedly contains a rich broth of assorted hydrocarbons, not all of them tasty or necessarily safe and healthy as a seasoning for your food. It is probably safer, though, than dropping a frozen turkey into a hot deep fryer.
Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don’t worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS
Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, the original 3D car site.
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Oh the mechanical atrocity of revving an engine like that without any load...
"Silly, perhaps, but not entirely stupid." I vote for entirely stupid. If you at least mounted a rotisserie on the rear bumper so you could drive rather then sit blipping the throttle it would waste less gas. However, as others have pointed out, flavoring with unburnt hydrocarbons is not my idea of tasty. "Using the waste heat from a car engine to cook food likely goes back to the early days of the automobile age." During my childhood summers spent in the back of a station wagon with my siblings we got one of the cooking on your engine books. I recall instructions such as "wrap in foil, Wire to exhaust manifold and drive 45 minutes at 60 MPH. other spots were under the air cleaner and behind the radiator depending on how high a temp was needed.