How Well Can You Actually Cook A Steak On Your Engine?

The internal combustion engine certainly has its strengths, but even the most efficient engine is far from good at turning all of the energy contained in gasoline into power. As a result, your engine tends to get pretty hot while it runs even with the help of a radiator. Does it really get hot enough to cook with, though? Well, as you’ll see in the video below, that likely depends on what you’re trying to do.

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For those of you who don’t share my enthusiasm for a perfectly balanced forged German chef’s knife that costs more than most people’s entire block set of stamped knives, there’s a marked difference between getting food up to a temperature that’s safe to eat and actually making it taste good. And depending on what you’re trying to cook, you’ll want different levels of heat to achieve different results.

Unless something is wrong, though, a modern engine doesn’t actually get all that hot, at least as far as cooking temperatures are concerned. Once they’re up to temp, don’t expect it go much higher than 220 degrees. There’s more cooking math to do if you want to get particular about it, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to skip over other factors that may affect the real temp inside the engine bay because if I could figure that out with any reliable degree of accuracy, I sure as shit wouldn’t be using my typing skills to make a living.

So even if you spring for a Prime ribeye, salt it ahead of time and properly season it, you aren’t going to be searing a steak using excess engine heat. Given enough time, though, 220 degrees would be plenty of heat to get it up to a temperature that’s safe to eat. That may be cheating since, unlike with other meats, you really only have to kill the bacteria on the outside of the meat versus cooking it all the way through in order to safely eat it, but a burger cooked blue (not to be confused with the cheese) would just fall apart, so what even is cheating?

If you want something more of a pot roast or have a way to sear after your drive and want to use your engine bay as an improvised sous vide machine, that may be possible in the 200-degree range. Theoretically. In practice? Well, no. No, no, no. After six hours of driving, the eye-round steaks weren’t even really rare, which is about 120 degrees. And as anyone who serves food to other people should know, the so-called “danger zone” for meat is between 40 and 140 degrees. That’s not great.

And, wouldn’t you know it, the steaks started to go bad before they were cooked enough to eat. Rain, having to wrap the steaks in aluminum foil, and the plastic engine cover certainly didn’t help things, either. So it was back to the drawing board. Was he ever able to cook a steak in the engine bay of his GLB? Watch the video below to find out.

I Cooked a Steak on My Car Engine | Food Theory on the Road