Alton Brown's Mega Bake
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- Опубликовано: 1 окт 2024
- We went to Alton Brown's secret workshop in Atlanta to learn how he uses the heat of lights to cook a pizza in under five minutes.
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"Hey Alton, the electricity bill is here! ...HOLY SHIT $3.6 million!"
Alton: "Yeah... But Pizza!"
@bloodshot2020 Not as lame as that upload history bud. Pot, meet kettle!
In the name of science, to make progress (whether it be progressing towards a finished product and or efficiency) you have to sacrifice something.
In this case, that damned light bill lmao
Have eaten Alton's pizza off this "Mega Bake" oven while working tech for a show of his. It's actually pretty damn good.
Just out of curiosity what was your job experience, and / or education that lead you to working on that show?
What did you have to do on the set?
thanks
monkeylard, are you interviewing MaximumCat for a job?
The ship's wheel made the whole thing at least 4 times more awesome
MickMaan I know
Efficient? no. Fun? Oh yessssss
Lance Lindle Lee Is it dangerous? Very. Is it efficient? I don't really know. But is it cool? Absolutely
In some of the venues where he showed the Mega Bake, he actually couldn't run it at full power because the house couldn't provide enough electricity to run it. That's awesome.
This is Energy Star-rated, right?
As in it uses more energy than a star produces? Why yes! In fact it's a five-star rating! The power of five suns!
*Homer Simpson voice* yeeahh...
you can buy 1 slice of pizza for only 1400$ to cover the electric costs
54 kilowatts at 10 cents a kilowatt/hour, about $5.40 an hour to run. Will need to pay for an utility upgrade though.
"requires own generator" would be an amusing note to see.
What a steal!
e-z bake oven would make a good sabotage in CK
I think there was something similar.
YESSSSSSSS Now, how to move it into hell and make sure the power stays on while using it.
Meh, unitasker.
Nonsense: with some recipe tweaks (and maybe the world's biggest dimmer switch) you could bake anything that's flattish. I want some cookies, Alton!
It is one of the best unitaskers though. I went to one of his live shows and it was amazing. You couldn't look directly at for long because it created spots worse than staring at the sun.
I accidentally cooked a bell pepper with just one of those lights, from a few feet away. You could cook anything you could fit in it.
larkknot
Why did you bring a bell pepper to a theatre?
That would have been weird, but I was practicing with a still life and different light sources for photography class.
Reactor Online
Wiring Online
Light Online
All Pizza's nominal...
Duraltia you win.
Okay. Who's messing with my Urbanmech's AI again?
I attended Alton's second 'concert' in Mesa, Arizona in 2014, and he baked pizza with this. I was sitting near the back of the auditorium and the wonderful aroma of pizza and the overwhelming heat of this device reached me there. It was a spectacular show. 🍕🍕🍕🍕🍕
I had that exact easy bake oven as a kid. Once the one-off switch broke my grandfather wired it up so you just plugged it straight in. Total safety hazard but I loved it. Getting a new set of little mixes was the best part.
1:30 they had to edit in 54 because he said the wrong number lmao
So you build a halogen oven.
Hello you!
Hi Larry
P
3:02 - "Meanwhile, I will get a pizza." I believe Alton and I have different definitions for "getting".
Yep, for me a pizza is a planned one week prelude at least. First I make mead, just honey, yeast, and water. Then I wait for the mead to finish fermenting, then I refrigerate it to allow all the yeast to drop out. I then rack it into a new bottle, and the very bottom mead and the already used yeast is the start for my pizza. The dough portion of the pizza can be hours to a full day. It depends on if I want a refrigerator rise or not. Once the dough has risen then things get hectic. But that's how I get a pizza.
That sounds absolutely fantastic! What kind of flavors does the mead yeast give to the dough though? I'm assuming something fairly sweet yeah?
Nenacu I feel you can get the crust to taste like the best pizza pub you ever went to. The yeast and added honey for a crust are what really make the taste simply wonderful.
+ReverendTed lmao I have a local pizza place on speed dial for emergencies
Intriguing... I may have to try this myself. :-)
I’m 13 and have seen every episode of good eats twice and I can’t wait for return of the eats
Son- I want an easy bake oven! Dad- No son of mine's gay!
You can't like certain colors or cooking food. Food and colors are gay as hell.
you two are so progressive it makes me sick to my stomach.
Now-a-days it's being a woman... men still can't like to bake apparently... instead, you're a woman on the inside... for some reason...
TheDeathmail I am a straight man and i love cooking.
Does that mean i am a gay transman? Or a non-binary attack helicopter? Im so confused!
I like to mega bake as well...😏
CHRONICPUNJABI see, I don't bake, but I'm still really dissapointed that the video is 4:22... wasted opportunity. haha
why because why not
because we can
when is this going on sale?.. I got some space on my counter, thought I'd get a waffle maker but I can't make pizza with that.
AL MAYYAHI u n i t a s k e r
You can always try
When I was 4 back around 1967 the neighbor girl that lived in the apartment above me used to have one. She would leave it on my patio because we had an outdoor plug. I used to catch potato bugs, worms, roaches and other disgusting critters, turn the little pan upside down over them and bake them when she wasn't around. Then later she would do the crappy little cakes or cookies with the thing and eat them with her friends using the same pan.
Alton's big contraption would probably do a pizza OK without the pan. The only pizzeria I can stomach around here is an oriental run place in PV and they use a similar treadmill rack with gas burners. It cooks the pizza nice and evenly with no gooey center. Crumbs and sauce might get on the lights though.
This is awesome. I bet with a motor and a computer you could make some code to move everything in preset configurations for different foods.
That pizza looked doughy ;(
That pizza looked pizza-y :(((
@@ChapuleTaylor Why is the flour so floury?!?!
yeah it was undercooked
Yeah. Far from done.
Alton, you're still goddamn magical.
Alton is so underrated. I love him so much. I grew up watching his show.
Still a better pizza than Little Caesars
... little Ceasars is my fav.. (their garlic bread is anyways)
Camps2630 some locations really do it right and put out a relative quality 5 dollar pizza.
I've had worse pizza from some of the big chains. Little Caesars isn't terrible. It's not gourmet but it's only $5 so you can't expect it to be.
It's just really popular to hate Little Caesars. The individual stores are hit and miss though, like the above commenter said. One near my old house, I loved eating pizza there. The hot-n-ready ones were a bit better than a 1 topping pizza from Dominos, Pizza Hut, or Papa Johns. The fancier ones were considerably better than the specialties at the others. They took a lot more care with those.
At my new place, all but Papa John's are worse, with Little Caesars being the lowest. What can you do, though?
wtf? i love little caesar's. they're super affordable and their dough is made fresh from scratch onsite. there are obviously better options in my area, but it's a great deal when you want munchies on a budget.
wow. what a staggeringly inefficient way to cook.
Heather Snow the point isn't efficiency...Its a proof of concept. Its science experiment. Its the about the awe factor. The fact that you can cook a pizza with just lightbulbs.
He uses 54,000 Watts to do what a 14,400-Watt oven does. That's less than 27% efficiency.
But an amazingly efficient way to entertain a theater full of people. This video doesn't do it justice; it can't. Seeing this ridiculous machine live is both awe inspiring and hilarious.
Heather Snow to be fair, so was the original Easy Bake oven...
what happens when grease falls on the lower level lights?
Firework show.
It doesn't in large amounts as the pizza is on a pan
Um No instantaneous death
It creates a black hole.
3:48 - I'm curious as to what kind of camera can withstand 640 degrees lol.
Glad to know I wasn't the only boy to have an easy bake oven, nor to be sorely disappointed. I did wind up a rather impressive cook!
@tommyculver6771 I literally think of his story (and those like yours) when we were shopping for toys for our son, who’s about 1 1/2. Not old enough for it yet, but I distinctly remember thinking and saying (and my partner totally agreed) “if he wants an easy bake oven, I’d be more than happy to get him one.”
I love this guy so much, such a genius yet still the same curiosity and creativity as a kid
Fascinating fun. I don't think most people think of what light can do. Reminds me of two other things: at Starbuck's Reserve Roastery in Seattle, they use LEDs to boil the water in their siphon coffee makers, and a demo where Harold Edgerton caused a newspaper to burst into flames when he turned on a high-power light he created for taking photos from planes. Oh -- and a third thing -- a huge number of kids burning leaves using sunlight and a magnifying glass. But they all lack the whimsey of your Mega Bake.
Mad Food Scientist... :)
That is such an inefficient oven but so stinking cool. Cooling with light especially that much light is not what I'd consider a great idea since it takes so much power to make the light but at the same time, this thing is very entertaining.
I've seen this in action at one of his shows. If possible, you have to go to his show. Even though I saw it 3 or so years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.
This is a spectacularly inefficient way to cook food. Key word being spectacular.
that machine is awesome
I'm almost certain the pizza hut near my house learned to slice pizza from this video.
the Rube Goldberg ovan!
those looked like giant AV cables for a second
that pizza was clearly not done :/
Could you do this with a big magnifying glass on a sunny day?
It's easy to light a fire using a simple lense, and paper combusts at around 450f.
So sure, you could easily do this using some reflectors. In theory, you can get about 10000 degree fahreinheit directly from solar radiation, and melt any known substance.
ruclips.net/video/XFw7U7V1Hok/видео.html Just make 5 of these and center them on one spot
That did not look crispy at all.
the dough almost looked raw at the end lol so much for a crunchy crust
My mom wouldn't let me have an Easy Bake Ocen either. She said I could learn to bake with the real oven. She bought me a big box of Easy Bake mixes and implements from the Sears catalogue, and supervised me while I prepared them, and baked them in the real oven.
Mom had already taught me to use the stove to make scrambled eggs if I didn't like what she'd cooked for dinner. I was 5.
AB! Love you man, Good Eats, Feasting on Asphalt, Cutthroat Kitchen are all-time faves! I'd love you to step up your game and really cook with light! I'm talking, concentrated solar, lasers, etc, because Megabake isn't cooking with light itself (it's cooking with lamps).
Just like the easy bake oven, this isn't cooking with light either! Its cooking mostly with the waste heat from those halogen lamps! It's basically just a super inefficient electric oven!
While I'm not sure which fixtures you are using, I found one point of reference for S4 PAR64 100W fixtures:
Fixture: PAR 64 1000w
Projected Light Beam: ~1100 btu/hr
Fixture Housing Dissipated: ~2314 btu/hr
Total: 3414 btu/hr
66% of the heat energy the Mega Bake is working with is coming off the lamp housings, not the light!
WTF Alton, is this what you’ve been reduced to? Building goofy contraptions for cooking. I loved “Good Eats” and I still watch the re-runs, but you do have a way of over complicating the simplest of cooking tasks. Like the time you smoked bacon in a gym locker, come on. Fun to watch, but no one is following that recipe. Just like the Easy Bake oven, you’re not cooking with light you’re cooking with heat, just like a real oven. The byproduct of the light source in both ovens is heat.
This oven doesn't cool with light, it cooks with waste heat from light sources. Those sources are designed to generate light, not heat, so this is totally inefficient. It's claim to existence is that it's "a giant E-Z Bake Oven". Cooking with waste heat that's just being wasted would be cooler. Build a pizza cooker into an overclocked PC!
Lightbulb heating, as a convenient and inexpensive source for a small amount of heat, is still useful for raising chicks (newborn baby birds). I also see it at some fast food restaurants and cafeterias to keep prepared food warm.
And yet... and yet... the 1 1/3 ounce yellow cake still came out wrong, I'll bet. (Those things were tiny packets of Betty Crocker mix, and in those days, hardly the epitome of haute cuisine...)
please understand this is a very inefficient way to generate heat. heat is the byproduct of incandescent light. people suggesting LEDs should be aware that the efficiency of LEDs is because there is less energy wasted into heat.
Wait, he put the cooked pizza on the cutting board with raw flour? Raw flour can harbour bacteria and is not clean or considered safe to eat. That's ripe for cross contamination. Not that big of a risk, but it seems like such a simple thing to avoid considering all the other food safety tips Alton's taught us over the years. Like stuffing?
Someone should write a paper outlining how the standard model of physics, photos, electrons, quark pair production, etc... all helps to make this pizza bake.
Wow, alot of buzzkills in the comments. No shit it's not efficient or practical, it's not the point... It's the novelty of the thing.... 🙄
this just feels like the next Iteration of good eats, like "Altons Mad Science"
adam savage Crossover when??
The Mega Bake was cool, but I'm more impressed with that pizza cutter!
That's brighter than sunlight, so maybe you should protect your eyes. Sunlight is about 100,000 lumens per square meter.
it didn't look very crispy and that's what i like in a pizza, a very crispy crust, that's why i love pizza hut even though their pizza isn't all that great, the crust is just phenomenal... greasy for sure but a pepsi or root beer solves that.
Did you guys get specific frequencies of light?
or just whatever bulbs you could get your hands on?
since specific frequencies would increase the amount of energy is absorbed by the food
Aliens: Should we make contact?
*Sees the Mega Bake*
Also Aliens: No, clearly they have surpassed us long ago.
the next evolution of the mega bake should be some. kind of self sustained powered. gas powered generator at least but at best some kinda of solar / wind turbine power. or possibly a generator powered by a local source, hook it up to old timey windmill or giant wheel driven by a small river. probably need some mega capacitors...
Wouldn't infrared light bulbs work better? Perhaps they are too expensive...
My parents bought me an easy-bake oven, and then wouldn't let me use it, because they said it was too dangerous. They did that with lots of toys. They were very over protective--and too lazy to help me with any of these toys like they promised, either. They also wasted a lot of money that way.
Easy bake didn't cook with light but heat. The truth is incandescent bulbs use most of the energy 90% to create heat and only 10% light.
Only 450 amps. Most homes have 100-200amp service. So we can try this at home, in a much smaller version
“Coal Factories HATE HIM!
Find out this one easy trick to up your energy consumption”
Cool idea but it's the heat of the light bulb's resistance, waste energy cooking, not the photons, right? I'm not sure now.
The older Easy Bake Alton has at the beginning looks 100% cooler than the janky, pink plastic one I had as a kid!
yet another unrealistic expectation for how I'm supposed to bake my pizza at home. when will it stop?
I would like to shake the hand of the electrician who installed a 450 amp service just for a giant easy bake oven
make 500 of them and spread them across the sahara and write 'HI ISS' so they get all giddy and we so nice!
Was that three phase Cam lock Power I saw you connecting to this. If so I'm even more impressed
I wonder what would happen if we could rotate the lights around to avoid creating hot spots? There's gotta be some way to avoid the hot spot issue in the design.
Well my power bar is kind of full already but I could unplug the kettle while this is in use I suppose.
He's literally a stereotypical evil genius. Tragic backstory and all.
would this be cheaper in cost for energy consumption than a conditional pizza oven?
wonder what would the electric bill be every month if a pizza joint had one of these things going.
I really wish I enjoyed watching Alton Brown. But I don't.
That's completely ridiculous.... I want one
My sister had a easy bake oven we had fun with it ..... but it won't cook eggs lol
Do you have to let the the power grid operator people before you power this thing up because of how much electricity it pulls?
that is the MOST impractical thing ever... I LOVE IT!
Tesla pizza
Alton is hot!!! loving iron chef !! hes blunt knows what hes doing!
I honestly would have had hated to do the tear out and install on the electrical for this ..... monster.
Nice little coloursource console... Bloody camlocks though!
pizz
with the machine you can transform steve rogers from skinny dude to a huge sexy man
I'd use those 54 light-bulbs for something else ....
yeah...that's not leaving much of a carbon footprint
What's the electricity usage compared to a regular oven?
Thank you Mr. Brown your teaching helps me so much please never stop you are really great at it. Thank you agin 😊👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Planck would be ashamed, but I am impressed.
Marvelous, can’t stop laughing!!!
it must be stronger now because he cooks the pizza almost twice as fast in future shows
Would be nice to have the time and money to do something this ridiculous.
I had an easy bake oven! I loved it!! The food was terrible.
Only Alton would make an oven with a pirate ship wheel :)
"If you do that, you get perfect done-ness." Yea ok I'll remember that next time I use a massive easy bake oven, thanks.
I have to admit, I've never seen par cans used this way before.