Electrical resistance cooking

[klugesmith]

In high school I played with cooking wiener sausages by applying 120 volts along the length.   In last week's storage cleanup I found a commercial product that does the same thing.
It still works.

Next exercise is to measure the current.  I bet it will increase as the hot dog gets hot.

[Mads Barnkob]

That is for sure one of the more dangerously interesting kitchen appliances!

I love that its mentioned to be submersible, WITHOUT mentioning that is has to be unplugged first!

[Twospoons]

What are the spikes made of? I'd be a bit concerned electrolysis would contaminate the sausages with metal ions. Though to be fair, those sausages are probably full of all sorts of nasty crap to start with.  My grandfather used to refer to sausages as "Mystery Bags", because you never knew what was in them.

[klugesmith]

>> What are the spikes made of?

Good question.  Most Zn-based die castings are kinds of Zamak alloy.

People buy zinc and iron supplement pills and eat them on purpose.   
Maybe the product maker could specify exceptionally tight limits on the toxic metals like Cd and Pb. 
I bet the spike bars in this product (which are removable without tools) have relatively forgiving geometry as far as casting challenges go.
Maybe technically pure Zn would work in the die-casting machinery.  How pure are boat anodes, or molten baths for galvanizing steel?

Used-metal dealers have x-ray fluorescence instruments to determine composition. But I bet that to measure impurities at 0.001% or 0.005% one needs careful wet laboratory methods.

Designers of this product must have studied the erosion of spikes after thousands of sausage heatings.
AC is probably much better than DC in that regard.
By weighing the bars, one could determine upper bounds on the amount of each metal that was imparted to food.  Starting with amount of Zn.
 

[davekni]

What are the spikes made of?

I'd guess graphite.  Looks a reasonable color in picture.

[johnnyzoo]

Heating a sausage by feeding current through it is quite a classic experiment, but I never thought that some company would actually make a commercial product out of it. 

On the other hand, there are all sorts of dodgy water heaters being sold in China, perhaps similar ideas were behind this product as well. (Danyk aka DiodeGoneWild has reviewed these on Youtube.)

Hm, the leaflet actually says 1977, this is older than I thought. Perhaps safety regulations were less strict back then?

Besides questionable electrical safety, electrolysis and arcing byproducts are some of the problems that came to my mind. 

[klugesmith]

Here's the instruction sheet. Original color pdf's were too big for this forum software, so I hope the screen snips work.

[klugesmith]

I had time for a partly instrumented test.  With one sausage at refrigerator temperature impaled on spikes, an ohmeter indicated about 5000 ohms.   When fully heated, R was less than 100 ohms.

Didn't measure heating current, but watched the brightness of 185 watt lamp in series with the cooker.  Dim at first, it brightened
as cooking progressed.