Fun fact: someone actually did it

Let's assume the chicken has to reach a temperature of 205C (400F) for us to consider it cooked.

Remind me never to let this guy cook for me.

What I learned from this is never let a physics major cook you dinner, unless you want charcoal for chicken (200C !?!)

But it only needs to reach 165°F, about 74°C.
Basically every food package says so.

Don’t forget, the chicken is frozen, so you also have to take into account the latent heat of fusion to melt the chicken before you can raise the temperature

This calculation also assumes that this is an inelastic collision where all the energy is absorbed into the chicken and not into your hand or into the air as sound or other kinetic energy.

Further the chicken is frozen solid, and, presumably, your hand is not. Of the two objects in this collision that could deform inelasticity and absorb the larger fraction of the energy, my money would be on the 0.4 kg slab of raw meat rather than the 1kg frozen billiard ball.

205°C? You're slapping your chicken too long, son. Your mother and I are worried.

To be clear, the slapping would have to be done in one single second to account for heat loss to environment.

There was a viral YouTube video of doing exactly this a few years back.

https://youtu.be/LHFhnnTWMgI

One thing to note, actually cooking something requires an application of heat over time. Instantaneous heat transfer will not cook, it will usually just burn.

Some people say you can use a nuke to cook a pizza if you put it in the right spot, but the same problem would apply.

Related, some guy did actually slap a chicken into being cooked. It was predictably disgusting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI

I was hungry

not anymore

At 400F it would no longer be a chicken but a pile of glowing cinders. A chicken is cooked at 165F.

Didn't someone build a machine to do this

Wait a minute 400°F? What dafuck?

Fun fact, 165F is often parroted for cooking chicken, but I urge everyone to go lower. 155-160F results in much juicier chicken. 165F corresponds to instantaneously killing all bacteria. 155F is about 60s, and 160F is 15s.

That's assuming an isentropic chicken though. You need even more slaps to make up for the heat loss to the environment.

Why isn't it a concern what slapping at this speed does to your hand/arm?

When Martha from accounting last asked me what my plans were for that night, I told her I was going to slap my chicken.

She won't look me in the eye any more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Me: I'd like to be able to slap fast. Like really fast.

This isn't going to be accurate, it's ignoring a key aspect of the heat that will be generated, friction. When designing materials for prosthetics we have to be aware of how much friction occurs between the material and skin. If the amount of friction is too great, the material can create enough heat to damage tissue.

The formula for the skin friction coefficient is cf=τw12ρeue2, where ρe and ue are the density and longitudinal velocity at the boundary layer's edge.

The real question is if you slapped hard enough to raise the temperature to 74C (undergrad clearly doesn't cook), what would the temperature of your hand be? And for the engineers: how far up your arm would you have to measure before the temperature returned to normal body temperature? And for the bio/kin/nursing/premed students: how much would need to be amputated?

The chicken ran away when I tried to slap it.