Cooking with Diesel

[Xabia Jim]

I thought you WFO guys might like a twist.

We finally tried cooking with diesel this week. Slow cooked ribs done right on the diesel engine!

We started by dry rubbing a rack of ribs and letting it sit in the fridge for 24 hours.
Next the ribs were wrapped in foil and placed in an oven bag. (if no oven bag, use two wraps of foil.)
The ribs were then placed on the coolant reservoir for our 3208 CAT engine on our boat. I added a towel cover later to hold in the heat on the ribs.
I checked on them hourly turning them over each time. The reservoir was 150 degrees. (good excuse to check the engine room too!)
We ran about 6 hours from West End in the Bahamas to Great Sale Cay. The ribs continued to rest for another 2 hours at anchor.
They were then finished on the BBQ for about 20 minutes and topped with some BBQ sauce.

They were awesome! Next time I'll try a chicken!

[DrakeRemoray]

That is excellent...your boat is just a giant mobile crock pot!

[stormy]

I was an oil field worker some years ago, we would pull long hours, sometimes over 100 per week but you have to eat. I would bake whole chickens on the top of an engine, potato, onion, a bit of spice and after about two hours of "run time", it would be falling off the bones.

[Neil2]

I tried to cook some hot dogs wrapped in tinfoil on my truck engine once. When I got to my destination it was gone - fallen off.

I hope it didn't hit someone's windshield. Probably would have traumatized them for days.

[Xabia Jim]

Hey Stormy, do you have any idea of the temperature of those engines where you did the chickens?

[BeanAnimal]

In underground coal mines with DC trolley wire and track equipment it used to be common to set the parking brake on a track locomtive and set the throttle up to 2nd or 3rd point to heatup the DC resistance coils so that one coud cook on them.

We also used to eat plenty of header hot-dogs on surfing trips.

[stormy]

We used the exhaust manifold to cook on(pretty hot), the top of the motor to keep it warm(not so hot) and it may have taken more than two hours to cook, it was a long time ago. A guess: the manifold was somewhere north of 400F, the motor top was just under 200F.

[Rocko Bonaparte]

Nobody mentioned Manifold Destiny?

Manifold Destiny is a 1989 cookbook (ISBN 0679723374), its updated 1998 edition (ISBN 0375751408) and a 2008 update (ISBN 1416596232) on the subject of cooking on the surface of a car engine. It was written by Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller, a photographer and a travel writer who were also accomplished rally drivers. Though neither edition remained in print for very long, the book is considered something of a cult classic in the American culinary scene due to its unusual subject matter, combining local specialties ("ready-boughts") with recipes designed with various regional and ethnic inspirations in mind, as well as evaluations of representative cars available at the time of their suitability as cooking equipment. A measure of its cult status can be found on Amazon.com, where a search in May 2007 revealed that used copies of the book sold for four to ten times the cover price of the book. In addition, despite its somewhat humorous tone, it is often cited as the primary (or even only) reference on the subject of car engine cooking.

[wotavidone]

A mate of mine used to pedal road trains up bush. He had a bracket welded on one of the exhaust stacks so he could throw tin dog (outback slang for any sort of canned stew) on there to heat up while he was driving. He reckoned you only forgot to punch a couple of pressure releif holes in the lid once. Baked on Irish stew from explodoing cans is really difficult clean off.