In the 1970’s and 1980’s there were several books the either had characters that did it or promoted it.
Why is there no cooking tray in my new car’s engine bay?
Is it dangerous? (It would be less physically dangerous if there was a specific spot for it.)
It’s very hard to get the car inside the kitchen.
In the 70’s fuel was cheap.
Nowadays, if I need to let the engine run for an hour, I can go to a michelin star restaurant for the same price. (OK it’s an over statement, but there is definitely cheaper and more optimal way to cook a meal on the road)
Op, what’s unsaid here is that there’s planning and enough required knowledge that is a barrier to entry for most people.
Planning: the engine will only get hot enough to do this after a drive of 30-45+ minutes, plus cook time. So for each person, each trip, it means specific planning of what to make, and when you can make it.
Knowledge: engines vary in design, and people vary in their comfort in how much they trust themselves to do things in their engine bay without risking damage. Taking some wire, making a secure spot to hold something wrapped in foil, and it not being in the way of anything AND if it slips or comes lose won’t get caught in a belt is something I feel fine doing, but I do a lot of janky redneck stuff all the time.
Most people barely know how to change their oil, and since the 90s, more and more cars are complex such that they seem designed to be repaired and maintained by someone else not the owner. This makes the simple act of opening the hood intimidating for most people. One survey I found online puts comfort in doing basic cat maintenance at 20% of people. Extrapolate from there an increasingly small group that is comfortable doing weird stuff, ok doing risky weird stuff to their car, and who don’t want to stop at a real restaurant to eat on a road trip (where my spouse will prefer to pee, not the side of the road), and you get a small enough number of people that is not surprising this isn’t common.
Most car trips don’t warrant a stopping for food.
There is very little space in the engine compartment on modern cars.
The engine usually run around 90°C which is not enough to boil water. You could use the exhaust pipe but that is harder to reach.
There’s a diner in town that tastes like this is how they cook their sausage, except it’s done on a 70s era F150.
Considering the amount of cancers related to exposures to petroleum products, is this a real question asking why we don’t cook on something that runs on vaporized petroleum products and is lubricated with petroleum products?
You can run it through a heat exchanger. I mean, if there was enough demand, you could do it. Probably are some aftermarket modifications out there to do it. People definitely have done it before.
I can give a handful of plausible reasons why you wouldn’t want to generally do it, though.
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While car engines do produce a lot of waste heat, they normally do so when a car is moving. Your trip length probably isn’t directly tied to the amount of heat you want to cook, or the times you want to cook. And cooking in a moving vehicle is going to either require you to work in sealed containers or deal with sploshing. Like, even in an RV, there’s more to this than just “run heat exchanger off the exhaust, route heat up to oven”.
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You can use a car idling to produce heat, but then you’re burning gasoline, not to mention adding some wear-and-tear to your car’s engine, just to get a portion of what you would by taking a container of white gas and cooking on a camp stove.
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Depending upon where this goes – and it’s probably gotta be pretty near the car – you’re liable to need to deal with grease spatters or whatever. Do you want to deal with bacon grease or whatever on the car?
I mean, if I were going to cook a little bit with energy coming from a car, my first choice would be something like an Instant Pot insulated pressure cooker running off a lithium ion power station charged off a car’s electrical circuits. That contains the food, is energy-efficient at the cooking stage (IIRC, only microwaves are more energy-efficient than an insulated pressure cooker), lets me move away from the car to cook if I’m camping, and lets you use other sources of power (like solar if you’re in some kind of vehicle off-grid or charge via A/C if you’re at the grid, which is cheaper than gasoline). Most of the time you’re gonna be cooking near a car, I suspect you’d also like to have a source of electricity, so your power station serves multiple duties. If you have an electric car that can provide power while it’s off, then you don’t even need the power station, since you’re already hauling one around.
If I wanted to specifically grill, then there are propane (if you’re in Europe, I understand that this is often commercially available as “LPG”) grills.
I think that most “serious” in-vehicle cooking (food trucks, RVs) use propane.
If you want to cook with something akin to gasoline, there’s Coleman camp stoves. The fuel basically amounts to gasoline without gasoline additives that might be an issue for cooking; I thought that this was “white gas”, but according to the WP page, Coleman fuel has some additives aimed at stoves rather than cars that aren’t in white gas. The fuel will cost more than gasoline; it looks like about 4x, checking online.
EDIT: There are also denatured alcohol camp stoves. The US has a huge amount of non-food-grade ethanol production. Last time I looked, it was about 40% of global capacity. This is a subsidy to corn farmers and mostly gets mixed into gasoline, but I’d guess — without actually comparing prices or how the subsidy gets applied — that it probably also means that if you’re in the US, you probably also effectively get subsidized denatured alcohol fuel, since if nothing else you can leverage economy of scale in the production infrastructure.
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We have natural gas cooking.
So, yes.I don’t think the vaporized petroleum is supposed to be on top of your engine block, but rather remain quite within it.
I don’t know too many people that actually follow regular maintenance schedules.I wouldn’t trust that just because it’s supposed to be inside, it actually stays inside
I’ve used the combine engine to warm up meals during harvest. About 20 minutes on the turbocharger heats a foil pan of stroganoff quite nicely.
My dad used to do something similar. He used to pack leftovers in tin foil and keep it in the engine bay of the tractor so he could keep going and stay out in the field not have to halt everything to have dinner way back at the house.
Cause the oil to have near your food is NOT motor oil, cause the exhausts could kill the entire family reunion, cause it’s incredibly wasteful… and so on.
Motor oil? What are you cooking on, an early 2000s Subaru?
Not who you’re replying to. But yeah, there’s plenty of vehicles that old on the road. We’re a couple, and we get by with just a single '06 Toyota Carola. So why not an old Subaru? Cars were better then! They have buttons!
Anyway, it definitely gets dirty enough in that engine bay that I wouldn’t want food in there.
What you can do safely is get a pack of cookie dough, wait till it’s summer time(hotter the better), be in Texas, Arizona or similar state, put cookie dough on pan and leave on your dash board, go to work.
When you get out of work you’ll have fresh baked cookies and your car will smell amazing!
One of my co workers at Disney did this, I’ve never tried it but every time I walked past their car with the cookie pan in the windshield I thought it was brilliant.
Mythbusters has an episode (Food Fables) with Alton Brown where they cook a thanksgiving meal in the engine bay. It went surprisingly well, although figuring out where to put everything and the different cooking temps were tricky.
It is very hard to time your trip so that you get there when everything is done. those who try it either have overcooked food or have to drive around for a while after they get there for the meal to finish.
in the end it works but not well enough to do it. Even truckers who eat on the road find separate appliances better.
My wife’s family once baked potatoes in the engine compartment during a road trip, just to see if it would work. Enough fumes leaked out of the engine that everything tasted slightly of oil and exhaust. Car engines are much tighter now, but I’m sure you still get a similar effect.
I don’t really know, but I would assume that taste represents quite a bit of random poisonous stuff in your food. Probably if you do it a couple times, it’s fine, the human system can take a lot of abuse in short doses. But if you made a habit I think it would mess you up.
Everyone’s overlooking that op asked why cars weren’t designed for cooking with the waste heat from the engine.
I think you could easily have a loop out of the radiator that was used as a heater for an enclosed air frier.
Totally a waste but it would be feasible
That’s literally how your car’s heater works. But it didn’t get that hot because the radiator dissipates most of the heat.
What you really want is to replace the water in the radiator with fry oil, and have a little basket for deep frying things in there glove box.
It’s too hard to get direct contact with the engine. And thanks to the invention of plastic engine covers all the heat is trapped largely under them. We heated some burritos once on a trim on my moms grand Cherokee.
Also I have a boxer engine so it’s kinda hard to get down to the engine itself, and the plastic air intake doesn’t get very hot.
