Is It Hot Enough to Bake Biscuits in a Parked Car?
The National Weather Service’s Omaha office conducted an automobile-baked-good experiment and shared their progress on Twitter.
Is it hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk? You may well ask. Yet as a summer heat wave held much of the U.S. in its hot, sweaty grip, with temperatures climbing into the triple digits last week, the National Weather Service did the age-old egg-on-sidewalk experiment (a summer pastime for more than 100 years!) one better. Its Omaha office set out to ascertain if, as the mercury reached sunny-skyward, it was hot enough to bake biscuits in a parked car.
“If you are wondering if it's going to be hot today, we are attempting to bake biscuits using only the sun and a car in our parking lot,” the NWS Omaha captioned a photo, posted at 8:40 a.m. on Thursday, showing a sheet pan of uncooked biscuits on a car dashboard with a digital thermometer nearby. “We will keep you posted with the progress. Stay cool!”
The first follow-up appeared, with a close-up of the biscuits, still looking rather raw, if perhaps a bit more plump, at 9:23 a.m.: “Update: 45 minutes in. Biscuits are rising.”
By 9:41 a.m., the biscuits were beginning to darken in color. “Biscuit update: the pan has reached 175 degrees in 60 minute[s] and the tops of the biscuits are at 153,” NWS Omaha tweeted, adding a cautionary note about the deadly dangers of leaving children in parked cars on a hot day. (“Look before you lock!”)
The next update, in which the team reported that the back-seat thermometer was clocking 120 degrees as biscuit baking continued, arrived 11:04 a.m. Then, at 2:09 p.m., the Twitter feed noted that the car had to be turned around due to a change in the angle of the sun and that, while the biscuit tops seemed to be baking nicely – as the back seat reached 144 degrees in the shade, the bottoms remained “doughy.”
Not long after, at 2:50 p.m., we got our next update: “Biscuits are starting to get a slightly golden tinge to them.”
The final biscuit update came our way at 4:01 p.m. Followers of the feed were treated to an image of a woman wearing a “festive biscuit hat” biting into a car-cooked biscuit and a close-up of a few of the biscuits themselves.
After almost 8 hours baking in the hot sun, with the pan reaching a maximum temperature of 185, “the outside of the biscuit is actually edible,” the NWS Omaha team relayed. “The middle is still pretty doughy though.”
And there you have it. What do you want to bet that the inside of that car smells divine?
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