The Hollywood Sign is seen high above drying vegetation in Griffith Park on March 29, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Los Angeles Is Hot Enough to Cook a Meal in Your Car

By Annie Wang
July 26, 2018 Updated: July 27, 2018

There are plenty of ways to tell how hot the weather is. However, attempting to cook food on your car’s dashboard might be the most surprising of them all. Interestingly enough, it can be done!

Staff from Take Two, a local group of journalists in Los Angeles, challenged the heat with a three-course meal, including frozen Thai vegetable gyoza, one quesadilla, and several chocolate chip cookies. It was an epic remake of Buzzfeed’s earlier demo of cookies baking on an Arizona dashboard, according to LAist.

The uncooked food was placed on a tray wrapped with tin foil. The staff then took the tray to their experimental oven, a 2010 Honda, in the parking lot.

According the USDA, foods should be cooked thoroughly to a safe internal temperature, which ranges according to food type from 140 to 165 degrees.

Fortunately, the hot sun was being very helpful that day, and the car hit more than 190 degrees inside, reaching the lower end of the temperature range of a standard toaster oven.

After several hours of successful baking, the staff shared the food with the rest of the newsroom and revealed their reactions to each course.

The gyozas were delicious inside, but the edges were too overdone. The quesadilla was also very dry, but the cheese made it still edible. And the cookies had a perfect top but the bottoms were a little squishy.

Overall, the experiment was a success. The staff left readers with some tips, such as black cars work better, and the food needs to be flipped for it to cook evenly.

In addition, keeping everything on a separate tray is critical to prevent anything from overcooking or the taste of one dish affecting the other food.
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