Can You Cook a Steak Dinner in the Clothes Dryer?

Last night I drank a bunch and took some Ambien while trying to brainstorm my next Pizzle post.

I spent 30 minutes stumbling around the apartment, farting loudly to myself, and I ate many snacks even though I was not very hungry. Even though doctors advise you not to not to mix Ambien and alcohol, I highly recommend it if you have no job and you do not have much to do the next day. It is very entertaining.

As I drunkenly scoured the Internet, I decided it would be interesting to Google whether or not you can pop popcorn in the clothes dryer. I like the smell of freshly popped popcorn as well as freshly done laundry, so it is natural for me to search for this information. I imagine fabric softener-scented popcorn would taste like carcinogens so this did not sound like a particularly good idea.

It turns out that clothes dryers generally not reach a high enough temperature to pop popcorn. From what I read, dryers on their highest heat settings run anywhere from 140°F to 180°F. And even if the dryer was able to pop popcorn, I would be concerned that the popcorn particles would fill up the lint trap and possibly cause a fire. I do not wish to kill people for my food blog, so I decided this was not something I should attempt. But I could not stop thinking about this.

While popcorn is a small fluffy food, can you cook something less rambunctious in the clothes dryer?

A smile crossed my drunken drugged-out assface, and I cackled with the glee of a child who has discovered flatulence for the first time.

I said to myself, “Dannis Ree, you have executed countless garbage ideas for the sake of putting garbage on the Internet. You have a luxurious yet highly affordable cut of steak in the refrigerator. You must attempt to cook your dinner in the clothes dryer without burning down your house.”

Why I do these things, I do not know.

Since I am a very simple person, I decided that I would cook a very simple meal of steak, potatoes, and green beans.

When I eat steak at home, I generally enjoy eating a side of baked potatoes along with a green vegetable. Steak is an ideal protein to cook in the clothes dryer since you can eat it rare, and you don’t need to cook it to a higher temperature, like, say, chicken. Plus, potentially spreading salmonella to my neighbors via their clothes would not be a very nice thing to do.

I guess cooking dinner in the dryer is also not a very nice thing to do either, but champions like me must make very hard decisions sometimes.

I started by preparing my vegetables for the meal.

I trimmed the stems off the green beans and cut my potatoes into small cubes. Normally I prefer my potatoes baked and not dryer-cooked, but I figured that a greater amount of surface area would be better for the sake of cooking them more quickly and evenly.

I know many of you will be disappointed that I did not wish to throw my food directly into the dryer, but that is a dickhole thing to do when you share a laundry machine with other people in the building.

I also did not want to get fabric softener residue on my food because I do not think “Mountain Breeze green beans” sounds very delicious.

“But Dannis,” you say, “Won’t these bags melt in the dryer?” 

I use Ziploc bags for my sous-vide machine up to 183° for things like vegetables. The bags have a reasonable tolerance to heat and do not melt at those temperatures. There is always the chance that my dryer runs hotter than that, but I was willing to take the chance and potentially have my landlady say, “You did what to the dryer?”

I salted and peppered both the potatoes and the beans, and added a touch of olive oil to the potatoes.

Next, I seasoned my steak on both sides with a generous dose of kosher salt and black pepper.

I gave it a good fierce slap for good measure, just like I give your mother’s bottom a nice fierce slap when we are pretending to be football players in bed. Steak is much firmer than her ass, by the way. Hers is more like a loosely filled water balloon.

I eliminated most of the air in the bags by submerging them in water.

I figured that would prevent the items from tumbling around too much inside the bags. If you do not have a vacuum sealer, a neat trick is to close up the Ziploc bag most of the way and push the bag into a pot full of water. The water pushes the air out of the bag, then you seal it quickly.

Instead of throwing the bags directly into the dryer, I put them into some ratty old pillowcases that I was okay with sacrificing in the name of science.

When you tumble dry something delicate, like stuffed animals, it is a good idea to put them in a pillowcase so they don’t lose their eyes or noses while they roll around in the dryer. I do not often have the need to wash stuffed animals, but life is full of unexpected circumstances and it is important to know these things sometimes.

Finally, I tied the bags shut.

I was ready to commit to a very bad idea.

We have a coin-operated washer and dryer in the dungeon-like basement of my apartment building.

It is a very scary basement. There is a monster named Susan that lives in one of the closets who mainly comes out when I have been consuming weapons-grade narcotics.

I turned the dryer up to its maximum heat level.

At this point I was nervous. What would happen if the bags leaked or the pillowcases opened up? Would green beans break a dryer? How about a floppy flaccid steak?

The pillowcases with the food bags went straight into the dryer and I felt sad about my mental state of being.

Every time I write a post on the blog, I wonder what in my life has led me to do these things. I could have been an engineer or a doctor. Instead, I grew up to be an idiot.

After 45 minutes, the cycle was complete. I caught the smell of cooking vegetables from the dryer and subsequently laughed my anus off. I hauled my disasterpiece upstairs, scared and alone.

When I opened up the pillowcase with the vegetables in it, I was alarmed to see that the potatoes had fallen out of its designated Ziploc bag.

This was one of the scenarios I’d hoped would not happen, especially considering there was olive oil in this particular bag. Thankfully, it was only a very small amount. I have put many lip balm sticks into the dryer by accident, and considering it was only about a teaspoon of oil it did not do much damage, though the dryer now smelled distinctly of olive oil. The green beans and the steak survived, thankfully.

Having turned topsy-turvy for 45 minutes, the steak was somewhat mangled when I took it out of the plastic bag.

I used my handy Polder meat thermometer to examine its internal temperature, but it only came up to a paltry 100°F degrees, a good 20 degrees lower than it should be for rare steak, so it was still practically raw.

Something to note, though — since the dryer has a vent facing directly outside, I could feel cold air from outside coming into it. I believe this lowered the internal temperature of the dryer quite a bit. It is in the single digits in Chicago today, which is cold enough to snap my dick off, so I think it probably lowered the cooking temperature of the food by a fair amount. I imagine that in the summer this would have worked better.

I did not eat the meat right out of the bag since it was pretty much body temperature, but I did dig into the vegetables.

The green beans were practically raw; their exterior was heated sufficiently enough that the beans turned bright green, but remained snappy on the inside. I prefer my green beans crisp, but these weren’t cooked much at all. I ate some pillowcase potatoes despite the fact they fell out, and they were utterly and completely uncooked. Bummer. At least they did not taste like fabric softener residue from previous loads of laundry. I have never worried that my food would taste like fabric softener so this is a new interesting concern in my life.

But, it wasn’t all a loss. I seared the steak and ate it happily (it doesn’t take much) along with all the green beans and as of this particular moment, I have not died.

So in case you guys ever get drunk and take Ambien and decide to cook your next meal in a clothes dryer, I can say that it unfortunately does not work, and that you should do something else with your lives.

And a final note to my neighbors: I’m sorry I made the dryer smell like olive oil.