If you learn physics well, you can make the most delicious fried rice...right?

When I was a child, my deskmate Xiaohua asked me: "Hey, what is your dream when you grow up?" I answered without hesitation: "To be a chef."

This was in stark contrast to the "standard answers" of other students in the class (such as becoming a scientist, doctor, teacher, etc.), and I became the "alternative" in the class. The reason why I wanted to be a chef at that time was also very simple, because I was fascinated by the cartoon "The Godly Chef Xiao Fugui", and I thought that if I had such good cooking skills, it would be easy to chase girls in the future.

After all, as the saying goes: To win a woman's heart, you must first win her stomach. (Something seems wrong..) But when my mother came out of the kitchen with a gloomy face for the third time, I knew that my career as a cook was over.

I tried many dishes at that time, but the only one I cooked well was the simplest one: fried rice with egg.

The history of fried rice can be traced back to 1,500 years ago, when chefs in the Sui Dynasty discovered that quickly flipping the wok to toss the rice grains could make fragrant fried rice. This involves a key skill when making fried rice: flipping the wok.

When frying rice, the Maillard reaction will only occur when the temperature of the wok surface reaches above 1000℃ . At such a high temperature, the chef must keep the wok moving quickly so that the rice grains can be thrown into the air when the wok temperature reaches the highest temperature, allowing them to cool down quickly to prevent the fried rice from burning, while also ensuring that the flavors of the ingredients are fully mixed together.

Everyone knows the principle, but the fried rice you make yourself is not as good as the one made by a chef. To solve this problem, David L. Hu, a curious physicist (probably because he loves fried rice), conducted a study on the motion of flipping a pan.

He also wrote a paper titled "The physics of tossing fried rice" and published it in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, a journal published by the Royal Society of the United Kingdom.

Using physics to study how to make the best fried rice may sound a bit like a forced "research funding grab", but there is actually rigorous scientific research behind it.

After the project was finalized (after the funding was received), Professor Hu Lide led his research team to visit more than a dozen restaurants in China within two years, filming every move of professional chefs. Of course, detailed records were also made of cooking utensils, the heat of fried rice, and other details.

After analyzing these videos with open source image processing tools, it was found that since the wok is very heavy, few chefs would take the wok off the stove, but would use the edge of the stove as a fulcrum to keep the wok and stove in sliding contact. The next step is almost two mechanical pan-shaking actions: moving the wok forward and backward or swinging it up and down.

That’s right, it’s the kind of technology that you can learn at first sight, but fail when you do it. So what’s the problem with failure? It’s because you are not fast enough!!

Based on the video, Hu Lide established a "double pendulum" mathematical model with the center of the wok and the raised edge of the stove to simulate the movement trajectory of the wok and the movement state of the fried rice during this period.

After calculation, it is found that the frequency of flipping the pan must be at least 3s per cycle to ensure that the fried rice will not be burnt . If the frequency is lower than this, the rice that should have been flying up to the sky will just lie quietly at the bottom of the pan and get burned, and the fried rice grains will naturally be burnt. It seems that this 3s frequency may be the difference between me and the chef.

However, the harm caused by such fast wok-flipping exercise is also great. A survey shows that about 64.5% of chefs in Chinese restaurants suffer from severe periarthritis of the shoulder , among which high-intensity wok-flipping is one of the main causes.

Hu Lide's research will help design "fried rice robots" and "bionic arms", which can reduce the chances of shoulder injuries to chefs to a certain extent.

Apparently it was a bad thing that I didn't become a cook.