How flammable can I make McDonalds?

hello welcome back to another gosh darn episode of explosions and fire how you doing today we're talking mcdonald's or as it's known in australia here mackers mackers smackers mackers you know the burger chain with the burgers and the fries and that sort of thing but we have to ask ourselves is it flammable enough and i'll be real with you here i don't think it is i'm honestly not satisfied with how flammable mcdonald's is so before we start making it more flammable we need to understand just how flammable the raw mcdonald's is i've come up with a 12 point flammability scale from 0 to 11. it's completely made up we get to assign how flammable an object is based on how well it burns i guess so you know zero it doesn't burn at all whereas an 11 is it detonating so we can track our improvements to see if we can move mcdonald's overall up the flammability scale which i've just invented that's good and now it feels like we're doing real science because i've like put a number towards it so this all seems really legit on the food side you've got the buns and the meat and the cheese and the chips and the nuggets and the filleto fish and the pickles and the sauce etc and on the non-food side you've got stuff like the bag the cup the paper straws you know the burger box and of course the toy that comes in all australian mcdonald's meals oh sick it's grimace [ __ ] i love grimace i love getting a grimace i love doing it i was [ __ ] grimaced how good is grimace i mean comment below how good grimace is right like i love how good is grimace oh [ __ ] i love grimace so it's not really surprising a lot of the paper things are reasonably flammable but a lot of the food really isn't that flammable so i think there's a lot of room for improvements is mcdonald's my favorite fast food that is a very good question thanks for asking probably not i reckon my favorite fast food is a taco bell crunchwrap i have never been to a taco bell i've never seen a taco bell but the idea of a crunchwrap supreme just sounds really good i mean i like wraps i like the concept of crunch well that's i mean it's probably the best food ever i wonder if this there's a taco bell in australia isn't there there's heaps of taco bells there's one close by i could drive there and back nearly in a day now i don't think i've ever lived this close to a taco bell that's fantastic i feel like there's an obvious solution which is just pouring a whole lot of oxidizer all over the food and then lighting it on fire and that feels like cheating we're not really making the food more flammable i mean sort of but it does definitely just feel like cheating so that's not what we're going to do that doesn't really count yeah it's still goddamn delicious on this side and the same thing goes we're not just going to put a flammable fuel all over the mcdonald's and then light on fire and count that as increasing its flammability what's up with that why would you suggest that that's barbaric this is a chemistry channel the point of chemistry is not to be barbaric to play god i want to get into that food and manipulate it on the molecular level there is an important second rule after the first i mean no cheating rule which is not using any oxidizer or external flammable fuels because that's obviously cheating we want the food to somewhat resemble food after we're done with it right if we're making a burger more flammable we need the end product to somewhat resemble a burger it's very easy in chemistry to grind things up and then turn them into tars or sludges or slimes or weird precipitates and i feel like if we just turn a burger into tar even if it gets more flammable it doesn't really count right so we can't dissolve the stuff in you know a solvent i wonder if do you reckon a chicken nugget dissolves in dichloromethane that's the thought i've just had i reckon do what i mean let's try it right the dichloromethane has a slight yellow color it's picked up something but the nuggets still look mostly fine i actually thought they dissolved a little bit better than they did anyway that has been a great use of my time so my idea of how to improve the flammability of all of these items is

through nitration now there's lots of different reaction conditions for nitration but basically you're trying to get a no2 group onto the molecule whether that's onto an oxygen or onto an aromatic substituent or just onto a carbon anywhere or even on another nitrogen in terms of flammability this is really good because it's just putting two oxygens into the structure the nitrogens also help a little i suppose but mainly for burning we're improving the oxygen balance of the food because a lot of this food and the packaging is made up of organic molecules with a lot

of hydroxyl groups the reaction conditions we're going with are quite cold we're using concentrated sulfuric acid so we can set up a nitration mix here we've got some cold concentrated sulfuric acid we're adding a nitrate salt in there which is going to generate our nitric acid and then we can go about adding our packaging materials so we've got our cotton we've got our burger box our straw and we can run that through a very gentle nitration over a couple of hours come on wash it to get rid of the nitric acid dry it out and test its flammability nice and this is really cool because in a lot of circumstances it doesn't change its actual physical properties too much it still feels like a napkin so i mean that wasn't too hard we used our knowledge of chemistry and we drastically improved the flammability of the mcdonald's packaging material however a problem arises when instead of packaging material we try using the insides of a sentient creature see we're using concentrated sulfuric acid and that doesn't really play very well with a lot of organic materials initially not too much happens as the sulfuric acid starts to pull out the water that's residual in the nugget and it will start to heat up but as the sulfuric acid starts to get hot it's able to break down the molecules in the nugget to pull water out of it which heats up the sulfuric acid again which continually breaks down the nugget producing carbon and heating up the sulfuric acid until it starts boiling and then we have boiling hot sulfuric acid which will churn through our nugget and is even able to oxidize some of that carbon to carbon dioxide and seeing as we're using concentrated sulfuric acid in our reaction mix this is obviously not going to work but what happens if we get the food really dry before the reaction mix now i did have this belief that mcdonald's food just wouldn't go off it just doesn't go mouldy because of all the preservatives they use or something like that which means if i wanted to dry it out i could just leave it in the sun for an extended period of time and then just come back when it's all dry but it absolutely doesn't work like that i don't know whether australian microbes are just built different but the food got horrendously mouldy bio has a level moldy so a much better idea to dry out the mcdonald's is with a food dehydrator we'll buy some more macas see which toy we get oh grimace i love grimace i'm not putting him in the dehydrator though don't worry i'm not going to put grimace in the dehydrator that's cruel all right why would you suggest that okay i'm not going to put cremas in the dehydrator so we divide up our cheeseburger into different parts we put some fries in there some nuggets and we let it run for i don't know three days or so until we get the stuff really nice and dry definitely worse you know i just kind of had like this softness to them which is gone let's do it like an asmr taste so miserable the dehydration has sucked all the joy out of this chip seeing as we've taken a reasonable amount of water out of the food already it's probably time for a flammability check has just dehydrating the food made it more flammable i mean yeah a little bit the fries are actually starting to get i mean somewhat flammable getting that really nice dirt nugget smell now that our food is all nice and dry we can go about nitrating it in a mix of nitric and sulfuric acid i'm just going to start with the bread and the fries here in the nitration bath because they're mostly starch and sugars i believe so they should nitrate pretty well the meat products have an extra issue which we will get to later but for now we'll just nitrate the bread and the fries after three hours we'll pull him out of the nitration bath and give him a wash in some ice cold water to wash off any residual acids then he gets a watch in some sodium bicarbonate solution which tries to neutralize all the excess acids but it goes quite badly first of all it does go a horrible yellow color which is never what i want to see the neutralization reaction releases a lot of gas which breaks apart the bread really well before long we don't have any nice pieces of bread anymore it's just a lot of bread powder but i did manage to salvage a few chunks out of it we leave it to dry initially over some calcium chloride just to try and pull a lot of the moisture out but when it looked like it wasn't really drying fully that way we used a vacuum desiccator over our friend phosphorus pentoxide to try and really remove all the residual water so after all that work and two weeks of drying is it more flammable i mean not really it's not very good at all actually my feeling is we didn't get rid of all the sulfuric acid which means it never really dries properly even over phosphorus pentoxide but maybe the nitration reaction didn't even really work that well we only ever really nitrated it right around the edges and didn't really get in all in there you know like we actually need to do so i was thinking about this how can we do this better because we need the food to stay more together but it needs to be more porous so the reaction mix can kind of you know get it on in there so what if instead of using a food dehydrator to dehydrate the food can we freeze dry the mcdonald's oh i am getting frostbite oh it's so late that's so weird so that's thought emporium who are convinced to freeze dry some mcdonald's and ship it all the way here from canada also no negative comments because technically it's a desiccated meat product so it's a mcdonald's jerky and jerky is allowed through australian customs through the post so didn't actually violate any custom laws

the advantage of freeze drying is not only does the food keep its structural integrity very well it is quite porous and very light and has very little moisture left in it it's also possible to freeze dry the least flammable items at mcdonald's such as the tomato and the ice cream for sure is what i'm excited about i mean it's chalky but it's like a nice chalky it's actually very good it just bakes like an off nugget very often i don't mind it it's bad like little bits of lettuce here crunch oh is that a pickle is it people i think we should eat our mcdonald's hydrated honestly now that we have our freeze-dried mcdonald's we can set up another nitration bath which i'm gonna split into four just in case there's some issues with components of the mcdonald's mix actually speaking of issues we really gotta talk about the nitration of the meat now don't we that's what we gotta do we gotta talk about the nitration of the meat all right i hate to break this to you but mcdonald's meat contains a component of fats and oils now animal fats and oils are made up of triglycerides which is a fatty acid on a glycerol backbone and under acidic conditions you can have a de-esterification so you can chuck off that fatty acid bit and just be left with the glycerol and then you have your glycerol in your nitration mix and it's going to turn into it's quite flammable but it is very explosive and quite sensitive so how do we manage it in this situation well i went to the best safety control i know denial that'll be fine okay back to our nitration bar we've got our bread and our fries our sort of starchy mixture in one we've got our nugget a little bit of meat and cheese in one which is kind of our like fat nitration bath and then we've got one that's the tomato and the pickles and the lettuce i'm not gonna follow up on the lettuce just [ __ ] died in the reaction mix okay what are you i'm not gonna make the lettuce flammable he'd it's not super ideal because all the freeze-dried stuff floats because the sulfuric acid is quite dense and the freeze-dried stuff is just full of air and we can't really make it sink so we just keep them bobbing on the surface once my patience is up we fish it out and put it in some ice water to clean off the acids and just have it sitting there for a little while like a little turd just bobbing around we really want to try and get all the acids out of the mixture at this step but we do another wash with sodium hydroxide this time just a very weak sodium hydroxide solution just so there's no gas generation which seemed to rip apart all our freeze-dried and nitrated material then to help it dry we'll give it a brief wash of methanol and then we'll set it up to dry i think the worst ones are definitely the bread which acts exactly like you would expect freeze-dried bread to act it's just a big sponge for liquid even though they kept their shape pretty well i had to absolutely flatten them out to try and soak up some of the liquid that was still inside of them because otherwise they just would not dry so once again we'll give this a week to dry and then we'll put it into our vacuum desiccator over some more phosphorus pentoxide i'm also going to chuck in a little bit of ammonium bicarbonate just so that it maybe releases some ammonia which will react with the nitric acid and sulfuric acid that is potentially left to help the drying process actually this is a very side point but the food absolutely no longer smells like food before even when it's freeze-dried it smells like mcdonald's after the nitration bath it smells like you'd expect a poison in a cartoon to smell it's like a cartoon poison smell if this is poison now that's how chemistry works you take something you do something else to it gets more poisonous oh and also on the other aside the uh beaker from the meat and cheese nitration mixture was actually covered in a bit of an oily film on the outside it could have just been the fats but i'm not gonna do it again no and definitely not at a larger scale don't do this i mean if you're thinking of doing this i'm what are you doing you know probably just going to mcdonald's enjoy the food like a normal person with your friends and enjoy the toy there's nothing more to it oh hell yeah another grimace hell yeah where were we oh yes making the food more flammable okay so is the food after all our efforts actually more flammable oh my god holy [ __ ] it actually is whoa i once again i get to the end of all these videos and i don't know how to act because i kind of plan the video like it's not going to work and then it vaguely works something actually worked i still think we have issues with both drying and penetration of the nitration mix but we're keeping the food together and not grinding it up or turning into a tar or slime or sludge so we're going to have that issue right here is our final assembled burger

obviously we have uh you know bread on the bottom followed by our meat and cheese slice of tomato there beautiful pickle goes on the burger followed by more bread undoubtedly a burger so obviously all the components in our burger have been freeze dried and they're nitrated got our nitrated nugget here nitro fries we've got a nitrated bag that's on a nitrated napkin it just looks like an ordering napkin but it's definitely nitrated and that is a normal cup except the straw that's a nitrated straw it's kind of burger looking i'm really stretching it so we made it more flammable i mean not by a huge amount but we did i would love to revisit this so if you have any suggestions on how you would have gone about this or other reactions i could do to try and make a hamburger really flammable i don't know why you would know this but if you if you've got some ideas i want to hear them on my own this is probably as good as i'm going to get it but with your help you bunch of psychos i could probably do a lot better look i gotta say i'm sick of this [ __ ] food though me needing so much mcdonald's i deserve some good food i deserve something really good some sort of really good food hey you hungry yeah all right let's go i mean what we've done three hours now is it three hours it's two and a half cows which is past 700 kilometers 700. seven oh lord that was really died there it is cheers all right now what