Your Toyota dealer knows that there are some strange things happening on the Missouri roads. Perhaps one of the strangest we’ve heard about is the practice of cooking a meal right on your engine as you drive. Now, we can’t recommend this practice because it could hurt your vehicle, it could contaminate the food, and it could even be a safety hazard, but since it shows up on TV shows, we thought you might like to hear about it all the same.

Engine block cooking, sometimes known as a “carbecue,” is nothing new. There are people who believe that since the car is going to be producing heat during a long drive, that they may as well take advantage of it and cook some food along the way. The basic idea is that the engine block can get as hot as a grill or an oven, and because of this it is plenty hot to cook foods. As you can imagine, this is not a precise method of cooking, and as your Toyota dealer knows, it’s not a particularly safe one, either.

Your Toyota dealer has learned that carbeque cooking doesn’t involve pots and pans. You certainly couldn’t fit those under the hood, after all! Instead, it tends to involve foil wrapped packages of meat and or vegetables, wrapped together to cook all at once. There is usually a good deal of foil used to make sure that if one layer rips, the others stay intact and keep the steam in and the engine grease out.

The most interesting part about the carbeque recipes your St Louis Toyota dealer has found is that they don’t involve temperatures or times. Assuming that you are driving down the highway at the speed limit, the recipe lists the total miles you’ll need to drive in order to end up with a well cooked meal at the end of the journey. As with cooking in your kitchen, fish takes less time than beef, and this is recorded by the mile.

So now you know, you can indeed cook a meal on your engine block. While it’s possible, we really can’t recommend it. With less effort and worry, why not stop at a roadside diner as you drive through Missouri, and catch some local flavor instead?