Headline:
Please Don’t Roast Marshmallows Over the Erupting Hawaii Volcano, USGS Warns
At first, this sounds like a bunch of joyless fun suckers sucking all the fun out of life. But USGS’s argument actually makes sense: the H2S and SO2 present around a volcanic eruption would probably make the marshmallows taste bad.
But the idea of using something other than an open campfire to toast marshmallows has a certain appeal. What you want in the ideal toasted marshmallow is for it to be evenly browned, not burned. You’re looking for that perfect Maillard reaction all over the marshmallow. And that’s really hard to get in a campfire context.
So why not use an indirect heat source? Could you use something like a heat lamp or some sort of radiant heater to toast marshmallows, instead of radiated heat from hot molten rocks? Why not? Even better, what if your marshmallow toasting stick had a motor in it? Just some sort of small battery powered one that, when you pushed a button, rotated the marshmallow at a uniform speed over the indirect heat source until it was evenly browned.
I thought I’d check Amazon and…well…I found this, which instantly turned me off the whole idea. I’m not sure why: maybe the whole idea of a dedicated electric S’mores maker just seems antithetical to the whole idea of S’mores.
Maybe part of the appeal of a toasted marshmallow isn’t just the striving for an even Maillard reaction, but also the added flavors of wood smoke and the great outdoors.
Or, maybe, I’m just overthinking it.
(But I strongly encourage at least one of my readers to purchase this and report back on the contents.)
You could probably rig something up with a Raspberry Pi or Arduino.
Use a temperature sensor to monitor the indirect heat and automatically adjust the motor speed, then move it out of the heat when it’s done. And perhaps play a happy little tune.
This is an interesting idea. Taking it a step further: you could have a thermocouple in the marshmallow holder as well and get a real-time readout of the internal temperature. There’s probably some correlation between internal temperature and external browning…
I’m not sure how consistent marshmallows are, though. Is it possible that an ideal internal temperature for one marshmallow would be sub-optimal for another?
Taking it a step beyond that, maybe you could use a camera to observe the marshmallow toasting and automatically remove the marshmallow when the data from the camera shows the marshmallow has reached the optimum level of brown. It might take some iteration to do this: maybe you could use machine learning to teach the machine to detect the ideal state.