I’ve heard of manifold grilling. That’s using the exhaust circuit’s heat to cook a nice dinner. But boy oh boy, I’ve never heard of making instant rice inside an engine’s cylinders. That is until now.

Andrew is known to his friends as Bucky, and to the internet as the “dorm room mechanic.” He went viral when he hauled a Chevy V8 into his University of Idaho dorm room to rebuild it over the winter. Though that rebuild’s over, the stunts are not.

Bucky has moved out of the dorm room and is dropping the V8 in a 1975 Chevrolet K20 pickup truck he found in his grandfather’s barn. What better way to send off the old engine than to pour a bunch of instant rice down the carburetor and see what happens? No, I’m not making this up.

Where in the world did Bucky get this idea? Pouring a tiny bit of water down the carburetor has long been a sort of farm fix for carbon buildup in your cylinders. Similar to when a blown head gasket allows a little liquid coolant into the combustion chamber, the water turns into steam and “steam cleans” the cylinder and piston.

Who in the world would also throw some instant rice in there? I see almost no references to this practice, anywhere on the internet. But in 2001, a TDI forum member named Ric Woodruff asked if anyone has heard of funneling some rice into the intake to “decarbonize the combustion chamber.” Perhaps the logic is that the uncooked rice adds some grit to help the water clean out the carbon deposits. I don’t know where Woodruff got this idea. But the forum members all laughed at him.

Bucky, however, did not laugh at the idea. He tried it. With his old engine revving and the carburetor wide open he poured a few drops of water through the intake. This began to steam clean the inside of the cylinders. Then, he began dropping single grains of instant rice into the intake. You heard that correctly.

I’m amazed the instant rice didn’t just burn to a crisp inside the cylinder heads. But somehow it cooked and became soft enough to get pushed back out the exhaust valves. The pressure in the exhaust pipes pushed it through the muffler and cooked rice actually spilled out of the tailpipe. Thanks to Bucky, the internet now has an answer to the question (nearly) no one bothered to ask. You can indeed cook instant rice inside of an engine.

Next, find out what Bucky did when the administration banned the dorm room V8 restoration, or see the rice-cooking stunt for yourself in the video below: