4 Times People Cooked Food With Volcanoes

If there's one thing that man has mastered, it's using heat to cook food. Sure, you can rub two sticks together until you get yourself a little campfire, but if you want to be really hardcore you can always just do what some people are doing: Track down a volcano or some liquid hot magma and use that to cook your food. While we wouldn't advise just trotting over to your nearest lava flow and hanging a steak over it, there are some people who figured out how to harness the insane amount of energy thrown off by a volcano into cooking food, and they're true heroes of gastronomy.

El Diablo

At this restaurant on the volcanic island of Lanzarote northwest of Morocco, chefs have been cooking meat using nothing but a volcano as a heat source since 1970. Designers built a large pit to cook the meat over, and while there's no magma, the heat coming from underground is more than ample to cook a chicken.

Sam Bompas

Food designer Sam Bompas recruited the help of a sculpture professor who's been making his own lava by heating basalt for about the past five years to grill a perfect steak, placing a grill on top of an artificial lava flow. "You get a really thick char on the outside, which frankly tastes delicious, but when we cut into it it was medium rare," Bompas told CNN after grilling the steaks on the 2,100-degree flow.

Bryan Lowry

This guy happens to have access to a real live lava flow, so he takes advantage of it to destroy things like cans of Monster Energy and Coke. We were especially intrigued by a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli that he sacrificed to the magma recently; while it exploded and spewed molten ravioli all over the place, a few chunks were left behind and definitely appeared to be edible.

Simon Turner

A New Zealand man named Simon Turner visited Marcum Crater in Vanuatu and brought along a long stick, some marshmallows, and beer. He set up a chair right next to a crater of bubbling magma and roasted up the most badass marshmallows of all time.