BBQ your steak over lava tonight, plus 4 other molten tricks

Monday, April 27, 2015, 6:27 AM - Robert Wysocki has a lava machine. 

We don’t mean a stylish bit of 70s kitsch, like a lava lamp or suchlike. No, we literally mean a machine that makes actual streams of molten rock. In the video above, you can see one experiment with pouring lava over ice.

Amazingly, Wysocki is NOT a James Bond supervillain, but a professor at Syracuse University. And rather than using it to hold the world’s governments for ransom, or some other nefarious purpose, he started it as an extension of his interest in landscape art, beginning with buying a $2,500 used furnace from a foundry equipment broker outside of Montreal.

"I rebuilt, retasked and refurbished it, hot-rodded it to be about 50 per cent more powerful than it was ever intended," Wysocki told The Weather Network. "I have about $30,000 in it and too many lost hours to know."

We doubt Wysocki really considers those hours lost, given what he uses it for. Here are five ways he’s put his high-powered tool to use.

Grilling a mean steak

If we were wandering around near an active lava flow, and we had a really long stick, we’d at least have the urge to toast some marshmellows or something. 

Thanks to his rather unique tool, Wysocki can aim a little higher on the scale of culinary ambition.

Yep. That’s seriously steak, grilled over 1,100^oC lava, along with a few other goodies that wouldn’t look out of place on a barbecue powered by propane, rather than molten rock.

As it happens, it wasn’t done just for fun. Wysocki said he tested it out as a “proof of concept” project with Bompas and Parr, a pair of culinary experts whose past experiments with food involve cooking with lightning and sending coffee beans up into space.

"Yes, the steak was perfect," Wysocki assures us. "I’m working with them on a larger project centred around food and lava."

Testing out your leaf blower

Real-life lava flows are dangerous, so one of the benefits of Wysocki’s machine is the ability to test out ideas without having to stand too close to a football field-sized incineration hazard.

Although lava is, of course, molten rock, look how easily small globules and strands of it are blown clear of the main flow by the kind of machine you could pick up at a hardware store.

"The leaf blower was an attempt to model or mimic explosive eruptions by lifting the lava in the air just as lava has been ejected by gas bubbles, driving the lava through a vent at the velocity to defy gravity a bit," Wysocki says.

He says this relatively simple project, suggested by an undergraduate student, led to the development of something a little larger: The lava cannon.

Yes, you read that right.

NEXT PAGE: The lava cannon