Aerosol Power

September 7, 2023 3:43 AM

I love Easy Cheese, but I find that it comes out of the can too slowly. Would it be possible to make it come out like silly string? Details inside.

So really there are two questions here, one practical and one theoretical.

On the practical side, is there any reasonable way with tools available at home to (safely) make Easy Cheese shoot out of the can like a rocket?

On the theoretical side, would this even be possible? Could someone like, I don't know, buy the company and change the formulation or something to make this happen, or would it result in something unexpected?

posted by Literaryhero to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

Best answer: Practically, you could gently heat the whole can. At some point it will explode. Before that, the cheese will come out much faster. This in principle could be done safely if you exploded a few in a controlled, safe environment, so you know what the safe range of heating without exploding is. But you probably aren't going to do that at home, so it's really only safe in theory.

Theoretically, the factory could pack more propellant into stronger cans. The cheese would the come out faster, but at some point the mechanics of the cheese come into play, and what starts out as a faster stream of a continuous connected bead of cheese foam will begin to break apart into a cheese sputter, then a cheese spritz, and eventually a sort of atomized cheese, sort of like spray paint, or a sand blaster.

A cheese blaster, if you will.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:35 AM on September 7, 2023 [23 favorites]

Best answer: You can use a whipped cream dispenser and charge it with multiple canisters (up to the limit in the dispenser's instructions) and make your own soft cheese, which will almost certainly blast out faster than the official Easy Cheese dispenser.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 5:53 AM on September 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

Best answer: If you have a 150 ton hydraulic press and a custom pressure pot at home, you can make any cheese into Easy Cheese.
posted by flabdablet at 6:42 AM on September 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

Best answer: There's a little plug in the bottom of the can where the propellant goes in. I suspect if you popped the plug out and then blew high pressure air where the plug used it be the cheese would come out really quickly.

Going off of SaltySalticid's comment there might be a note on the can that says something like "Do Not Store at Temperatures Above 120F". If you have an immersion circulator, you could set the temperature to 119F, toss the can in, wait an hour, and see if the cheese came out any faster.
posted by gregr at 11:38 AM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: Ok, thanks all. I am, obviously, not going to do any of these at home, but I still would love to have a can that blasts cheese out over the horizon. Maybe someday...
posted by Literaryhero at 6:20 PM on September 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mod note: [btw, SaltySalticid's answer and this question have been posted to the sidebar and the Best Of blog]
posted by taz (staff) at 2:16 AM on September 10, 2023 [2 favorites]