I made an apple peel itself

So, legend has it that [music] if you take a potato and put it under extreme pressure and heat, then explosively release that pressure, the potato will peel itself. Woah! I wanted to see this for myself in slow motion, which meant building a device to do [music] this that I could see into, which is a lot easier said than done.

It's storing the energy of three sticks of dynamite, and it really wants to blow up, but I'm using engineering to try to make it not do that. It was so dangerous I had to make a blast chamber and run it remotely. The results exceeded my expectations. And it also turns out you can peel other

stuff with some pretty unexpected results, and I really don't understand what happens to strawberries. My wife certainly enjoyed it. I think she really appreciated a potato peeler with a three-stage 47-point checklist. >> I feel like I'm diffusing a bomb. >> So, this general idea is not new. This is how they supposedly peel

potatoes for potato chips and things where you can't have skin on it. I've tried to find videos of it online, and there's nothing. And that is why I'm doing this project. [music] I want to see what happens to the potato. If you're wondering how pressure and steam makes a potato peel itself, it's

actually pretty simple. Steam transfers heat to things a lot faster than air. So, when it surrounds the potato, it will heat up the skin [music] really fast. It'll do it so fast the heat will only penetrate a little bit below the potato skin. The water just under the skin of the potato will get so hot that

it would boil if it weren't under pressure from the steam. It's like a pressure cooker. But if you quickly release all the pressure, all the superheated water under the skin of the potato will boil [music] and expand, but it's trapped under the skin of the potato, so it'll just pop it like a balloon, and it should just come