About 18 months ago, I moved from California to Pennsylvania.
While I like it here, it does lack one important thing… there is a total lack of Jack In the Box.
So, can anyone think of a way to have a friend buy me a couple of Sourdough Jacks and an Ultimate Cheeseburger for the wife, and have them send it to me wherein it gets here still warm?
A way to package a hot item so that it stays hot for the time it would take to be sent from, say, Oklahoma to Western PA?
The problem is you HAVE to keep the burgers in the “safe zone” 160°F+ during the entirety of the shipping. Unless of course you want [del]fries[/del] food poisoning with that.
Even if it’s doable is going to leave you with lousy burgers (ever have a “the grill is closed, but we still got these, they’ve been sitting under the heat lamps for 3 or 4 hours but, if your really jonesing” burger?).
You could freeze them, and pack them in dry ice. They will still be frozen if you ship overnight.
Reheating will be left as an exercise for the student.
Your friend might try asking the restaurant to provide the sandwiches unassembled, so he can pack it in separate baggies so you can heat the patty and assemble the sandwich yourself.
Cannot Fedex dry ice - at least without extra charge. From experience in shipping stuff back from AK there hasn’t been a problem with stuff staying frozen on an overnight shipment. I would use the dry ice to freeze the food before shipping - residential freezers work fine but dry ice seems to work better.
Vacuum pack food like substance (FLS) or use ziploc type bags with most of the air removed.
Store FLS in refrigerator to bring down the temperature.
Put FLS in cooler with dry ice and gel ice pack.
When the FLS is like bricks take out remaining dry ice and pack newspaper or bubble wrap in the cooler for extra insulation.
Ship (standard overnight is cheaper).
bon apetite!
Experiment with local FLS of inferior quality. May have to remove vegetative matter before freezing.
Do not use ice cubes. Ice will not keep the FLS as cold as the blue gel packs. Ice works fine for shipping environmental samples which only have to be cooled to 34 F, but not for frozen foods which are much colder.
(I asked Alaska Air why they have a restriction on <5 lbs of dry ice and they have told me that dry ice is toxic to animals. YMMV)
I once mailed a Sausage Egg McMuffin[sup]TM[/sup] from Hong Kong to England. It wasn’t hot when it arrived about a week later, but my friend did accidentally eat it at a party about a week after it arrived. He said it tasted fine, and gave him no ill effects.
Couldn’t you pack it in a thermos? Wrap the hamburger in plastic (Ziploc bags and plastic wrap) so that it’s watertight, put it in a large thermos, cover it with boiling water, and seal the thermos. If you send the thermos via overnight delivery, it might still be warm by the time it arrives.