Featured Image Credit: Tom Scott/ YouTube
Garlic bread fresh out of the oven is a delicious treat but what about if it had just returned from a trip to the edge of space?
One YouTuber decided to test it out.
In 2018, Tom Scott sent a chunk of garlic bread nearly 22 miles (35 kilometers) up to the 'edge of space.'
He recruited Random Aerospace, a company specializing in high-altitude balloons, to get the bread up in the sky and strapped a GoPro to it to document its journey.
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In a video about the wild experiment - which has been viewed more than 61 million times - Steve Randall from Random Aerospace explained prior to the flight: "We're using a weather balloon today. We're going as high as we can with this payload.
"As it goes up, the atmosphere is getting thinner and thinner and there's less and less air pushing in.
"The balloon itself will get bigger and bigger. Eventually the balloon will pop and the equipment will parachute down to the ground and we'll go and recover it."
The bread was tied to a piece of Styrofoam, but left exposed to the atmosphere during its journey, hitting temperatures well below freezing along the way.
Bizarre footage shows the half-baguette - baked that morning by YouTube cooking star Barry Lewis of the My Virgin Kitchen channel - floating around high above Earth as it reached heights of up to 35.8 km.
Then, as the balloon popped, it dramatically started tumbling back down to terra firma.
But, the experiment didn't end there. Once the garlic bread returned, they decided to eat it, even going as far as keeping the other half of the baguette on Earth to conduct a comparitive taste test.
The final verdict? Cold and chewy.
Comparing the two, Scott said: "[The space bread] tore completely differently. So, [the Earth bread] ripped. This one went 'click.'
"It's definitely got an icy middle. I mean, that has been frozen in the stratosphere. You can sort of see the color of the middle of them. It's whiter, isn't it?
"This went to the stratosphere and I'm eating it!"
Funnily enough, garlic bread isn't the first food item to be sent into space. In 2001, Pizza Hut partnered with the Russian Space Agency to send a vacuum-sealed, 6-inch salami pizza to the International Space Station on a Progress resupply vehicle.
Upon its arrival, Expedition 2 Commander Yuri V. Usachev reheated the pizza in a space oven and ate a slice, becoming the first person to eat pizza in space. What a title to hold! You can watch the video here.
