Thursday, July 5, 2012

Experimenting with solar oven

For the last year I've been mulling solar cooking. I looked at a couple of DIY plans as well as a couple of commercially produced ovens and finally bit the bullet this week at Earth's General Store. Today I started experimenting to get the hang of it.


I bought the reflector set (and additional $30) to help with heating and the angle of the sun, especially in winter. You can see above the oven plus reflectors at about 10 am with the Sun hitting it full on.


I cooked some potatoes and hard boiled some eggs this morning and both simple dishes went well. After two hours both were done (perhaps a bit more than done) and the roasting plans cleaned up.


I was surprised by how easy this was and the heat that built up. You  can see the steam when I opened the oven (above) and it hit 300F at 1 pm (below).


I also decided to try a desert (a raspberry/rhubarb crisp to clean out some frozen fruit from last summer).  This cooked just like in the oven. Actually, it was more like a crock pot with no browning. I wonder if I should have left the lid off?


If I get enthusiastic, I will try baking bread tomorrow.

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