Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Cookies in the Sun Oven

I've borrowed a Sun Oven from a sweet friend, and since it's been sunny, I've been out experimenting with it a bit. I got it out Monday, intending to cook some bread in it since I was baking bread anyway, but it had never been out of the box, and the instructions say to let it heat up and then cool down and wash the interior before baking in it (you know, to burn off the "new" fumes), so that's how Monday's baking went--all the bread just went in the regular oven.

Tuesday was nice and sunny, so I busted the sun oven back out to bake some cookies. Here it is all set up in my yard:
After 20 or so minutes, it had heated up to about 310 degrees. Really. All you skeptics out there that think it would take two hours to heat up a solar oven, it really did heat up in 20 minutes. Here's the thermometer:
And just for good measure, here's a photo of the back of the sun oven with the height adjustment leg to enable you to aim it right at the sun. EASY.
I made my husband's favorite oatmeal cookies and put a pan of them in the oven. The cooking chamber isn't extremely large. I used a smallish pan instead of my regular cookie sheets.
This cookie recipe is 350 for 10 minutes, so I checked at 10 minutes and the cookies weren't quite done (of course, since the heat level was lower than 350).
Here's how we looked at 15 minutes. Done. Actually a little overdone--they were a bit dry. Not burned, just a bit dry. I pulled the second batch out a little sooner with better results.
That's steam coming out the top of the door when I opened it. Yep, it gets that hot in the oven.
The cookies were delicious, and cooking in the sun oven was easy. I'm definitely sold. I'll be trying something else this week before I have to give the oven back. :)

10 comments:

Carolyn Evans-Dean said...

Very cool! I'm gonna have to add one of those to my list of things to buy... (someday!)

Chief Instructor said...

Very impressive. I'm curious - do you know the approximate air temperature when you were cooking? I've heard that the air temp doesn't make a difference as long as you have clear sunlight. Logically, it seems like a cooler day would draw heat out of the oven.

Using one of these is definitely on my TO DO list. Good info.

Angela said...

We hit a high of 60 degrees here on cookie day. I baked them about 2:00 in the afternoon, so it was probably pretty close to 60 when they were cooking.

Momnerd said...

Wow, that is really cool. I have never even heard of it before. How fun!

marci357 said...

Thanks for such a thorough writeup on the art of sun baking!

Julene said...

I am so excited to try this. My parents got me one for x-mas and it is killing me to know it is at their house right now and I could be using is. So I will be testing the cold weather cooking as I live in Utah. Can't wait!

HermitJim said...

Hey, if it can do cookies and bread...I'm sold!!

Thanks for the review!

Leasmom said...

I've wanted a sun oven for awhile. Maybe oneday in the future...

Paul Munsen said...

You can cross stack the small cookie sheets up to 4 high to increase the yield per batch.

Mia said...

That looks like so much fun! I didn't know such a contraption as a 'sun oven' even existed.