need help with solar oven purchase

[flowerseverywhere]

I know some people here cook with solar ovens. I have decided to buy a global sun oven and want some advice.

What pot seems to be most useful to everyday use?
Is it worth it to have the pans for baking? What do you bake?
Anyone found a good place to buy one? I was going to go to Sun Ovens International as I believe they are the manufacturer and they are doing a lot to help the Haitians, providing sun ovens and food.
have you found any specific cookbooks to be helpful?

[razz]

What a good question! It will be interesting to see the answers that arise.

[Gina]

I purchased a sun oven about two years ago after years of playing around making my own far less efficient ones. I don't use it too much right now, but I just love having it.

I did not buy the pans that came with it but prefer to use just about anything with a glass lid. My favorite is a low, wide corningware casserole w/lid thing from a yard sale. My next favorite is a standard metal stock pot that just fits (the cavity of the oven is smallish, but more than large enough for the 'right' pots/pans). I also use a glass lid on that.

I prefer the glass lids for two reasons - they let more sunlight into the cooking container itself for increased heat where the food is, and I can see how things are going just by looking (be careful - that can be very bright from some angles). Since solar cooking is somewhat passive, when you open the oven door to check something, you loose heat and it takes longer to get hot again w/o the flames beneath.

I don't bake much in it because I don't bake much, but I did make a small pizza once. It was ok. I used a black, shallow cake pan for it. I expect with practice they would be much better... >8) It takes a while to learn how to do different things with these ovens, but you will just love it.

I have bbq'd pork ribs in it in another shallow dark pan, and those were very good. Browned up, and were very tender and moist. The easiest and most successful things however are things like soups and stews and beans from scratch. But you generally need less liquid.

One of the biggest things to get used to is how long it takes the oven/foods to get up to cooking temps. And the fact if you want to do long-term cooking, you have to start/be ready early in the day. Sometimes for expediency, I will bring something up to heat onthe stovetop inside, then put it already hot into the solar oven. That saves lots of time especially if you are beginning later in the day.

I really like the solar oven and should think of using it more. I've fallen back into the lazy convenience of cooking inside.

Oh yes... I used to participate on a google groups 'solar cooking' mailing list. Lot's of good stuff there. They had arranged to get a 5% discount for the mailing list members from a particular dealer - dont remember who that was. You might look around 'google groups' to see if that is still in effect. If you cant' find the list, let me know and I'll look.

[loosechickens]

The Sun Oven is an excellent choice. I cook in mine most sunny days. www.sunoven.com is a good source for it, and less expensive than some other outlets that sell it. Best to just go to the source.

For baking I use the regular dark, Ekco type baking pans like Baker's Secret, available everywhere, which are better than using shiny pans. I have several spatterware, enameled metal casserole dishes with lids that I use regularly. You don't really need any special pans....I've used Corningware, Pyrex, stainless steel, etc.

However, if you use shiny pots with lids, you'll find that you can concentrate heat better (the shiny pans reflect a lot of heat back out the glass door), if you get a piece about 20 in. by 20 inches of 100% black or another very dark colored cotton, and drape that over the pot. It needs to be 100% cotton, as a poly or poly blend may melt, but cotton is good up over 450 degrees without scorching, and your oven isn't going to get that hot.

Since the shelf is in the bottom of the oven, and heat rises and the air in the oven is stratified, up near the top of the oven may be 50 degrees hotter than the bottom, so when baking, I often upturn another pan and put it on the shelf and put my baking pan on top of it, so that the food is up in the top part of the oven. Especially good for stuff like muffins that really like a hotter temperature.

I often spend a few minutes bringing something up to temp on the stove inside, then putting it in the sun oven to cook, to save time, because by the time you preheat the oven, and then put cold stuff in, it takes awhile for the food to get up to temp. I often do this with dried beans. I put the beans and cold water in the pot, bring to a boil on the stove, then put in the sun oven and cook, so that the cooking can start right away.

You get the best cooking if you learn to align the oven, not only to face the sun, but at the correct angle for the sun for time of day and time of year. I like to set up my oven at what I think is the correct angle to the sun, then stand to the side of it, with my hand perpendicular to the glass door, and move my hand straight up at a 90 degree angle from the flat glass door, and your hand should encounter the sun. That way you know in an instant that your glass door is perfectly perpendicular to the sun's angle for optimum cooking temps.

Sounds more complicated than it is. Enjoy your Sun Oven.......you can cook most anything you can cook in an oven or on top of the stove except for frying. There's hardly a day that mine isn't out there working hard for me.

[pcooley]

We love our global sun oven. We were lucky enough to find it at a thrift store, and it's still going strong years later though it's looking a little rough around the edges.

I bought a black enameled roasting pan from the hardware store, and that is what I use to cook in most of the time.

I have purchased most of the cookbooks available, and while they are all OK, none of them has really excited me. We use the sun oven mostly for cooking beans over the course of the day. For that, it's awesome, though I imagine a homemade, cardboard solar cooker would cook beans just as well. I also bake chicken and lasagna in it, though I have a tendency to leave the lasagna in too long. You can overcook things in the sun oven. Oh yeah, potatoes and sweet potatoes do excellently in there.

So, for the most part, I use mine for things that would bake for a long time in the oven, and I don't really need a solar cookbook. A friend of mine made cookies in hers, but you can't really get a big cookie sheet in there, so, to me, that's a waste of time.

[loosechickens]

solar cookbooks are really a waste of time, to my way of thinking, unless you just like to collect cookbooks and recipes. Your ordinary recipes work just fine. Obviously, you might need to make time adjustments....if a brownie recipe says 20 minutes at 400 degrees and your sun oven is steaming along at 300, it might take 35-40 minutes. You just need to learn to cook stuff until it's done, as opposed to a specific length of time unless temps are compatible with recipe, such as baked goods are done when edges pull away from the sides of the pan, and/or you can stick a toothpick or something similar in the center and it comes out clean, etc.

If you buy the Sun Oven from www.sunoven.com they include a nice black spatterware pot that is useful, and works well in the oven.

Some things that are EXTRA good in the Sun Oven, to the point where if I can't cook them in my Sun Oven (if it's cloudy, say), I just don't cook them at all. Brown rice.......I take one cup of rice and 2 cups of water and bring quickly to a boil on the stove, then pop, covered, into the Sun Oven for 45 min. to an hour, and it's done perfectly every time. Also, baked sweet potatoes, which just become luciously done in the Sun Oven.......I like it best for those very inexpensive foods that take long cooking, like baking homemade New England style baked beans from dried beans, and slow cook stews, etc. It's hard to beat for popping in one of those organic whole chickens from Trader Joe's in an open roasting pan, for a couple hours until the meat is almost ready to fall off the bones and the whole thing is nicely browned and wonderful..........

I think cookies are kind of a waste of time, too, because of the fact that you can't get a big cookie sheet in there, so have to do several loads and it's a PITA, so I usually convert most of my cookie type things to bar cookies, use a 9 x 9 or a 9 x 13 pan and make bar cookies instead if I'm using the Sun Oven.

Biscotti......it makes wonderful biscotti.....both baking the roll of dough in the first place, and then cutting it and making the biscotti.....

I LOVE my Sun Oven. They will have to "pry it from my cold, dead hands".........

[Gina]

I don't know if it's still the same, but when I was shopping for mine, at other vendors you could buy the same oven alone or with added accessories such as the pots LC mentioned. To me it was not worth it to pay that much more to get those particular pans especially since I didn't want them, so I didn't. But then I had been using my homemade solar ovens for a few years and already knew which of my existing pans worked well.

I agree that you really dont need to buy solar cookbooks. If you already know how to cook, it doesn't take that long to learn how to cook in a sun oven. There's also a lot on the internet.

Solar ovens are absolutely great things, and as the cost of energy continues to rise, I suspect will become even more popular. This thread is making me want to use it tomorrow - it's been sunny and warm here. :D

[Gina]

I was curious what the current price for these were since I purchased mine, and if they had gone up much. I only briefly looked at 2 places, the link that LC posted above - their price was $299 with free shipping. The other place's price was $219 + 29.85 shipping to continental US. http://www.sustainableguide.com/products/buy-sun-oven.php I know nothing about them, nor if they supply the little enamal pot that sunoven.com does.

With that sort of price difference, it might be worth it to look around some more. :)

[flowerseverywhere]

thank you all. I will continue to do research and fill you in once everything is in place.

[peggy]

So, I guess just about any crock pot recipe would work? Oh I want one of these! I think this will be my goal for this next summer. Get one and learn how to use it. I have a south brick patio that is sunny from can see to can't see.

[loosechickens]

of course, most all crock pot recipes cook wonderfully in the sun oven, but you're not limited to them. Pretty much, you can do anything but fry in them, although for some things, changes in how you cook them are needed.

One example is boiling potatoes. Instead of putting potato chunks in water to cover and boiling on the stove, you'd put your potato chunks in a covered pan with only a small amount of water, and steam them more than boil them.

[Gina]

We are set for a few sunny days so I just hauled out the solar oven, prepared some chili verde on the stove top the way I usually do, transferred it to my favorite solar oven 'pan', and just now popped it into the oven to simmer. I'm leaving here shorty, so it will be happily bubbling away while I'm gone. I'll re-align it to the sun once more before I go. I feel so virtuous.

:D