Sun Oven, Part IV: Baking Bread with the Sun

I gotta admit that I was feeling a bit defeated this morning as I threw together the ingredients for bread. The results of my first Sun Oven experiment? Inedible, chemical-tasting cookies. The second one? Inedible, uncooked soup. Yipee, now I had the chance to make bread inedible.

After the first rising

I prepared my usual quadruple batch of EZ Whole Wheat Bread. My word, I love this bread. It would be a travesty to ruin an otherwise perfectly good loaf. I read over the pointers that Crystal (the same Crystal from Everydayfoodstorage.Net who developed that bread recipe) posted about baking bread in a Sun Oven. It seemed like it might be a good idea to forgo the second rising since the bread would be cooking at a low temperature for an extended time. All that extra time would give the bread the chance to rise to full height.

I preheated my Sun Oven and the thermometer read 300 degrees when I put the bread in.  The remaining three loaves I baked in my electric oven for comparison (and for insurance).

Bungee set-up

My beloved readers gave me lots of great tips in the comment section after my last Sun Oven fiasco. I took Julene's advice and raised the leg to capture more of the autumn sun and also used bungee cords to stabilize the reflectors. The bungees made a huge difference and it was definitely a windy day that put them to the test.

By 20 minutes, the glass door was covered with condensation. That was a problem. Condensation = less sunlight entering the box = a temperature drop.

Look! It's actually rising! 

I tried a couple of different methods of removing the condensation. First, I simply unlatched the door and the majority of the condensation went away. It came back within a matter of minutes, however, so I ended up wiping the inside of the door with a dishtowel.

I checked to see if the bread was done at about 45 minutes. It wasn't brown, but I thunked the top. It didn't have that hollow sound that bread should have. After another 10 minutes, the bread was ever so slightly brown and it did sound done.

"One of these things is not like the other"

Here's the finished product! Guess which loaf was baked in the sun? I read a tip somewhere that if you gently mist the bread with water prior to putting it in the Sun Oven, it enhances browning. By the time I remembered that, the bread had already been baking for a while. Besides, I used all my spray bottles to apply garlic-cayenne insect repellent this summer. Garlic-cayenne bread might taste good, but it was not what I was going for!

After the bread cooled, I eagerly sliced into the loaf. The outside was crusty but the inside was very moist. It was good and didn't taste at all like industrial strength chemicals. I've finally gotten the chemical smell cleaned out of the Sun Oven! I did miss that dark, caramelized taste I get from the bread baked in my oven. It also required more "babysitting" (oven position adjustments, condensation removal, etc.) than sticking a pan in my electric oven. Overall, I prefer oven-baked bread but I certainly wouldn't hesitate to eat this bread. Anyone would be happy to eat this bread during a power outage or while camping.  Finally, I'm able to appreciate what a great preparedness tool the Sun Oven truly is. I'm feeling pretty victorious. :)

September 2001 in Review and October Preps

September 2011 Preps

What did you accomplish in September? We had amazing weather all month long. We had very little rain or cloudy days and the highs were consistently in the 70s. The end result was picture-perfect fall weather. That encouraged this lazy woman to soak in the sun instead of prep or experiment with solar cooking devices.   

Even our sewage lagoon (our clay soil prohibits a septic tank)  gussied
itself up with a cloak of sunflowers this month. 

I did buy two bushels of apples and canned and dehydrated them. It was the first time I've used my Excalibur 9 Tray Food Dehydratoron something besides herbs and I was really impressed with how well it worked. I ended up with 3 quarts of dried apples that I'll use for desserts this winter and another 2 quarts of apples that I sprinkled with cinnamon and dried into crispy chips. The kids love snacking on those. I also made 3 pints of apple butter and 15 quarts of applesauce. Added to what was left from last year, we are fully stocked with apple goodness.

Our lovely weather is encouraging the garden to keep producing, albeit slowly.

I have enough green peppers frozen to last me until next summer's harvest. There are probably another 50 peppers still out there, so I think I'll try dehydrating the rest of them. We're still getting green beans from our remarkable zombie green bean patch and our raspberries are giving us the best harvest we've had from them yet. Not enough to can, but certainly enough for multiple batches of raspberry bars and fruit salad.

In between furious bouts of leisure and intermittent sprinklings of food harvesting and preservation, I also added some store-bought food to our food storage. I picked up some canned goods on sale at the grocery store as well as more clarified butter, coconut oil, freeze dried fruit, and tomato powder online. We are also prepared to stay warm during a winter power outage. And I'm excited to say that we were able to save up most of what it will take to buy the chicken coop of my dreams.

Oh, we also got one of these:

Christened "Goldie Butterscotch", but mostly called "Bunbun"

Mini Me has been obsessed with rabbits for about 2 years. We broke our "no pets in the house unless they live in an aquarium" rule and bought her this little guy for her birthday. Of course I also had to quickly buy a couple of months of food storage (timothy hay and alfalfa pellets) for the rabbit! That is not to be confused with using the rabbit for food storage. I don't think Mini Lops make good eating and it would definitely not be worth the trauma to our little rabbit lover.

What's in store for October: 

• I'll be returning to the Sun Oven. I'm bound and determined to cook something properly! I think I'll go for bread next. 
• After it frosts (Our frost date is quickly approaching ~Sigh~), we'll plant garlic. This will be the first time we've tried to grow garlic. Last spring we bought some garlic starts from the nursery as an impulse buy. They didn't do very well and therefore don't count! We bought a pound of "Music" variety organic seed garlic from Peaceful Valley.
• We have TONS of green tomatoes out there. I'll definitely have to do something with those before it frosts. I have several solutions in mind, so stay tuned for that. 
•  Maybe I'll do something with our pie pumpkins. We have about eight of them and while I enjoy using them as decorations, I'd like to try and cook at least a few of them. 
•  Hubby Dear and I will begin the infamous chicken moat this week. We priced out several options for fencing and discovered that this project is going to be more expensive than we thought. I'm sure it will also be more difficult than we thought, too. That's generally the way projects are at our house. Since we have never built fence before, it should be a grand headache adventure. 
• I'm still saving up for the chicken palace, but I should have some money in the budget to buy some miscellaneous preps. I'm not sure exactly what I'll buy, but it will definitely include food storage and probably more books. I'll keep you posted. 

So that's me. What did you do in September and what do you have lined up for October? 

Sun Oven, Part III: Using the Sun as a Crock Pot

This is the third part of my Sun Oven series. Part One is here and Part Two is there. I wasn't quite ready to post about my attempt at cooking soup in the Sun Oven. As you'll read, I had some more issues to work out and I wanted to play around with it a bit more. The problem is that the weather hasn't been very cooperative.

Great weather for watching football on the TV, not
so great for using a Sun Oven! 

The test of whether there is enough sunlight to cook in the Sun Oven is if it casts a shadow. That's not going to happen when the weather has been like this for a week. I'm going to post my initial experience today and revisit the topic soon.
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After the chocolate chip cookie debacle, I'll admit that I was feeling pretty deflated. What's the good of cooking with the sun if the end product tastes like the tire off an SUV? Nevertheless, I pressed on. I announced to the family at breakfast the next day that I would be making dinner in the Sun Oven. Hubby Dear shot me a skeptical look and mumbled under his breath, "I guess I'll be picking up dinner tonight."

The recipe I selected is a simple potato soup recipe that I have been making in the Crock Pot for years. It only takes about 3-1/2 hours to cook in the Crock Pot, so I felt sure that if I started it around noon in the Sun Oven, it would surely be ready by dinner time.

First, the setup:

Cooling rack in place in the bottom of the chamber

Any pot big enough to hold a batch of soup for my family will not fit on the leveling shelf.  I removed the shelf and placed a small cooling rack in the bottom of the Sun Oven. It is imperative that there is air circulation all around the pot so that it cooks evenly, hence the cooling rack.

Pot covered with a dish towel

I chopped the vegetables and assembled all the ingredients for the soup and placed them in a stainless steel pot and covered it with the lid. Since stainless steel is reflective, I covered the whole ensemble with the darkest dish towel I could find and took it outdoors.

It didn't take long for me to notice a problem.

The wind pummeled the reflectors

See the reflector on the left? It's not supposed to be bending like that. Our notorious country winds kept flipping the reflectors around. I didn't know what to do about that, so I just left the reflectors alone and readjusted the position of the Sun Oven throughout the afternoon to maximize the sunlight.

I was a bit disappointed that our local Jehovah's Witnesses didn't stop by that afternoon. The last group that stopped by asked me who I thought was in control of the universe. I was ready if they had visited while my Sun Oven was out. I was going to say excitedly, "You know who is in control? Really? Can you take me to your leader? We're establishing communication with our mother ship!" Maybe that would have weirded them out enough to keep them away for a while. As a rule, I try to be kind to proselytizers. We're just overrun with Jehovah's Witnesses who won't take no for an answer.

 In the midst of my musings about Jehovah's Witnesses, I did notice that the thermometer didn't seem to be climbing as high as I expected it to. The oven hovered around 225 degrees.

I finally took the pot out around 5:30 PM and brought it inside to check the results.

More disappointment. The potatoes and other vegetables were still mostly raw. The soup smelled good, but it was far from edible. At this rate, it would take another 10 hours to cook the soup in the Sun Oven! Since my family wanted to eat dinner sometime before dawn, I went ahead and finished cooking the soup on my stove.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, but I think the wind might have been the issue. Since the reflectors were moving about frequently, there had to be a drop in the amount of sunlight that was getting directed into the cooking chamber. I found a solution to the wind problem on the Sun Oven website, but since my Sun Oven is only on loan, I didn't feel like I should be drilling holes into it!

When we have a sunny, calm day, I'll try again. This shouldn't be so hard!

Sun Oven owners: any input on why my soup didn't cook?  

Sun Oven, Part II: Chocolate Chip Cookies

This is the second part of my series on the Global Sun Oven. You can read part one here.
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The next thing I did after I unpacked my Sun Oven and familiarized myself with it was to put it through the pre-use cleaning regimen. That involved heating a pot full of soapy water for about 2 hours and then scrubbing down the inside of the chamber and on the outside around the gasket.

Soapy water heating up. By the end of the two hours,
the glass was completely fogged over with condensation. 

Even after all that, my Sun Oven still had a lingering chemical smell. I pushed my doubts to the back of my mind and decided that the first recipe I would try would be chocolate chip cookies. After all, I had successfully baked chocolate chip cookies in my mini-van in July. This would be a great test of the merits of the Sun Oven.

While I made a batch of standard chocolate chip cookie dough, I set my Sun Oven outdoors to preheat. It would easily have reached 300 degrees in the cooking chamber within 20 minutes but I forgot to latch the glass lid. Oops!

Once the oven thermometer finally read 300 degrees, I slid the cookies into the chamber.

Cookies in!

A less than impressive amount of cookies, eh? Well, I had a hard time coming up with an appropriate pan that would fit into the oven. I settled on using this nonstick cake pan but I could only fit three cookies in at a time. If you are going to get a Sun Oven, I highly suggest that you invest in some cookware. Brownie pansor these toaster oven sheet panswould be ideal. The cool thing about the Sun Oven is that because it is  uniform in temperature throughout the entire chamber, you can stack the pans by crisscrossing them and fit several in at one time. They will all cook at the same rate. In my case, the tiny amount of cookies I baked on my solitary cake pan turned out to be a good thing. More on that in a bit.

It took about 20 minutes for the cookies to brown and look like they do when I pull them from the regular oven. They looked great, but what would closer inspection reveal?

The end result

The first thing I noticed was the texture. They came out very crispy. When cookies get this brown in my regular oven, they end up chewy, which is the way we prefer it. Lesson #1: Obviously, I can't use the level of browning as an indicator of doneness in a Sun Oven. Next time, I would take the cookies out about 5 minutes earlier.

I took a big bite of a cookie. It tasted like I had eaten a spoonful of baking powder - it was a bitter, chemical taste. I can't even describe how repulsive it was and, needless to say, I ended up spitting it out. I baked the same cookie dough in my regular oven and they came out perfectly, so obviously the chemical smell from the Sun Oven had permeated the cookies baked inside it.

This was disappointing to say the least, especially when you compare the results from my mini-van experiment.

Mini-Van vs. Sun Oven

Outside temperature and season:   110 degrees, late July     vs.    75 degrees, mid-September
Time it took to bake the cookies:  2 hours    vs.    20 minutes
Appearance:   pale    vs.    browned
Texture:   soft, a bit crumbly    vs.    crispy
Taste:   Kids loved them    vs.    Ended up in the trash

Obviously the Sun Oven is a powerful tool. It certainly has the capability to harness the sun's energy, even on cool days. The chemical taste, however, is unacceptable.

I did the cleaning routine again and the chemical odor has diminished yet further, though it has not completely disappeared. The next thing I cook will be in a covered pot so the odor can't affect the food. I'm hopeful that I'll get this to work yet!

Coming Soon: Sun Oven, Part Three: Can the Sun Oven Work like a CrockPot?

Sun Oven, Part I: First Impressions

Welcome to the first installment of my series on the Global Sun Oven. First, my disclaimer. The Global Sun Oven Company sent me a Sun Oven to try. I'm not getting paid for this; I just get the fun of experimenting with the Sun Oven for length of time before I have to give it back. All opinions you'll read during this series are genuine and based on my personal experiences.

With that out of the way, let's get started.

The Box. Gee, I wonder what's inside?

My FedEx guy was chuckling and making snide comments as he delivered my package. Hey, guy, don't knock it before you try it! We'll see who's laughing when I'm eating freshly baked bread during a power outage! I've written before about how preparedness companies should ship their products in plain, unmarked boxes to help preserve their customers' privacy. A Sun Oven box doesn't give off the "crazy survivalist" vibes that some companies' boxes would, but still. Help preserve my OPSEC, Global Sun Oven, and I'll love you for it.

The moment I opened the box my nose was flooded with a strong chemical smell that nearly singed my nose hairs. Sorry for the ugly image but that's truly what it felt like. When I was doing some research on the Sun Oven prior to receiving it, I found several customers complaining that the Sun Oven lent a chemical taste to their food. My Sun Oven was packaged with explicit instructions on how to pre-clean it prior to use. I'll follow those instructions carefully and see what happens.

Out of the box and ready to go

The Sun Oven is very easy to put together.  It is already assembled and all you have to do is pop up the reflectors and put it in a sunny location. Done!  I appreciate the handy carrying handle and strap to hold reflectors in place during storage and transport. Even with my current handicaps, I had no problems lifting it and carrying it around.

The oven itself seems pretty sturdy. Reflectors are a bit bendy (we'll have to see how well they hold up to our legendary country winds), so if there's a weak spot, it's there. The case is plastic with wood surrounding the door. The door is made of tempered glass and it is attached to the body with sturdy metal hinges. The inside of the cooking box is made of anodized aluminum and it appears to be the source of the chemical odor. According to the company, the box has a food grade powder coating, so perhaps that's the culprit. I sure hope the pre-cleaning regimen works!

In position. The reflectors still have their protective coating

The reflectors come shipped with a protective coating that you have to remove. Hubby Dear and I had a hard time peeling it off and some of it clung stubbornly underneath the rivets. He and I are notoriously un-handy, though, so you would probably find it a breeze.

Looking inside the cooking box

Here's a shot of the inside of the Sun Oven. You'll see there is a thermometer included so that you can monitor the internal temperature. There is also an automatic leveling tray so that your food stays safely contained in its cooking vessel, no matter what angle you set your Sun Oven at.

The leveling leg

Speaking of angles, depending on the season and the time of day, you might find it necessary to angle the Sun Oven in order to capture the maximum amount of sunlight. There is a built-in leveling leg that makes this easy to do, even for me.

The Sun Oven comes with an owners manual, CD, and a cooking pot

My shipment also included an owners manual, pot, and a CD. The pot is pretty small for my family of six,  but you can stack pots inside the Sun Oven to cook more food at once. Apparently you can use any dark-colored or glass cooking vessel (NOT shiny aluminum or stainless steel and thinner pots are better), but I appreciated having a pot included with the Sun Oven.  The CD includes a copy of Wendy DeWitt's very helpful food storage plan, the owner's manual, two short instructional videos and a recipe and cooking tips document.

Now that I've become familiar with the Sun Oven,the only thing left to do is start using it! I hope to clean it tomorrow and cook something with it, weather permitting.

Stay tuned for Part II: the Sun Oven takes over where my mini-van left off. Can sun-baked cookies compete with oven-baked ones?  

Can You Use a Mini-Van to Bake Cookies?

Like much of the nation, it has been darn hot around here the past few days. Day after day of 100 degree+ temperatures must have caused me to crack, because this afternoon I got the notion to try and bake cookies in my van. You've probably seen people on the news frying eggs on the sidewalk during heat waves. An egg just wasn't going to cut it; I wanted chocolate chip cookies.

A quick Google search led me to the Baking Bites blog where someone had already tried baking chocolate chip cookies in her car.  I "preheated" my van while I made the dough. I pulled my van out of the garage and pointed it towards the west-southwest, where it would get the maximum amount of afternoon sun. I used the Baking Bites recipe as a starting off point, adding in a few drops of double-strength vanilla extract and using regular size chocolate chips instead of the mini-chips specified.

Dished out and ready to bake

The Baking Bites recipe uses a slice and bake method to form the cookies. I chose to forgo this, relying instead on a cookie scoop like this to dish out equal amounts of dough. I gently flattened each cookie with my hand, hoping that would help the cookies bake evenly. The author of Baking Bites blog also lined her cookie sheet with parchment paper. I skipped this and simply sprayed the pan with cooking spray. The reason? I've watched enough videos about solar ovens to know that dark-colored cookware works best and white parchment would reflect the sun's energy. My old aluminum cookie sheets would have to do.

I placed a double layer of towels on the dashboard, placed my cookie sheet on top, shut the door, and crossed my fingers. The temperature outside was 100 degrees according to the National Weather Service, a brutal 108 degrees according to the thermometer on my deck and the perspiration on my body.


The baking begins!


Unfortunately, I didn't think to place a thermometer inside the van, so I'm not sure how hot it eventually got in there. I checked the cookies (from the outside) every 30 minutes. I didn't want to let the heat escape so I kept the door shut.

At thirty minutes - the cookies have spread out and look moist

One hour has elapsed - not much has changed, but they have spread out a little more

I'll spare you the photo at an hour and a half. It pretty much looked the same as at one hour. At this point I was wondering if this would really work.

When I went outside at two hours, I went ahead and opened the door and touched a cookie. To my utter shock, they were done!

Pallid, but cooked!

How do cookies baked in a mini-van compare to those baked in an oven?

When you cook in a mini-van (or any solar oven, for that matter) things don't brown quite like they do in a standard oven. The cookies on the left were baked in my oven; the ones on the right came out of the van. As for the taste test, I much preferred the ones from the oven, though I wouldn't turn my nose up at the mini-van ones. The Thinker actually preferred them.

 So there you go. You CAN bake in a mini-van.

Month Four Preps: Butane in my veins

I like to write posts named after lyrics from songs from my youth. I probably should have called it "Come on Baby, Light My Fire", but that would be from my parents' youth. We'll stick with the 90s today.  

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Without electricity, how am I going to cook any of this food I am so frantically storing?

Around here it is de rigueur to have at least a 500 gallon propane tank on your property. Ours runs our furnace and gas cooktop. Depending on the season and the weather conditions, a full tank will last us between 2 and 6 months. We are members of a fuel co-op and have regular deliveries to keep our tank topped off. We also buy our winter fuel ahead of time, locking the price of propane in place and paying for everything in advance. If Hubby Dear should lose his job, that's one bill we wouldn't have to worry about for a few months.

The only problem with this set up is that the starter-spark thingy that lights the gas in both appliances is electric. The furnace also uses electricity to run its fans. I can't do much about that until we get a generator, but we can easily use our stove even in an emergency with aid of a handy-dandy butane lighter.

I love this Zippo MPL. It is very easy to use and is refillable. And did I mention it is pink? :)

I bought four extra cans of butane this month. I'll get more butane as well as additional MPLs later on. 

Of course there's always matches. You can never have too many of those. I have some in our kitchen and others in our BOBs. I'm going to stock up on more as part of Month Five of my Prepping Plan.

The third item I'm planning on buying for potential fire starting needs is a firesteel. I first saw one of these demonstrated on The Discovery Channel's "Dual Survival" (Here's a link that describes all the methods they used to start a fire on that show). You rub small metal striker perpendicularly down the steel. It produces a very hot spark that will light the gas on my stove or the tinder I gather for a fire outdoors.

Speaking of tinder, I've started collecting dryer lint. Finally, a use for dryer lint! I'm filling small ziplock bags with it and putting it in our BOBs. If we do have to bug out and make a fire, having dry tinder at the ready will be vital. 

If the electricity goes off, my electric oven won't work. There are a few options for baking food without electricity:

• A solar oven, either homemade or store-bought. That method will only work if it is sunny.
• A homemade box oven.
• Baking on the dashboard of my van on a hot day. For real.  

At some point, we're going to have to consider getting a wood stove and/or a generator for backup power. For now, though, we can be sure of a hot, home cooked meal whether or not the power is on.