Solar oven full of eggs for the chickens to eat.

For a while now I have wanted to get into solar cooking. Why? Two reasons, I like to experiment while cooking and I am lazy! By lazy I mean I really like recipes that say place in slow cooker for 4-6 hours. Solar ovens had these same directions. Things get cooked low and slow, like good BBQ.

I bought a solar oven like this one on eBay – Solavore Solar Oven. It came with two pots and a thermometer. I have tried it a couple of times empty on sunny days, but due to cool spring weather it has not gotten above 200 degrees, which is pretty good considering.

First experiment: hard boiled eggs. We found a post about cooking eggs in the shell, heaven forbid, even in the carton. Occasionally we get behind on eating eggs or the girls get ahead, not sure which and we boil up the extras and feed them back to the birds. So these two things came together at the same time and you have the above picture. The post said to cook them in the carton for 2.5 hours. I preheated the oven for 15 minutes, per the instructions. The temp showed 250 degrees, so I placed three dozen eggs straight from the fridge into the oven.

Results: at 2 hours and 15 minutes I did a check. The oven never got above 205 degrees with the cartons blocking some of the black background. The egg I checked was mostly done meaning the white and yellow of the eggs was no longer runny, but still not 100% cooked. I closed the oven back up for a half hour (15 minutes to heat back up and 15 to finish cooking) and the eggs were then done except for a couple in the one container. The instructions say it is impossible to burn the food due to the low and indirect heat, so I think next time I will give them three hours to make sure they are all done. That is unless I see it heating up past 250 degrees.

For now I am happy with the performance and the chickens are happy with the results of this solar cooking project.

Solar cooked egg after 2 hours 15 minutes at 200 degrees