I think you guys need a visit from the exaggeration police. I appreciate your comments, though, as they make me think through what I have learned from my solar cooking so far.

My “rocket” is just a solar oven. It’s an oven. I don’t know about you but I have used ovens for decades. Some ovens cook hot, all have colder and hotter spots, and you have to learn by cooking food on different levels, front and back, etc. (One of my favorite ways is to place small pot pies all over the racks and let ‘er rip.) It is a trial and error process, which is just what I am doing.

Figuring out how to cook chicken in this new oven is in no way equivalent to going to the moon. The destination and every step to get there are well-known and practiced. The primary variable is how long to let things cook in the new oven, which is exactly what I am testing.

Microwave turkey? Geez! A solar oven cooks like an oven, a familiar technology, not like a microwave. Not only have many people cooked chicken in solar ovens (many, many online recipes for example) but in both of my tests I have successfully cooked chicken. In the first test only the top half of the chicken and in the second all the chicken parts.

So what has gone “wrong”? Nothing a little more cooking time or a little more water in the pot couldn’t fix. In fact that is exactly what I did to finish the dishes in both tests: put the incompletely uncooked food in a conventional oven and finished cooking them. All the food was then good and eaten.

Why couldn’t I finish everything to perfection in the solar oven? It is in the nature of a solar oven. You have to guesstimate the cooking time. Once you open the heat envelope around the pot(s) and the pot(s) to check the food you cannot quickly bring the oven back up to temperature. And in my tests the envelope and pot(s) were opened later in the day with much less sun available so I judged it impossible to resume solar cooking (I may be wrong about that but those experiments are for another day).

So what am I going to do? Cook exactly the same dishes again. Give the chicken parts and vegetables more cooking time for the vegetables (the chicken cooked fine) and give the chili-rice-etc. dish more water for the noodles (they were all that were undercooked).