I didn’t realize you tried to cook a whole bird with it till I re-read your post. I would stay away from trying to do this with a whole chicken. But if you just do chicken breast I would do the boiling and then browning method.


You never learn what something can or can’t do, or what you have to change to make it work till you experiment like you did.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah, I was a bit stubborn in trying to cram that big a bird and all the rest into the pot. [The carrot became stuffing because there was nowhere else for it to go.] Maybe second time will be the charm.

The chili came out awsome, though I did have to relocate the solar cooker to avoid the shade of a neighbor's tree. I think smaller pieces of food and the closed lid made a big difference.

The chicken came out of the oven and with a side of chili, well, I don't really count anything after seconds!

"...the boiling and then browning method..."

You can probably skip the browing part, that is just for looks anyway. Chicken tastes pretty much like chicken, no matter how brown it is...

An easy, quick and no mess way to brown something is to blowtorch it. I love bratwurst, it just doesn’t look right not browned. I buy the pre-cooked kind. I put them in a zip-lock bag with some water in it and drop them in a pan of hot water for a few min and then pull them out and hold them with tongs and run the blowtorch over them. No mess, they look right, taste right and it makes no mess to speak of. The pan only has to have the water dumped out, I use that water to clean the tongs off. It also works for hotdogs, I’m sure it will work for other meat.

I'm working on my solar blow torch now.

Camping out on the east side of Folsom reservoir. Deployed solar oven at 11 a.m, more than an hour late, due to getting caught up in a tracking session.

Pushed things again by going double-decker: chicken in pieces and a few veggies on top of a chili / Spanish rice / corn mixture. But this time I made sure the lid shut firmly.

Pots very hot to the touch in about 15 minutes. I moved the oven a couple times to better track the sun.

The plan was to let everything cook until at least 5 pm; sunset was near 8 pm. For a complex of reasons I packed up my gear starting about 3 pm instead of staying the night. I intended to remain in camp until the evening campfire began which would have been about 6 to 7 pm.

Best laid plans and all that. Seeing that I was packing, the troops got restless. Food was pulled from the solar oven just before 4 pm.

Top pot: chicken juicy and wonderful, accompanying vegetables too al dente. Chicken disappeared into hungry campers.

Bottom pot: everything great except slightly under cooked vermicelli strips that were part of the Spanish rice mixture. Much of the contents of this pots happily eaten by campers.

Perceived lessons:

Solar can work well but you need to get to know the oven well.

If not started early, this solar oven should "cook" as long as there is substantial sun in the sky.

May have been inadequate moisture to rehydrate the vermicelli.

Smaller pieces of vegetable seems to cook better.

Hungry campers will eat even stuff they have not seen before.

Given the perfomance of this carboard fold-up solar oven, a more efficient box oven that gets at least 75 degrees warmer [into the mid-200 degree range] is sounding pretty good.

Why not start out with simple meals, and things that won’t harm you (with bacteria) if you don’t have it fully cooked right? Move on to more complex things once you get the basics down and get refinements worked out.

Your suggestion / question has surface appeal and paying attention to cleanliness is always a good idea. But:


I want to practice cooking food I want to eat.

I do not know what progession of "simpler" foods would lead to cooking the food I want to eat. Maybe there is a scientific approach to cooking stuff leading up to, for example, cooking chicken, but I do not know what that would be.

It is easy for me to see and test whether chicken is cooked properly: flesh "bounce" to touch, whether meat "falls of the bone", presence or absence of red in juices, flex of joint tendons, how rendered the fat and skin, and color of the red meat all come to mind as some of the ways I test chicken in a few seconds. I have learned and applied these tests for many decades every time have I eaten or cooked chicken. When in doubt about the chicken or anything in contact with it, cook it more or discard it. At home I have an instant thermometer to confirm that the other tests accurately indicate the chicken has reached temperature ranges suggested in the cook books.

It is also easy for me to determine if potato, carrot, onion, garlic, and celery are cooked properly. Use of these vegetables, cut in different thicknesses. is a diagnostic for how the solar oven is cooking. I need to learn to time the cooking from these foods.

Whether rice or noodles properly cook is also diagnostic of the amount of moisture that should be added (it seems to be less than in conventional stove top cooking) and how long it should be solar cooked.

All of that said, I have moved from cooking a whole chicken over vegetables, to cooking chicken parts over vegetables, and may try cooking just the chicken parts next time.

The sort of chili stews I have cooked both included rice as a diagnostic ingredient that was tested by pulling out a few grains. The first time the rice was great; the second time the rice was good but the small amount of vermicelli noodles in the Spanish rice mix were not quite done. The small amount of the second batch I reserved and put on ice to take home was excellent after adding some water and cooking in a covered pot at 325 degrees for about 30 minutes. Again I think the second batch needed more water for the noodles.

So, I think I just need to keep after it.

Before NASA sent a man to the moon, they did a lot of other testing, what fuel to use, how much fuel to use, how to make airtight doors and a million other things. It seems you want to build a rocket to take you to the moon without testing your rocket first.

+1 on that Bob.

It's always best to start small. You may eventually get it right but you're much more likely to get it right if you start small and learn what works and what doesn't.

And even if you did get it right, would you know why? I used to be a programmer and would preach the benefits of changing code one snippet at a time only, then testing, then changing something else, then testing. My bosses used to get on my case about the waste of time. But if you change more than one thing at a time, you don't know what change fixed or broke your code.

Jumping to the final product can be the same way with cooking. You learn a lot of valuable lessons when you start small and build your way up. I like to think I'm half decent in the kitchen but I wouldn't be half as good if I hadn't experimented with stuff, made some mistakes, and learned lessons about what works and what doesn't.

To me it's like giving somebody who's never seen a microwave before a microwave and a turkey and asking them to make a perfect Thanksgiving feast. There's no way they'd know how to do it or know if it were even possible. And even if they got it right, they'd go through a lot of Turkeys learning stuff we take for granted because we've used microwaves on little stuff for years and take it for granted.