In the previous post, I ordered a Global Sun Oven with Dehydrating and Preparedness Package. Today, we cooked our first full meal with it. We had previously cooked some beans that we had just picked from the garden, and they turned out very well. Once Laura was confident that it would work, she prepared a full dinner using the Sun Oven. Tonight’s supper was meat loaf and a rice dish – cooked by the sun.
The rice dish was cooked in the pot that was part of the package, and the meat loaf was cooked in a loaf pan that we already had but was identical to those provided as part of the package. Both worked just fine. We started cooking at 3:30 and took them out of the oven at 5:00. With this being our first real meal with the Sun Oven, I can’t say that the results were better or worse than using a conventional oven. What I can say is that it works. Plain and simple – it works.
One thing we noticed is that the food is not as hot as food just removed from a conventional oven. That’s pretty obvious, but the thought hadn’t crossed my mind until we sat down to eat. The lesson in that is that you need to be ready to eat as soon as you remove the food from the oven. If you normally wait for the food to cool down a bit, you’ll want to plan things a bit differently.
Meat loaf and rice dishes cooking in the Sun Oven
Removing the fully cooked food from the Sun Oven
Supper cooked by the Sun
One more little detail to mention. The instructions tell you to cook a pot of vinegar and then use it to wipe down the inside of the Sun Oven before using it. What I didn’t know is that vinegar is quite an effective herbicide. The patch of dead grass at the top of the first photo is what happens when you clean it over grass and then just dump it out. When you dump your used vinegar from cleaning, dump it on some weeds – not on your grass.
Hi Stephen. I live in Louisiana, which is super humid like FL. Have you tried the dehydrator with the Sun Oven? Have you heard of any non-electrical dehydrator working in this type of climate?
Thanks for your response.
Good morning, Leslie.
I have not tried using this as a dehydrator either – for the same reason you bring up. I suspect that it would work just fine later in the Fall when the temperature drops a bit and the humidity is fairly low. I think I’ll try it now though, just to see what happens. We are getting plenty of eggplant now, and we dried some last year using the electric dehydrator. That way I will have something to compare it to. Eggplant isn’t the best vegetable to dehydrate, but it will work for testing. When I do it, I’ll just write up a post about it and include photos. Thanks for the idea!