Baking in January with a Sun Oven


Bread, Sun Oven

Ice and snow are on the ground and our high temperature today has been 33 degrees.  I decided to break out the Sun Oven and bake some bread.  While I didn’t have any trouble getting my baking temperature up, I went too far testing out another “what if”.

The Question

My main bread recipe is a three loaf recipe and my Sun Oven only holds two bread pans.  I was curious to find out if it was possible to bake all of the dough from my usual recipe at once in the Sun Oven using two overfilled loaf pans.  I hoped they would just bake “up”, but instead they spilled over and fell forward (thanks to the way my oven was tilted to catch the lower winter sun).  Lessons learned:  1)  Don’t economize.  2)  Follow recipes exactly.  3)  I’ll need to find and use a different two loaf bread recipe.

 

9:00 am

It’s important with a Sun Oven to start the preheating early.  To align it correctly, aim it toward the sun and evenly position it between it’s shadow behind it.  About once an hour you’ll need to realign it.  Finally, tilt the oven until the shadows made by the side panels line up with the front wooden rim of the oven.

11:00 am

By 11:00am I had 300 degrees.

Bread-making process

For detailed instructions, visit this post, but here I’ve made my dough, allowed it to rise once and formed it into loaves.  I did not allow it to rise in the loaf pans.  Off to the side, I’m using a pencil to hold a part of the oven door open to allow steam to escape.  From this point on, my oven temperature dropped to 250 degrees.

End result:  Lessons learned

In the end, I gave it a little under two hours to cook and at that point it was 1:30 in the afternoon.  I knew I had a mess on my hands and I wasn’t sure what had cooked and what hadn’t.  Opening the door means losing heat and it was 1:30 in the afternoon.   Because morning sun brings more heat than afternoon sun, I knew trying to get a baking temperature wouldn’t be easy.  So, as a result, I gave up.  It was mostly baked; I put it into my conventional oven for about 15 minutes.

 

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