My wife and I spent the weekend at the cabin with plans to see friends today on the lake. She wanted me to make brownies in my GoSun solar stove that I use regularly, but I didn’t have any parchment paper and shot the idea down. I was supposed to grill some chicken drumsticks for dinner, and she asked me if we could do those in the solar oven instead of on the BBQ… I had bought a Kecop brand (sold under a number of names) solar oven that is larger than my GOSUN stoves—these are large enough to accommodate 2-3 mini-loaf pans. I was hot up here so keeping the cabin cool was not a bad idea…

This was a first run on the new stove, and it came with foil mini-loaf pans like you can get at the dollar store. We had 7 drumsticks but could only fit 4 (really could have fit all of them in retrospect if I wanted to wait longer to cook), so I crushed some pepper, sea salt, and seasoning on them and put them in the solar oven  right out of our cooler. Cook time was somewhere in the 1:45 range with me opening the seal to boil off some of the water per the manual’s suggestion to help crisp them up. While not as fast to get up to temperature as my GoSun stoves, it did get to 200 degrees fairly quickly and then temperature stalled at 250F (a function of moisture content in the food, they will get a LOT more hot than that if you need) and after 20 minutes at 250 the legs were 170F internally. They got another 20 minutes to crisp them up and I pulled them as my wife started on the side dishes.

They turned out perfect-If I had more time I would have given a little more time to crisp up but they weren’t bad. I was totally satisfied with how well they cooked and the texture of the skin. With the oven still a little warm (you don’t’ want to shock cool these), I put the remaining 3 drumsticks in and they cooked until a little after we were done eating and cleaning up for the night as the sun went down-you don’t’ need full blown sunshine to cook with these.

I bought this stove after getting my best man one for a wedding present, I’d definitely recommend one after this maiden voyage.

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

Oh,…. And man…. What a smell comes out of these in the woods while they are cooking!

That's pretty cool!  And the chicken looks good!  

Forgot to show what they come with-I can’t get the pic to load right now, but nothing fancy-dollar store quality

Manual, oven mit (you need it), and I wanna say 8 mini loaf pans. You can get direct replacements at Dollar Tree or get silicone pans on amazon:

It was.. Aside from being seasoned right and a nice little crunch on the tops it was one of those meals where you are hungry because you only made one real meal that day and wolfed it down even though it was too fucking hot.

The drippings in the pan didn’t go to waste either, I used them to doctor up the dog’s dry kibble-it would make a great soup stock if SHTF and you needed to church up some rice or noodles by cooking them in it.

Oh, for the record guys, I have had more trouble overcooking food in these solar stoves than things being under cooked. Pork in particular is easy to over-do and end up dry. That, and the end of the tube is hotter than the front so you can burn a batch of brownies if you aren’t careful. I don’t have any real experience with this new one yet, but the GoSun Sports seem to take about 1:15-1:130 for just about everything whether it’s baking brownies or browning some beer brats.

I found the Gosun Sport much easier to use than I expected.

Back when I was a kid, my parents had a solar oven. It had aluminized plastic leafs around a rectangular partially silvered glass plate at the top of the box. The bottom of the unit looked like a thin metal sheet pressed over a form. My guess is the insulation in that and the walls was asbestos. It could easily get to 350deg in the winter and over 400 in the summer. A whole package of hot dogs literally only took like 5 minutes to cook. Great little unit and was fairly light. Wish it hadn't gotten lost. Would like to rebuild something like it using modern materials.

ETA: Looked like this one: SunDiner solar cooker

FWIW, they have the tray on sale this weekend super cheap to convert it to solar and electric via 12VDC. You’ll either have to buy a power cable or match it up (it’s a common computer connector).

I have the original Sport model and it was damaged in my house fire (corrosion on the reflector from the chemicals in the smoke and water, I plan to try and polish or coat the reflectors in aluminized Mylar) and replaced it with the Sport-E. I haven’t had a chance to power it yet, but Aaron at 123homefree on YT has had good luck with his until he had some delamination. He uses the hell out of it though and does things with it that you and I probably wouldn’t… like roast coffee beans and fry potato chips.

My sister has one like this, I only got to see it make chicken stew on a sunny day but it did work… Seemed like it took a damned long time, but it could accommodate a pot where none of my solar stoves would. Didn’t seem like anything you would be able to brown meat in though… and unlike these solar tube stoves, they won’t work as well as partial sun days…. The solar tubes are like a thermos that gets hot in the sun and stays hot-you only need periods of sun  to get it to temperature and it will cook. In fact, I have ruined a batch of brownies by putting them back in the tube after they were cooked without allowing it to cool enough….. my hope was that I’d have hot brownies later in the day when it was forecast to be rain showers and I got that-they were still too hot to eat 8 hours later but the back half of the tube’s worth of brownies were a dried out rock because they kept cooking. Now I wait a little while before they go back in to stay warm.

Those SunDiner things were great for hot dogs. I think I actually cooked a steak on it one time. But, the problem was that you had to seal up things that would drip since you had to point the thing towards the sun. So, you'd wrap up the steak with aluminum foil and put it on there. Getting to 350-450 degrees was pretty quick as I recall. It was way, way too easy to burn the hot dogs.

I bet the dog loved that!

Yep, he just finished his third batch (I slept in) of melted chicken jelly on his breakfast…. He was whining for it and woke me up while she was mixing it in for him.

Forgot to mention where to get them and price-several brands and about a $10 difference-this is the high end at $205, so check shipping:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08B3GBSDW?tag=arfcom00-20

Now this is cool. Might have to look into one of these.

I have thought about a solar oven in the past, but in my overcast geographic area, it hasn't been an option to consider. These newer ovens(?) with the vacuum insulated or evacuated tube are intriguing. This makes me wonder how long they hold a vacuum or if a vacuum is lost, is it something I can repair myself?

The GoSun with the DC auxiliary heat would be a good option in my always overcast region. I can see where if I can add a few extra Watts of extra heat I know I could make it work.

I would try the GoSun Sport even without the aux heat .  The vacuum is a continuous piece of glass (like an old style Thermos without the metal shroud), and they seem pretty tough.  The manual does point out not to cold shock them (don’t cook one thing and then swap in frozen food immediately).  I don’t think the tube would be repairable if it breaks, but they seem pretty robust so far.

You don’t need constant sun-just enough periods of sun. It will take longer to cook but still get done. These are like sealed Pyrex (heat treated glass) thermoses that get hot in the sun-even after they cook your food, they can be used to keep it hot for 8-12 hours (usually dries it out though). The only way for them to lose vacuum is to break them somehow, and you’ll know it immediately because the chemical coatings on the inside of the glass immediately get frosty from exposure to the atmosphere and corrode.

The tubes are fairly tough-you don’t’ want to make a habit of dropping them, but they do take a surprising amount of roughy handling. Where you CAN hurt them is with shock cooling. Like any material, the glass expands and contracts with heat. As long as it happens evenly and fairly slowly, nothing bad happens. But if you have really hot food in them and take the tube out and add something cold, you get localaized cooling in the tube and they can and do crack.

I have the original GoSun Sport and now the Sport E. I haven’t tried to plug it in yet, but given the cost it seems a nice capability to have, especially if you want to cook and can’t because it’s cloudy out. It’s worth knowing that you can cook indoors with these if you have a large window or door wall, they don’t have to be outside. One of the things we appreciate about having these stoves is that my cabin isn’t air conditioned so running a stove and baking in the summer is not super comfortable…. It’s pretty special to throw chicken legs in one of these and then a half hour later the smell comes wafting in from the woods thru a window.

There hasn’t been anything I have made in my original GoSun that didn’t cook. Some things take longer than others and the day might not have the best weather-it’s just a time/temperature thing for the most part-I have made cake in a raw solar tube I bought on EBay with nothing but a windshield reflector……on a 20 degree day with some clouds:

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

I’ll add that you want a meat thermometer to do it right with these… the ramp up in temperature isn’t like a regular oven so it’s easy to overcook food. The bagged/marinated pork loin in the above pic was wayyyy overdone and ruined because I didn’t have a way to make sure it was done and wanted to be safe because it was pork. I’d rather eat pillow stuffing than that again.

GoSun is running a SCREAMING Buy One Get One 48 hour deal for Father’s Day….. if you guys want to get into this type of cooking on the cheap, this wouldn’t be a bad way to go-in fact, I think it’s a better way to go than a single Sport unit because you can cook more than one thing at a time:

https://gosun.co/products/solar-oven-kit?utm_source=Klaviyo&utm_medium=campaign&utm_klaviyo_id=01HDT4TPH1BC01XMGATPKTX1N7

Very neat! Thanks for the review!

Ok, went back to the cabin-weather wasn’t as good but the chicken was good enough I wanted to try again for my Dad on Father’s Day.

As you can see from the pic, the sun wasn’t out. We got up to the cabin, I spent a few minutes opening the place up and put the chicken in the solar oven. After that, we went to shoot for an hour and a half or so. When I got back, the oven internal temperature was 250F like last time, but I had no idea how long it was that hot and how done the chicken was, so I probed them with a thermometer. They were 170 internal temperature, so clearly done. They weren’t as browned on the outside and didn’t render as much water and oil from the fat as last time but were clearly done-done. I cracked the stove to vent steam and closed it up in the hopes of getting them to brown a bit more. Gave that 15 minutes, got impatient and served them for dinner. Dad says they were the best chicken legs he had ever had, no idea if he was BS’ing me or not, but they were good. We ate dinner, screwed around for a bit and then I remembered I had 3 more to cook. The sun was getting low, so I put them in and basically left them until the sun was below the trees. The thermometer was at 150deg., and had been for close to 2 hours so I pulled them near dusk. I was pretty sure they were safe to eat, but the following morning I zapped them in the microwave and we had them for brunch.

So, yeah, you don’t need full sun to cook good food in these:

Attached File


Before browning:
Attached File


Finished product, probably had another 30 minutes longer to cook than a fully sunny day:
Attached File

NOT JUST FOR SUNNY DAYS!


Cliff Notes: Total cook time was 5 hours, but it was fully cooked internal temperature-wise in 2 hours. During those two hours it had 30 minutes of off and on sun thru clouds until it became total overcast and stayed that way until the 4-1/2 hour mark. In this weather, it didn’t cook much in the three hours extra it stayed in there, but the meat didn’t dry out-I think it’s because it has a sealed bung at the end of the tray with a fairly small steam escape hole.

————————————————


I’m getting more and more impressed with this stove. It could be 10 degrees out with skies like this and it would still make piping hot, fully cooked meat.


Did another run of chicken legs today under poor conditions…. I don’t like Chicken this much, just trying to have repeatable experiments as I learn this oven.

Conditions were very overcast today. Sun was shining for the first and last 30 minutes of the 4 hour cook time. Temperatures got to 250 in the front of the oven per the stock thermometer and the meat was “done” at hour 2. I made stainless steel mesh standoffs to get the meat out of the drippings and poured those off at hour 3, then put the chicken back to see if it would get crispy. No dice. When it got sunny at the end I had hope but was worried that the meat would be dried out. When I opened the tray to drain the fluid, the oven had a hard time getting back over 200 deg. Until the sun came out.

My wife had the sides ready for dinner so I didn’t let it go longer, the deepest tray on the insert was a little dry on the top side, everything else was fine. It was well cooked meat that would have been fine to eat 3 hours earlier…


So, if you want crispy chicken, it needs to be sunny early in the cooking. Severely overcooking it doesn’t seem to ruin the meat.

Time to start with something different. Attached File

Attached File

Back in my backpacking days, all we had was a reflector baker

You wouldn’t backpack with one of these, but there are models small enough to do it with. I just picked up a pair since this thread went up for Memorial Day (on sale again for $40 during their 4th sale at Gosun). It’s a shorter, smaller diameter version of their Sport model that will definitely burn your Brats and brownies.


On thing I think is an issue with the stove being reviewed in this thread is that the reflector isn’t very good or that it’s difficult to aim you can’t tilt it and it’s bent so much that not a lot is exposed to the sun. I’ll have to experiment with angles and openings, but I get the feeling it could be better even though it seems to work well.

Attached File

Attached File

One other thing to know about these stoves is that you can let them cool a bit down after you pull your food and then put the food back in and it will keep the food warm for most of the day. If you don’t cool it down, they will continue to cook and you’ll end up with a hard burned brownie brick or whatever that’s dried out because the steam keeps escaping.

Sun’s out, time for more experimentation. Well, that, and my wife weaseled out of making dinner because she decided to wait until I came home to paint the front door… Apparently any cooking done outside is “my job” now that we have a good smoker/grill/griddle…..


So, I came home and planned to bake some cakes but my wife started crying about the pork chops I said we’d have because they and the two leftover chicken legs were in the fridge long enough they had to be cooked. Imagine my surprise that the two cuts of pork were perfectly sized for the silicone pans!

I seasoned the meat, put in my stainless mesh grease standoffs, dropped them in the silicone pans, slid them in the solar oven, and pointed it at the sun. All meat went into the oven at refrigerator temps. Here is a breakdown of time/temperature buildup:

Minutes:      Temp.           Notes:

18                    110
35                    150
47                    170
59                    200
1h 16m            227               Had to readjust for slight tree shadow, don’t think it affected cooking
1h 31m            250               Opened to check liquid, temp stabilized at 240
1h 53m            250               Opened to drain the liquid off, decided to check deepest piece of pork…. 210deg… Ooops…. (I thought)

(Note that it seems to temperature stall at 250 degrees, this is related to the moisture still boiling off in the food-the pork was 210 when I pulled it, which is just under the boiling point for water. I need a test where we don’t need to eat the meat as soon as it’s ‘done’ to play with cracking the bung open to let steam out and see how much of a gap is worth the temperature tradeoff, if any)

So, what we can get from this is that the stove will get to a temperature that will safely cook pork in about 45 minutes in full sun. At that 170 degree internal temperature, the meat won’t be ready yet but the stove will continue to stay hot internally and keep cooking it even if you zip it up and take it inside.  What impressed me the most was not how fast that happened, but that it did it yesterday in basically no sun in 2 hours…. This thing is a totally viable way of cooking in a SHTF, you just need to plan around the time for preparing your side dishes. Even without the world coming to an end, it has value to me because my BOL cabin has no air conditioning (yet) so cooking indoors this time of year is both very uncomfortable and uses Coleman fuel I have to stock.

So…. How did the pork chops turn out? Fantastic! I thought for sure based on the last time I did pork in my bare tube it would be as dry as eating newspaper but even with the 210 deg internal temp being about 45 degrees higher than you’d want for pork it was super tender and juicy. Not as much browning as in an oven, but it was getting there and I pulled them thinking they were overcooked. I had some fairly burned spots in the silicone pans that I had to clean off. I will say that I much prefer throwaway miniloaf pans for cooking meat after doing it for a while-cleaning the silicone pans takes more of my time than the aluminum throwaways are worth to me…. They are dirt cheap on amazon. I also want to do something different for the mesh grease standoffs…. They are not tall enough, fragile in the size mesh I made them with  and a real pain in the ass to to clean burned on meat/fat/skin/blood.

I had low expectations for the pork,  but couldn’t have turned out better… The smell was strong enough to bring the neighbor out and start asking around, and the dog is starting to get a little entitled over the drippings…

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File



Next up should be muffin mix done in two different stoves. Weather isn’t calling for any sun until maybe thurs. or sun. We’ll see if it’s bright enough to chance it-I’ll be up at my BOL and will want something to do anyway.

Guys,…. You really do want one of these style stoves. The smaller GoSun Sport sized stoves are capable of cooking as fast or faster than this, but the small tray size sucks for most foods, you can’t really cook for two people, and you can’t cook different things without making them taste like each other because they share juice. It doesn’t have to be this particular stove, just one that is also large enough to take mini-loaf pans. Amazon has plenty, it’s definitely worth getting one with a thermometer on it like this one though.

Very informative thread.

My initial impression was that these were gimmicky, but they look quite impressive and the sale prices look surprisingly reasonable.

There’s a YT channel called 123HomeFree where a guy lives in a sheep pulled wagon and lives a minimalist lifestyle, he uses one of the Gosun Sports (the smaller one with integrated reflectors above) for all of his cooking. He even roasts coffee beans and fries potato chips-some of the stuff he does is abusive so don’t copy everything he does…. The main thing is don’t shock cool the tube by putting cold food in a hot tube, don’t preheat it much, and let it cool down slowly by cracking the door and introduce outside air slower than just opening it up. You also don’t want to leave it in the sun with nothing in it, but you can “oven clean” by leaving in in the sun and not putting the tray in.

Oh, keep the hot tray away from the nylon straps, they will melt thru them.

Pretty cool! Would it be possible to use a wireless thermometer? Perhaps a grommet in the end cap to pass the probe-to-transmitter wires through? It would probably help out a lot.

I think 123HomeFree is one of the people I saw using it that made it look at least passable.  

Your drumsticks are much more motivating.  Think I'll have to get one of these.

Yes-you’d have to put a hole in the end cap or englarge the steam relieve hole-Gosun sells one and the thermometer for this. I’m probably going to do this to one of mine-I’m recovering from a near total loss house fire so my ability to make things and fix things is limited to tools on hand for now.

I’m a supporter of his and phone him once in a while-his average method of cooking tends to be more expedient and “get it done” than looking for best results… that, and a guy eating a sheep eyeball doesn’t care if it’s grilled to perfection, lol.

Up at the cabin for the weekend, will be testing several stoves and hopefully the electric Gosun Sport tomorrow and maybe the Gosun Fusion tray in my raw solar tube I got from EBay or Amazon some years ago.


First up: Gosun Solar Kit. These were $80 for two a month or so ago, currently $40 each on a 4th of July sale. These are cute and might be valuable for backpacking as they come apart and pack small but not sure how useful they could be as you are talking about just enough volume in the tray to feed one not-super-hungry person. Be great for time with a child or grandchild for baking cakes and cookies or hotdogs though.

So: practical test…. Making safe water to drink is one of the most basic needs this forum would have, so…. I filled one up with water to the copper layer inside the interior glass and put it in the sun. Didn’t put a lot of thought into aiming perfectly but …. Rolling boil in 53-55 minutes under partially cloudy conditions, wife used the water to do dishes:

Attached File

Attached File

Second run in cloudy conditions as the sun got low to make water for dinner dishes: The water got pretty warm early on but as the sun went down it didn’t stay warm in the tube. By the time I brought it in the cabin it was not better than room temperature. I think the cap doesn’t insulate as well as the other larger stoves-it did the job and was warm enough to use, but I was hoping for more boiling water and squandered the opportunity-but, that’s what microwaves and propane on demand hot water heaters  are for.


I baked two packages of muffins, berry and chocolate chip. Each one ended up being just right for a mini-loaf pan, and I put it in the plain tube with a tray some old guy used to make and sell on EBay. The sun was never really good for this run and it was later in the day-my hopes weren’t high … Result: The loaves rose in the oven under sunlight, but didn’t quite cook all the way. I switched out the tray and pulled out the electric tray that Gosun sells for the Fusion stove-the Fusion has the same tube inner diameter as mine but is shorter, which is fine. It took an additional 40 minutes under 12V power and they were quite done-burned on the bottom… hooray for silicone pans!. I really need to get on the stick and make reflectors for this one-this is the same stove I overcooked the shit out of a pre-marinated pork loin in a plastic bag with a car windshield reflector:

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

$40 Gosun Solar Kit

Cheddar Brats: 1:11 min under partly cloudy skies

One stove coooked a little more done than the other but both were cooked and browned with crispy skin all over. Could be the sealing on the lid wasn’t as good one one oven when I set them up-both were aimed about the same. The only problem I had was getting the little trays out and handling them-you are supposed to use the “hook” on the lid to pull the tray out but my hook was too rubbery. I had to use a screwdriver and pot holder.

Not super fun to clean burned on drippings-a credit card saved the day:

Attached File

Attached File

Attached File

Potatoes, cut, oiled and seasoned for our grilled steak: 2 hours until very cooked. Fusion tray in silicone pans in my bare tube with some tin foil for a reflector. Not crispy yet but starting to fry:

Attached File

Attached File

Gosun Sport-E: This was my first run on this stove, but I have had a standard Gosun Sport for about 7 years. Was a mostly sunny day, it cooked two smoked sausages in 1 hour and 6 minutes. Way more than we need for lunch-the two sausages took up the whole tube. I sprayed the tray with olive oil first to cut down on the scorching and it seemed to work. The dog will enjoy dinner tonight…

I rearranged them in the tray prior to the pic for more cook time but upon seeing them they were more than done. The one that split all the way down was in the far end of the tube, the other split 1/3 of the way.

Attached File

Been cooking with the thermal probes Gosun is blowing out for $19. Takes ALL of the guess work out and you don’t have to open the solar stove to see the temperature if you use an oven or not. Bit of a game changer because you don’t need to guess at how long to cook on days that aren’t fully sunny.

Attached File

The pictures make it look like a normal temp probe. Is there anything special about them that makes it work better with the solar oven?

The shape of the probe maybe-it isn’t bent 90 degrees at the end like my normal ones I use. Other than that, it’s just cheap on close out and runs on AAA batteries.