The Barkoudah's: Izzy's Solar Oven

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Izzy's Solar Oven

This weekend Izzy participated in the 3rd Annual Brookline Youth Climate Adaptation Challenge. This is a unique science fair that celebrates nature inspired innovation, art and science. Categories included biomimicry (yes, we had to look this term up!), art and water. Izzy and John worked together to create a solar oven. This was all their own project as I was lacking of knowledge in this area. I got such a kick out of watching this come together from discussions to inception to building and finally to cooking!

Mommy was a bit worried Izzy won't remember her talking points. I don't know why I was. She can talk anyone's ear off and proved this yet again today. I was so proud of her showing how the solar oven worked to talking about the challenges we encountered with trying to cook in cool weather.

1st trial - chocolate chip cookies

Designing insulation after our 1st trial of chocolate chip cookies was a fail.

Originally, Izzy and John tried to bake chocolate chip cookies. The weather in Boston was just not going to cooperate for this. They had to battle cloudy, rainy days and even a snow day in April! We all learned that to bake something like cookies or cakes requires sunny, warm days to get the temperature inside the oven high enough. The highest we got was 150 degrees F. We all agreed we'd retry the cookies in the summer time.

Back to the drawing board we went given our lack luster weather. We decided to make crackers (similar to Wheat Thins). First we baked them in our conventional oven. Then we made them in the solar oven. Being able to taste test these crackers at the science fair gained Izzy many visitors and creative points from the judges. In addition, we tried to see if we could make a hard boiled egg. Izzy ended up with soft boiled eggs... still a success.