Thursday, August 2, 2012

Egg Frying--Part Three

Okay, I admit it. I'm a little obsessed with trying to fry an egg in the sun. When my previous two attempts  resulted in only a raw egg and a lot of sweat, I thought I was done with this experiment. Really I did. But ideas kept popping into my head for other tries--maybe a solar oven. This idea was sealed when I talked with my sister-in-law about solar ovens. She had several ideas, but what I heard was that your car can be a good oven. Bingo! I didn't have to worry about construction, and I had heard of people cooking things on their dashboard. This was the new thing I had to try.

On the next hot day, I started by putting an iron skillet on my dashboard for a while to heat up. After it was really hot, I cracked an egg into it and closed the car. Then I waited. And waited. But that was okay because my sister-in-law said that solar ovens cook very slowly--even slower than a slow cooker sometimes. When the sun started to go down, I retrieved the egg.  Guess what I found? A raw egg.

If I were really serious about these experiments, I would be carefully studying my techniques and researching the properties of the materials I am using--doing a complete scientific analysis. However, I'm not serious in that way. I'm serious in an impulsive sort of way. Meaning when it's hot outside, it's time to crack an egg and see what happens. This method reminds me of one of the ways they taught my kids how to do math problems. It was call the "guess and check"--meaning you guess at the answer and then plug it back into the problem to see if it is right. I thought that was a crazy method at the time. However, I kind of like that model for my egg experiments.

The solar oven for my experiment.


The egg on the dashboard not cooking




4 comments:

  1. Okay, so maybe won't work for frying an egg. But I have heard of people successfully using their cars for dehydrating fruit in summer. Do you have a candy thermometer that you could test the interior temp of the car? I'd be curious to know just how hot the inside of a car gets while sitting in the sun.

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    1. I have not measured the temperature in my car, but after a bit of research, it looks like cars can max out with temps of 130-140 degrees F with 90 and above air temps. If I had researched this before I tried the experiment, I would have known that the car was not going to get hot enough to fry the egg, but what would have been the fun in that?

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  2. OMG --- you are seriously making me laugh! OK... here's a thought. How about a cast iron pan on the sidewalk inside of one of those plastic oven roasting bags... you could even put some strategically placed tin foil fins around it to reflect the sun back towards it.

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    1. Thanks for reminding me. I had been thinking about the oven roasting bags being a part of this. I'll give it all a little thought and check the weather for the next really hot day.

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What do you think?