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