The Solar Cooking Podcast: Make Incredible Food With Your Solar Cooker, Solar Oven, or Sun Oven

In this season 1 finale, the microphone gets turned around as Solar Cooking Podcast host Patrick Sherwin gets interviewed by the Reddy Yeti Podcast host Josh Salvo. Enjoy this wide-ranging discussion on the origins of GoSun and the past, present, and future of solar cooking.

A solar cooker is one of the best things you can have in a disaster, since it can make food when the entire grid is down. But newer-generation solar cookers can do so much more. Did you know that some can charge your phone or any other USB-powered device. In this episode Scott and Patrick discuss all the solar gadgets you can use to turn survival into surthrival.

Solar cooking has all sorts of surprising health benefits. In this episode Scott and Patrick discuss just a few of them:

• Solar cooking preserves more of the naturally-occurring nutrients of food by cooking at slower and lower temperatures.
• There's almost no air movement in a solar cooker, allowing the food to stay moist, tender, and flavorful. Sun-baked roasts are tastier and more succulent, and sunbaked bread has unparalleled taste and texture.
  • Temperatures in a solar oven rise slowly and evenly, allowing complex carbohydrates time to break down into simple sugars, emanating subtle natural flavors.

Cooking with charcoal or firewood kills millions a year through smoke inhalation and other health complications. Plus it releases millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Patrick discusses his dreams of how solar cookers could scrub as much carbon from the atmosphere as wide-scale solar energy adoption and save many lives in the developing world. 

Coleman stoves are a great way to cook while camping, but they're bulky and heavy. Patrick discusses his experiences going to the back country with nothing but a solar cooker, his favorite camping recipes, and plans for a 7-day survival adventure with nothing but a solar cooker and his wits to survive.

Getting started with solar cooking is a blast, but you can get burned by simple mistakes...literally. Mishandle a parabolic dish and you've accidentally created a solar laser beam. Misalign your box cooker with the sun and those brownies will take hours to cook. In this episode Patrick talks about all he's learned from years of trial and error and how to avoid the simplest solar cooking mistakes.

Solar cookers come in different designs to meet different needs and different weather conditions. In this episode Patrick and Scott discuss the four main types of solar cookers and their advantages and disadvantages: box, panel, parabolic dish, and hybrid solar/electric.

One of the biggest questions about solar cooking is whether it can be done in the winter. After all, how can you claim that cooking with the sun can change the world if it can't be done part of the year?

In this episode Patrick talks about his experience eating only solar-cooked food during the winter in Ohio, the challenges that come with cooking during each season, and his favorite recipes for each season.

Welcome to the first episode of the Solar Cooking Podcast! In this inaugural episode you'll meet the hosts Scott Rank, who is just learning about solar cooking, and Patrick Sherwin, who knows a lot because he has worked in the solar industry for several years and founded the company GoSun, which makes all sorts of solar cookers. 

In this episode Scott asks Patrick

• Why solar cookers are so much better than conventional cookers
• Problems with solar cookers on the market that he tried to solve with GoSun
• His 40-day experiment to eat nothing but solar cooked food
• Why solar cookers are just as important to the future of renewable energy as solar energy or electric cars