The All American Sun Oven

 

Cook, Bake, Dehydrate, or Boil with the World’s Most Universal Power Source – Free Sunshine

Our story

 

Since 1986, the Sun Oven has helped people cook meals with nothing but sunshine. Anywhere there are sunny, bright days, delicious food is just a sunny afternoon away.

Today’s All-American Sun Oven is solar cooker ideal for a climate-changing world. There is no cleaner, more eco-friendly power source than the sun. .

We’re proud the Sun Oven has stood the test of time, becoming more relevant than ever. Whether your power grid is unstable, you’re an outdoor enthusiast, you want a low-emissions lifestyle, or you need another oven because you love entertaining — the American-made Sun Oven outlasts and outperforms other solar cookers. .

In an era of declining quality in products, our Sun Ovens are still cooking up feasts for our long-time customers after a decade, two, or more. There’s no sense making products to save the world if they’re not built to last — and we’re a sensible company. .

Whatever the reason you seek a solar cooker, the Sun Oven outshines the others. That’s because we believe in what we do: We build quality American-made solar cookers for a climate-changing world.

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Customer testimonials

"Solar cooking is amazing. The All American Sun Oven is awesome and an excellent choice for longtime solar users like us and It is so easy to use it is great for beginners as well. So far we have made hard boiled eggs with no water, fried bacon, cooked biscuits, baked cookies, and the best baby back ribs I ever tasted."

Guitarzan

"I am delighted with the American Sun Oven because it really works. On a sunny day it rapidly reaches 350 - 400 degrees. And, you can easily prepare two loaves of bread and two meals in only a few hours. With the American Sun Oven all I need is the sun."

Gary Morgan

"I can not express how much I love my sun oven, I only wish I would have spent a little extra and got all the goodies! What I think I love most MADE IN THE USA! This is one item you must-have for your outdoor kitchen."

JCF/TLF

"This oven is a great way to save energy and avoid heating up your kitchen. If the power goes off you can still cook with this as long as you have the sun. Anything you can bake, roast or braise will work great in this oven.This is definitely a keeper!"

Kimberly Davis

"My scepticism has dissolved. The American Sun Oven has turned out several beautiful loaves of wholewheat bread. I feel certain that anything that can be cooked in a 300-350 degree oven can be cooked with an American Sun Oven."

James Petty

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Benefits of Cooking in a Sun Oven

Benefits of cooking in a Sun Oven

  • Cook for free - Bakes, boils or steams Any kind of food with the power of the sun - No fuel needed!
  • No learning curve - Create your favorite recipes as you feast upon natural sun baked treats!
  • Just like your home oven - Reaches temperatures of 300° to 400° F!
  • Totally safe - No danger of fire - Never burn dinner again!
  • Versatile, easy-to-use, portable as a small suitcase!
Cooking in a Sun Oven is easy, fun, natural, and nutritious, while helping the environment. Sun Ovens are ideal for everyday use in your back yard, at picnics, while camping, or in the event of a power failure. They can help keep your house cool in the summer by keeping the heat from cooking outside.

Sun Oven cooking

Even though it is called an oven, food can be baked, boiled, and steamed at cooking temperatures of 300° F to 400° F. There is no movement of air in a Sun Oven, allowing food to stay moist and tender and flavorful. Sun-baked roasts are tastier and more succulent, and sunbaked bread has unparalleled taste and texture. The aroma of food sunning itself in a Sun Oven is sure to please your senses.

Temperatures in a Sun Oven rise slowly and evenly, allowing complex carbohydrates time to break down into simple sugars, emanating subtle natural flavors. The even temperature of the Sun Oven prevents burning, so you do not need to stir your food while it is cooking.

There are two ways to cook in a Sun Oven. If you refocus the oven to follow the sun every 25 to 30 minutes, cooking times and methods will be very similar to cooking with a conventional stove or oven.

Or a Sun Oven can be used for slow cooking, much like a crock-pot. You can prepare your dinner, put it in the Sun Oven, point the oven where the sun will be approximately halfway through the time you will be gone. Leave, and come home to a tasty, slow-cooked dinner. If you run late, there is no need to worry; the Sun Oven will keep your food warm, moist, and fresh for hours.

The History Behind the All-American Sun Oven

Sun Ovens have been changing lives ever since a Rotarian named Tom Burns got inspired to help people cook food without fuel or emissions back in 1986. Hailing from Milwaukee, Burns was a well-traveled man who grew concerned at the extensive deforestation he saw internationally on those travels

Though retired, he’d run restaurants for much of his career and was shocked at how much pollution some regions had just from cooking. Burns thought if people could cook without fire, it could slow the pace of deforestation in places like Africa, where the climate had already begun changing.

Burns didn’t invent solar cooking, but he saw its potential and sought to make it accessible — something easy to use, so language and education barriers didn’t get in the way. He worked with Sandia National Laboratories to make a more effective solar cooker. Using an array of reflectors and a well-insulated cooker box, they devised an easy-to-pack-up solar cooking solution.

By the time Burns retired for good in 1997, the Sun Oven had made its way around the world. World Vision camps used Sun Ovens to feed people in developing countries, mountain climbers cooked meals without leaving propane canisters in the wild, refugees had healthy meals wherever they were camped, and soldiers in the Gulf War cooked in daylight without flames or smoke alerting their enemies.

In 1997, Sun Ovens International stepped in when Tom Burns stepped away to retire, for real this time, and SOI continues making the Sun Oven with the same care and passion Burns had.

The Science of Solar Cooking

The All-American Sun Oven doesn’t just make food without fuel, it makes cooking safer.

Not needing charcoal, gas, wood, animal dung, or other fuels is a game-changer for nearly a third of the world’s population, who don’t have electric cookers. Cooking with smoke indoors is among the leading causes of death worldwide for children under five years of age, thanks to smoke inhalation.

Often, the ‘healthy’ solution is simply to cook outdoors — but that doesn’t solve the issue of emissions, and the Sun Oven does.

So why doesn’t the Sun Oven create black carbon or other harmful emissions?

With sun-powered ovens, it’s not the sun’s heat making tasty food, but rather its UV rays. Once those UV rays hit the cooker, they’re converted into infrared rays, and as it makes molecules vibrate rapidly, they get hot – which, in the case of your food, means it cooks.

Some solar cookers act like a greenhouse and merely capture those rays. The All-American Sun Oven’s reflector ring captures more rays, making it capable of getting hotter, and staying hotter, for longer. The Sun Oven also performs better year-round, thanks to that reflector array. Plus, the cooker’s well-insulated design means that once meals are cooked, they can be kept warm until mealtime much later.

You already know how you cook affects the taste. Consider a chicken that’s grilled, fried, roasted, or microwaved – they all have wildly different texture and taste. Folks who’ve roasted a whole chicken or turkey in their All-American Sun Oven swear by it, saying you’ll never eat a juicier bird, because it’s not dried out through direct heat.

Who Needs the Sun Oven?

If your region routinely has an UV index of 6 or 7, with reliable and unobstructed sunlight several hours in a day, the Sun Oven may be the outdoor cooking solution for you. For nearly four decades, our customers have used their Sun Ovens in myriad ways.

  • RV enthusiasts use Sun Ovens so making a roast doesn’t mean the RV gets cooking too
  • Folks who hunt and fish love cooking their catch where it’s caught, without worrying about campfire bans or safety with gas, fuel, or open flames
  • Anyone with unstable power grids or increasing energy costs can cook meals for free, for years, with only the sun
  • People who love entertaining but need more oven space – because, hey, you can roast a whole turkey in a Sun Oven
But that’s just in the United States.

The Sun Oven is simplifying lives in more than 126 countries. From high in the Himalayas to remote villages in Africa and throughout the Caribbean, Sun Ovens get meals made. From hobby chefs living off nature’s bounty to subsistence cookery in places where every meal is uncertain, the Sun Oven is an easy-to-use, low-emission solution time and again.

Location, Location, Location

Depending where and when you use it, solar oven performance varies. For best performance, some recommend using Sun Ovens when the UV index hits 7 or above. All solar ovens need the sun high in the sky, with uninterrupted and clear sunlight for a few hours, depending what’s cooking. Most foods cook in 2 to 3 hours.

Where the All-American Sun Oven outshines its competitors is in its ability to function year-round in places that enjoy clear, long sunny days – like, say, Phoenix, AZ or on the Mexican Plateau. This is because the Sun Oven is so well-insulated, making the most of days with weaker sunshine or even seasonal haze.

Further north, that outcome wouldn’t be the same in the mid-winter, because northern regions suffer from the sun being lower on the horizon for a greater portion of the day. Low-horizon sunshine is weaker, less direct, and less effective for cooking with, because it shines through much denser atmosphere. But northern solar cooking can be done — it’ll need a deeper tilt, and there are after-market modifications available for doing this.

Further south, the sun remains higher on the horizon, with less atmosphere in the way, so it cooks better – but winter temperatures may hover around 300 degrees, for long slow cooking, rather than a hotter oven you’d have mid-summer.

Why Do You Need a Sun Oven?

The Sun Oven might be the cooker you never knew you needed. Talk to elders in Italy or the Deep South USA and they’ll tell you great food has one ingredient you can’t buy — time. That’s true of the Sun Oven. If you’re in a rush, it’s not for you. But if you’ve got the time and the sunshine, we’ve got your favorite new way to cook.

But don’t take our word for it. Online, passionate solar-cooking communities love to share All-American Sun Oven recipes and their ingenious methods. We’re constantly in awe of the creativity and deliciousness cooked up by Sun Oven devotees.

Sun Ovens International Facebook Page
Solar / Sun Oven Cooking Group (not affiliated with our company)

If the power grid goes down, if the house gets too hot, if you’re camping during a fire ban, if entertaining a huge crowd — the Sun Oven’s what you need. No plugs, no fuel, no flame — just sunshine and you’re cooking.

The All-American Sun Oven maximizes the sun’s power. It’s so well-built, you’ll be passing it down to a new generation of chefs in 20 years. If you want the toughest, made-in-America, most efficient solar cooker, then you need the All-American Sun Oven.

The F’s of Sun Oven Cooking

Why Cook in a SUN OVEN? It's all about the Food!

The F's of SUN OVEN Cooking Cooking in a Food Friendly SUN OVEN is Fresh, Flavorful, and Fundamentally Nutritious.
  • It's Fun It seems almost mysterious to put raw food into a black box and remove a moist, tender, sun cooked dinner. You can enjoy a leisurely day knowing the sun is hard at work gently cooking your dinner.
  • It's Forgiving SUN OVEN cooking is the most forgiving method of cooking you will ever experience. Sun cooked food does not burn or scorch, and is very difficult to overcook. A SUN OVEN transforms unskilled cooks into outdoor gourmets.
  • It's Financially Favorable After the initial purchase, there is no more money to spend. You do not need to use electricity, or buy charcoal or gas. You can cook outdoors throughout the summer and keep you house cooler, reducing air conditioning costs.
  • It's Friendly to the environment The sun energizes food without hurting the environment. The air is not contaminated with smoke or greenhouse gases, and no fossil fuels or electricity are required.
  • It's Flameproof A SUN OVEN can be used in parks that ban open flame cooking. There is never any danger of fire or of burning food or forests.
  • It's Fossil Fuel Free The sun comes up every morning, and harnessing the sun for cooking does not deplete the earth of its resources.
  • It's a Family Favorite Using a SUN OVEN can be one of the most satisfying events you can plan with your kids. You can turn off the TV and computer, let the machine pick up the phone, and go outside and make a sun snack. In addition to healthy food, the family can learn about the power of the sun, nature and the environment through a fun tasty object lesson.
  • It's Flexible You have the option of choosing how long it will take to cook by choosing how often you refocus the oven toward the sun. SUN OVENS are portable and easy to carry, enabling you to use them in your yard, at the park, on the beach or while camping or boating.
  • It Frees up time You spend less time preparing, tending and cleaning up sun cooked meals. You can place a frozen meal in your SUN OVEN in the morning, set the oven where the sun will be mid-day, and come home from work to a meal that has thawed and cooked while you were at work. Cleaning up is easy because the even temperature of your SUN OVEN prevents the food from burning or scorching your pots or pans.
  • It Foils the Forces of nature A SUN OVEN enables self-sufficiency in the face of the increasing number of weather and natural disasters which lead to power failures. You can purify water or cook your dinner in the event of a black-out.

Changing the World

IN USE AROUND THE WORLD - BECAUSE WE MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Diverse peoples use SUN OVENS® around the world for many and varied reasons. Sun Ovens have been adopted by people around the world including:
  • From governments in developing countries looking for solutions to deforestation – to North American families looking for a way to bake without heating up their kitchens.
  • From women in the rain forests of Africa who can’t find wood to cook with – to deer hunters in North America who love moist venison.
  • From Americans concerned with power disruptions and increasing fuel costs- to Pakistani women who can not afford the high cost of fuel to make their dinner.
  • From ice fishermen in Minnesota baking their catch on a frozen lake – to desert dwellers in Kuwait baking lamb.
  • From RV enthusiasts looking for fresh moist roasts – to environmentalists trying to preserve the planet for future generations.
  • From micro-bakeries in Honduras making bread and pastries to an orphanage in Uganda feeding hundreds daily.
The one thing they all have in common is that they have all discovered that solar energy is the least polluting and most inexhaustible of all known energy sources and it is free. Sun Ovens are the foremost and most effective solar cooking devices available anywhere in the world.

AROUND THE WORLD

Sun Ovens International is striving to develop and implement comprehensive solar cooking programs which will radically decrease the developing world’s dependence on fuelwood and dung as the primary cooking fuels, while benefiting the environment, raising the standard of living, and improving the health of the poor worldwide. The exploding population throughout the developing world has hastened the ever-increasing need for firewood, severely enhancing the degradation of land and creating massive deforestation which often leads to desertification.  This land abuse is not inclined to decrease without giving rural residents another method of food preparation. Sun Oven International is committed to innovative methodologies which harness the power of free sunlight to decrease a family’s use of fuelwood and charcoal by up to 70%, while improving their quality of life. Sun Ovens International has been innovative in developing methods of placement, training, and marketing to assist in the positioning of over 75,000 family sized Sun Ovens the U.S. and more than 100 developing countries, and 250 large VILLAGER SUN OVENS in deforested developing countries.

Saving Lives by Preserving Forests Around the World!

Sun Ovens International, Inc. is committed to providing an alternative to cooking with wood and charcoal in deforested developing countries that have been blessed with an abundance of sunshine. Sun Ovens can have an enormous impact on the everyday life of millions of people by:
  1. Reducing the demand on forests.
  2. Reducing health hazards.
  3. Improving women’s conditions

A Deforestation Alternative

Forests are dwindling at a more rapid rate than ever before. One third of humanity, over 2.4 billion people, depends on wood and charcoal to prepare food and the worldwide supply of wood is rapidly decreasing. The demands of massive population growth and the inefficient conversion of wood to charcoal have outstripped much of the world’s forest’s ability to regenerate, creating a phenomenon known as deforestation. Deforestation is the gravest environmental crisis facing the world today. Its far-reaching effects include:
  • The decreasing availability of firewood.
  • Removing the trees from an area is to remove its source of life. (Deforestation has left more than 25% of the continent of Africa almost useless for cultivation.)
  • Forests protect the soil against erosion and reduce the risks of landslides and avalanches.
  • Forests increase the rate that rainwater recharges groundwater as well as control the rate that water is released in watersheds, helping sustain freshwater supplies.
  • Forests affect the climate. The occurrence and strength of floods and droughts increase when they are eliminated.
  • Forests are an important source of oxygen.
  • Forests store large amounts of carbon that are released when trees are cut or burned.

Reducing Health Hazards in Developing Countries

The use of Sun Ovens can eliminate the use of up to 70% of the wood which is currently being consumed for household cooking. The acrid smoke from cooking fires subjects women and their children to levels of smoke that at times are often 100 times above the international safety standards. This results in 3 deaths a minute, totaling over 1.6 million deaths each year. Bio-mass smoke has many harmful effects which can cause or contribute to:
  • Acute respiratory infections (Respiratory infections are one of the world’s leading child killers. A child is two to three times more likely to contract acute lower respiratory infections when exposed to smoke than an adult.)
  • Pneumonia
  • Tuberculosis
  • Lung Cancer
  • Asthma
  • Lower birth weights
  • Cataract
  • Nervous and muscular fatigue
The use of SUN OVENS reduces the amount of acrid smoke from cooking fires by up to 70%.

Improving Women's Conditions

In many deforested communities, the gathering of wood is no longer a simple matter. As the supply of wood decreases, women must travel great distances to find wood. Many women in developing countries must spend several hours each day collecting fuel-wood. As women and girls travel increasing distances gathering firewood, they are forced to expose themselves to greater risk of beatings and rape. Once wood is gathered, women spend many hours stirring food. Food cooked in a Sun Oven does not require stirring, freeing up time for income generation and other more productive activities. The use of Sun Ovens can dramatically improve the quality of life for women and girls.

Does More Than Cook

In addition to cooking, a SUN OVEN® can also be used in a variety of other ways including:
  • Boil or pasteurize water
  • Make sun tea
  • Naturally dehydrate fruits, vegetables, or meats
  • Heat water for a sponge bath
  • Kill infestations in grains or dried foods
  • Sanitize dishes
  • Dry firewood
  • Sprout foods
  • Decrystallize honey or jams
 

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