Baked Turkey
One of my favorite things to do in my solar oven is bake a turkey. We love to eat turkey year around, but in the summer, it is just too hot to turn on the oven. But with my solar oven, we can eat turkey as often as we like. For Thanksgiving or Christmas, cooking the turkey outside frees up my oven for other holiday favorites.
13 lb turkey in the GSO
Prepare your turkey for cooking just like you have always done, the way you like it best. We injected ours with butter and put a nice poultry rub on the outside, then put it into a cooking bag. . But sometime times, I just rinse the bird, baste it with melted butter. Place the turkey into a pre-heated solar oven, and cook until light golden brown. We used the GSO. This 13 pound turkey took 4-4.5 hours at an oven temperature of 325°. (This is the about same amount of time as required in a regular oven by the way.) The turkey is done when the internal temperature reaches 165 degrees F (75 degrees C) at the thigh. Be sure to use a meat thermometer. It is embarrassing to serve raw turkey. (I know this from experience.)
After you remove the turkey from the solar oven, be sure to let it sit for a while to let the juices redistribute through the meat to keep it moist and tender. Our turkey was moist and falling off of the bone.
13 pound turkey cooked in a solar oven
Can you tell that the meat is falling off the bone (look at the wing)? If not, take a look at the other side of the baked turkey — the meat has come off of the breast bone and leg.
13 pound turkey cooked in a solar oven
Here are some other posts about turkey in the solar oven.
This is totally cool! Or hot, lol! I’d love to build one of these things. We live on an acreage right now and have an astronomical power bill we’d like to eventually get rid of entirely. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a solar furnace you could hook up to your existing vent system? Turkey looks great.
Hi, there are many ways to go solar including parabolic solar cookers, solar dehydrators, solar panels, and even solar furnaces. I did a quick search for solar furnaces and quickly found plans on how to build it yourself or where to buy it. I’m sure something just right for you is just a few mouse clicks away. Thanks for stopping by. Let me know how your solar furnace works out for you. Merry