Cooking a meal inside a hot van with chef Johnny Oran

Temperatures inside van reached 72 C during cooking experiment

Image | wdr van cooking 4 July 12, 2016

Caption: Chef Johnny Oran surveys his kitchen, with his 'oven' in the background. (Derek Spalding/CBC)

As the heat wave in southwestern Ontario continues, CBC Windsor's Jonathan Pinto decided to test out a popular notion about cooking inside a hot car.
Chef Johnny Oran from Licia Ruby took a CBC van and looked at whether he could cook a full meal using only the van and the sun as a heat source.
Oran tried to cook fried and boiled eggs, trout and chocolate chip cookies on the van's dashboard.

Image | wdr-Van coooking July 17 2016

Caption: Chef Johhny Oran prepares to cook a meal using only the sun and the inside of a CBC Windsor van for heat. (CBC)

"It was just thinking what would cook in a good amount of time," Oran said.
"Fish cooks pretty easily, so [with trout] I was thinking, 'what fish would cook in just a little bit of heat.' With eggs, everybody knows eggs cook pretty easily … and cookies are just a staple. Everybody likes cookies."

Image | wdr van cooking July 12 2016

Caption: Chef Johnny Oran inspects his 'oven' before getting to work. (Derek Spalding/CBC)

Beginning at 8:30 a.m. the temperature inside the van read 45 C, but it didn't take long for the van to get to cooking temperature. By noon, the inside of the van reached 72 C.
After a few hours in the van, there were mixed results.

Image | wdr van cooking 3

Caption: Chef Johnny Oran shows off cookies baked using a hot van as the heat source. (Derek Spalding/CBC)

The trout cooked without a problem. The cookies were fine, but just a bit soft. The eggs did not turn out very well. The eggs on the frying pan dried before cooking, and the water didn't get hot enough to boil the eggs in the pot.

Image | wdr van cooking 2

Caption: Chef Johnny Oran used the van's internal temperature of 70 C to cook this dish of deconstructed chocolate chip cookies. (Derek Spalding/CBC)

Videos from the afternoon can also be found on the CBC Windsor Facebook page.(external link)