People who see us conduct the solar cooker experiments, seemed amazed by the potential uses of a parabolic solar cooker. They also seem to think that it takes a lot of money to create one, when in fact there are already numerous tutorials on how to make various designs of solar cookers (including parabolic ones) with the cheapest of materials.
Indeed the possibilities are endless and an impressive looking cooker that can harness the power of the Sun, can help us understand consumer perceptions towards the use of sustainable energies in hospitality from an alternative perspective. The fact that using alternative energies is cheaper and better for the environment has been proven again and again, but for hospitality professionals the questions often are; Do consumers care? Do I get a competitive advantage? Do consumers prefer food cooked in a solar cooker more than the food I can cook by traditional methods?
Well in our attempt to answer such answers and more, we just had to try baking BREAD in the solar cooker... And as if this was not a task hard enough in the semi clouded skies of Great Britain, we decided to make the task twice as hard and place the bread mix in a see through Pyrex dish so we can video the process... 3 hours and a lot of praying for better weather later we had a wonderful loaf of bread! We of course then tested the beliefs of customers by asking them to taste a bit of the oven cooked bread and a bit of our solar bread and the results were very unexpected, and gave us the energy to carry on experimenting!
We hope you enjoy the second video of the Solar cooker series.
Springboard Grants Programme
Brighton Hospitality Research Group
Neil at the solar shop
Sukrin for donating the bread mix
Andreas Vourkou for composing the video opening jingle.
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