"My car is an oven!" Have you ever tried using it that way?

No. Baking is fraught with enough possibilities for going wrong without adding the car as oven.

When I was in Atlanta at a Cajun festival, some guy was fying eggs on the black top, but I’ve never heard of trying to use your car as an oven- so cool!

I have never tried this but with many people living in tent cities due to foreclosure, I can imagine this type of baking becoming popular.

I haven’t tried it but the dashboard cookies sound tasty.

I once did a foil wrapped baked potato near the exhaust manifold just or fun. (It worked but was not worth the effort.)

top gear once cooked some food on top of the engine while going around their race track.
it tasted awful.

You know those peanut butter M&M’s? I don’t know what it is, but they taste like 3 billion times better if they’re warm and melty inside. You can put a dish of them in a microwave, or you can leave a bag in a hot car for a little while and achieve the same effect. But both ways you have to make sure not to “overheat” them, or the candy shell will dissolve and you’ll end up not with several candy coated explosions of melty chocolate/peanut butter, but an entire bag of brown goo which you’ll feel really bad about yourself when you try to lick it off the bag.

Mmmm. Putting yourself inside a car that is at 180˚ F sounds like baked baker as well.

Someone, somewhere, did a pot roast in foil under the hood.

Didn’t the Mythbusters do this once? Sounds like something they’d do.

I should have guessed. There is a cookbook devoted to engine cooking called Manifold Destiny.

It is similar to the one on road kill.

Allow me to completely over analyze this now.

First off, from the feeling inside a car on a hot summer day, I have no doubt that you COULD cook some things inside a car. After all, the lowest setting on your oven is 140 degrees. How hot it actually gets inside a car, I do not know. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it does get hot enough to turn dough into cookies. I’m not sure it would work, I mean you do need to sort of carmelize those sugars to get your cookies brown and of a consistent texture, I’m not sure if a car could do that, because if it could get hot enough to do that, would we even be able to get into our cars in the summer? I guess I don’t know quite enough about the chemistry of baking and the maximum air temp which can be achieved by a car to answer this definitively.

The first problem I would see however is how hot is it outside, and what relationship does the car interior bear to the exterior air temp, and the amount of direct sunlight? Is there a max temp? Does it vary from car to car…like would a Hyundai Sonata and a Subaru Outback given the same air temp and direct sun percentage achieve the same internal car air temp at the same time? And what about the color of the car? We all know that a dark color will absorb more of the sun’s rays than a light color, so would that lead to achieving an even higher internal temp, or would it only cause the max internal temp (assuming there is such a thing) to be achieved more quickly.

I would content that baking times could vary widely, and you may not achieve a consistent product depending on a number of factors, from the size, shape, make, model and color of your car, to the air temp, the percentage of direct sunlight and possibly even the angle of the sun which would vary with your personal geographic location. And would there be any circumstances, or would all cars given a certain temp achieve a high enough temp to achieve what we know as “baking” as opposed to simply “warming”?

Another thing about food is the texture and indeed the flavor. Some things beg to be cooked slowly…certain meats achieve a fall off the bone tenderness with a lower cooking temp at a longer duration. Some foods however taste better if they are cooked at higher temps. Know why you can’t make a homemade pizza as good as your favorite pizza joint? Because their ovens are more intense. French fries taste way better if the oil is REALLY hot than if it’s just hot enough. Even cookies, you cook them at a higher temp vs. a lower temp, I suspect you will see a difference between soft, gooey cookies, and crispy, dunkable cookies. Not sure which way results in the best.

But having said all that, I’ll say it’s worth a try. After all, if you bring home a pizza in your car, your car smells like pizza for a couple days….I imagine your car would smell like fresh baked cookies for a couple days after this experiment, even if it failed, and that can’t be a bad thing.

I think however I would use pasteurized eggs, just in case.

No, I haven’t tried this; however, it does help with that super frozen ice cream that you need a chainsaw to hack into. It becomes soft-serve! :)

I’m such a germaphobe when it comes to food, I’d be too worried about the dough becoming a germ factory after sitting too long out of the optimal temperature range (fridge/oven temps).

@lan me, too!

There are recipes for chicken carbeque and other niceties…jerked pork, sausages…just the ticket. The cook book divides the sections into “length of car trip.”

@dalepetrie; I am almost certain that a black car would have a significantly higher temperature for a given outside temperature and sunlight intensity (the rate of energy intake from the sun is higher, so the rate of thermal exhaust to the environment, and thus the temperature difference, must be greater to achieve equilibrium), as well as a greater rate of temperature increase. But in any case, fine cuisine is not to be expected.

since it’s like 120 degrees F where I live it’s easy to do cook stuff in there but I don’t do it, except for reheating things when we’re on the go like if we bought food from a drive thru and it got cold we could just put it on the dashboard and it’s hot again

@augustlan, I have to agree. I wouldn’t be concerned about anything in cookies except for the eggs…if you could find an egg free recipe it wouldn’t concern me too much, but I’d have to look up the temperature which kills salmonella and make damn sure my car reached at least that interior temp…and though I’ve gotten into some pretty hot cars, it doesn’t seem feasible to me that the interior temp could be warmer than whatever temp it takes to kill salmonella, but I could be wrong.

On Car Talk they once helped a man cook a steak, he placed it in foil on the manifold. I once had my dog get into the groceries in the car, I overlooked piece of chicken under the seat, in the middle of a heat wave, for a few days. Unfortunately it didn’t cook completely

@Capt_Bloth – so, how did it taste?

@Ragingoli, remember when Jeremy tried his V8 blender?

@Fred931
oh yes
and when james tried the end result. i saved a screenshot of his face

And that’s why you shouldn’t leave a baby or a dog in the car.

I’ll bet a hot car would make great Smores! What a great idea. A marshmallow and chocolate wedge between two graham crackers, wrapped in tin foil and left in a car while you go shopping.