tea for 3

Now that I have my new hardcore solar oven I am super keen to use it! So I have set up 3 cups of tea (one for me, one for my sister and one for my brother) in my oven. Very glad the two of them are around the house this morning and willing to sample my solar tea. At 10am I filled up each mug with cold water and stuck the tea in. In my black mug I have a herbal strawberry teabag, in my sisters blue mug I have some T2 leaves in a strainer and in my brothers stripey mug i have a back russian caravan teabag.


15 mins in - Oven is heating up nicely.

30 mins in - The tea is feeling luke warm. I have agitated the teabags/strainer to help infuse the flavour. I moved the oven to better sun.

You can also see here the pancake i have cooking simultaneously in my other oven. Blog post is to follow.

1 hour in - Tea is ready!!

My brother, sister and I sat down to try our varying teas..

Neither my brother nor my sister were particularly impressed with their tea (this was partly me fault - the tea was not hot enough. As a non tea drinker I thought it was ok and I think I was a bit too excited). However I thought mine tasted ok and they both agreed after tasting it. From this we have concluded that perhaps herbal tea bags are most suited to the solar oven over the black teabags and loose leaf herbal tea. I think I will test this theory again over the weekend to see if it holds.
They also suggested that perhaps the strange taste came from the fact that the tea bags had been soaking in the water the entire time. So perhaps I will also test a mug without the tea bag and add it in once the water is hot enough as one normally would when making tea.