Every time a parent brought in their child for a dental appointment, Dr Minal Kabra would hear them worry about sugar intake and their perennial hunt for foods made with sugar substitutes. It prompted her to experiment with a batch of refined sugar-free cookies. She tried this in a solar oven, a new and improved version of the yesteryear solar ‘peti’ called Sunwings that her IITian husband, Vivek, innovated in 2016. “I first cooked with a solar oven when I moved to Jalna after marrying Vivek. My mother-in-law had been solar cooking since 1989. We used to make all our meals in it,” recalls Kabra. In working with the old model, the challenge was to keep tracking the sun and move the oven around as per its movement. “Sunwings is an advanced version of a solar cooker that has a glass tube, a cooking tray and a parabolic reflector to concentrate the sun rays and build high temperatures. It has a thermometre probe, and usually a charged oven will be at 230 to 250 degrees Celsius. There is a thermal storage battery, which needs to be exposed to the sun for 30 minutes.”

Using solar energy for baking prevents 5 gm of CO2 for every cookie that otherwise would have been emitted from traditional fuel-fired ovens