Thai Vendor Has Been Roasting Chicken with Sunlight for 20 Years

Sila Sutharat, a roasted chicken street vendor from Phetchaburi, Thailand, has come up with an ingenious way of cooking chicken. Instead of an oven or a charcoal barbecue, he uses 1,000 mobile mirrors that concentrate sunlight into a strong beam. He basically cooks meat with over 300 degrees Celsius of natural sunlight.

Like most other street vendors, Sila used to cook his chicken over a charcoal fire, but that all changed in 1997, when a mundane observation gave him a brilliant idea. One day, he was hit by the sunlight reflected off the window of a passing bus, and he felt its heat. “I could possibly change it into energy,” Sila told himself, and started working on a contraption to capture the sunlight and use it to cook his chicken.

“They said that I’d gone mad, that cooking chicken like this was impossible,” Sutharat told AFP about how people reacted to his idea. But he didn’t let their jokes and insults get to him, and in the end he was the one who had the last laugh. His invention, a panel featuring 1,000 small, movable mirrors worked exactly as he predicted, allowing him to cook a 1.5 kg chicken in just 10 to 15 minutes. “After a long time passed by, they’d say: ‘Actually, you could do it’,” the vendor recalls.