How far away from the sun do you have to be to cook food (in space)

Question: How far away from the sun do you have to be to cook food (in space)
- Keywords:
  cook,
  space,
  sun
Asked by anon-267550 on 10 Nov 2020.
- Sam Geen answered on 10 Nov 2020:
  
  Well, you can cook food anywhere in space if you have the right cooking equipment. But I assume you mean how much sunlight does it take to cook food directly without building a solar-powered oven.
  
  Let’s say you have a big stone surface you want to cook an egg on. We can calculate how hot something gets when light shines on it with some equationsMATOMO_URL Let’s say something needs to be about 120 degrees Celsius to cook on it. If you use these equations, you can get to this temperature easily on the surface of Mercury.
  
  An easier way, though, is to buy a 1 kW solar panel to power your stove – one of these on Amazon is about 0.5 m^2 in area. A few solar panels on your roof would go a long way to making as many eggs as you like!
  
  * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_equilibrium_temperature
- Jesse Dykes answered on 11 Nov 2020:
  
  The European Space Agency have some good cooking videos in space – there’s a few by Samantha Cristoforetti, one of the astronauts up there recently. The ISS isn’t much closer to the Sun than Earth is though, so you’d still have to be about 148 million km from the Sun to cook some food

Question: How far away from the sun do you have to be to cook food (in space)