SOLAR COOKER / COOKING

Solar cook­ing is the sim­plest, safest, most con­ve­nient way to cook food with­out con­sum­ing fuels or heat­ing up the kitchen. The first solar cooker we know of was invented by Horace de Saus­sure, a Swiss nat­u­ral­ist exper­i­ment­ing as early as 1767 Box Cook­ers — This type of cooker has been the advan­tage of slow, even cook­ing of large quan­ti­ties of food. Vari­a­tions include slant­ing the face toward the sun and the num­ber of reflec­tors. With box cook­ers, the food will cook more quickly if it is divided into sev­eral smaller pots instead of hav­ing it all in one large pot. Solar cook­ing is not only fun but it’s a great edu­ca­tional tool. Solar Box Cook­ers, con­structed using card­board, news­pa­per, alu­minum foil, and a piece of glass will typ­i­cally cook at tem­per­a­tures between 225 — 275 F. Panel Cook­ers — In this design, var­i­ous flat pan­els con­cen­trate the sun’s rays onto a pot inside a plas­tic bag or under a glass bowl. The advan­tage of this design is that they can be built in an hour or so for next to noth­ing. Panel Cook­ers require only one box, alu­minum foil, a jar and an oven bag, and can be con­structed in less than an hour. Par­a­bolic Cook­ers — These are usu­ally con­cave disks that focus the light onto the bot­tom of a pot. The advan­tage is that foods cook about as fast as on a con­ven­tional stove. The dis­ad­van­tage is that they are com­pli­cated to make, they must be focused often to fol­low the sun, and they can cause burns and eye injury if not used cor­rectly. A good first food to try is a small quan­tity of rice, since it is fairly easy to cook and looks very dif­fer­ent cooked than it does raw. Chicken or fish is also very easy to cook. There’s no need to rotate the oven to fol­low the sun, though it will improve cook­ing times A solar cooker is like a hot box, in which we can cook our food with­out any cook­ing gas or kerosene, elec­tric­ity, coal or wood.

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