A Bit More About Solar Cooking and Solar Ovens

Photo courtesy of nmfbihop at Flickr.com.

Assuming you can get the bugs to buzz off, cooking in the great outdoors can be a wonderful experience, combining culinary expertise with that classic American hankering after our roots. But if you’ve had it up to here with all the smoke, that distinctive tang of charcoal starter in your food, and the obscene price of propane, there’s an easier way: use a solar cooker. Millions of people all over the world benefit from solar cooking on a daily basis.

Once you get past the obvious drawbacks—that is, that it doesn’t work at night or on cloudy days—solar cooking can be a pretty darn good deal. The technology is mature (it’s over 240 years old) so that it’s well understood; it’s easy as pie to use a solar cooker. It yields absolutely no pollutants, except maybe a little CO2 and water vapor released from your food as it cooks, and you never have to purchase fuel. As long as the sun’s shining, you’ll have more than you can ever use. All you need is a calm, sunny spot and an oven.

Solar ovens come in three basic designs. The most common is the box cooker, which is, as it sounds, a simple box where sunlight is directed into the interior. A box cooker can handle up to several dishes, depending on its size, and generates medium to high temperatures.

Parabolic ovens are shaped like a satellite dish, and focus light to a point near the center, where very high temperatures can be achieved. However, parabolic solar ovens tend to require a lot of adjustment, and aren’t as easy to make as box ovens.

Panel cookers combine the features of both parabolic and box ovens, and consist of movable panels that you can easily adjust to attain medium to high temperatures.

Photo courtesy of yanealhoo at Flickr.com.

Incidentally, a decent commercial solar oven doesn’t cost any more than a decent commercial barbecue grill; you can get one for about $200, sometimes less. However, you can also make your own from household items like aluminum foil, plywood, and cardboard that can cost you as little as a few dollars.

For example, here’s a simple box cooker that gets hot enough to boil water (that’s 212 degrees Fahrenheit, folks) and cost the inventor a whopping $7 to make. It won him a $75,000 prize. Talk about a nice return on your investment!