Let the sun do your cooking for you!

June 28, 2001 8:53 AM

Let the sun do your cooking for you! Not just a great way to save electricity, gas, or charcoal... (particularly if you live in California *grin*) it's delicious too! We built the Solar Funnel Cooker just for the halibut (groan) - cooked it in white wine with shredded zucchini and carrots - and it was the most tender, tasty fish I've ever eaten.
posted by thunder (13 comments total)

Anmd when you are done, use the solar toilet!
Cool link, thanks.
posted by thirteen at 8:58 AM on June 28, 2001

I intend to do this on our next camping trip . . . we could cook dinner at the campsite while we hike! Huzzah!
posted by iceberg273 at 9:06 AM on June 28, 2001

to hell with cooking your own food. just eat out all the time.
posted by tolkhan at 9:08 AM on June 28, 2001

A nice solar oven would be the perfect complement for the earthen oven I'm finishing in my back yard. The next pizza party's at my place!
posted by ewagoner at 9:27 AM on June 28, 2001

I saw a homemade version of this on 3...2...1...CONTACT! when I was but a wee lad.

cool!
posted by Mick at 9:57 AM on June 28, 2001

recipes. do they have recipes? can you cook beans in one of these (and how long would it tak?) rice? boil water? - rcb
posted by rebeccablood at 10:12 AM on June 28, 2001

recipes. do they have recipes? can you cook beans in one of these (and how long would it tak?) rice? boil water?

A pot of pinto beans: all day (five hours maybe).

rice: two hours.

Boil water: depends on the cooker that you are using. If you want to decontaminate the water, however, you don't need to boil it. Pasteurization will do.
posted by iceberg273 at 10:23 AM on June 28, 2001

the first site i ever built that used compatible-with-almost-nothing mouse-overs was for a company that sold plans for solar ovens. They work really well if you have the right weather...and i know they used to trade recipes with other solar cookers as well.
posted by th3ph17 at 10:27 AM on June 28, 2001

When I was in eighth grade, a friend and I finished the planned curriculum before the end of the year, so the teacher allowed us to pursue our own science-based projects, one of which was a parabolic solar cooker. We did the math to get the parabola, cut out the forms from cardboard, assembled and covered in aluminum foil. It worked. We cooked something (I don't recall what) on the lawn outside the school in the Texas summer heat.
posted by tippiedog at 10:29 AM on June 28, 2001

The halibut took a couple of hours, in a black plastic "oven" pan (Glad brand) - no attention necessary. There don't seem to be many recipes on that site (although some cooking times are mentioned when they are part of an experiment), but here they say that colar cooking is like cooking with a crock pot type of slow cooker (makes sense) and they give a few recipes, including one for pinto beans! :-) (dang - iceberg beat me to the link! *grin*) And ooooh - just found this link for Solar Cook, which appears to be a webzine with a few recipes as well.
posted by thunder at 10:37 AM on June 28, 2001

I can't find it, but at the earthship site they have information on a solar toilet that works on solar oven properties, rather than on solar electric or solar composting. Basically, the toilet cooks the shit until it's ash. Apparently it works pretty well in the desert southwest, I expect it'd be pretty bad here in the great northwest.
posted by daver at 11:15 AM on June 28, 2001

the first site i ever built that used compatible-with-almost-nothing mouse-overs was for a company that sold plans for solar ovens. They work really well if you have the right weather

Until I got to the word 'weather', I'd been assuming that that second sentence referred to the mouse-overs. This probably means I think far too much about HTML, but it made for an interesting reading experience, at least.
posted by moss at 11:43 AM on June 28, 2001

My 9th grade science fair project included a parabolic cooker (didn't work--our reflective surface wasn't reflective enough) and one which used a 12-inch fresnel lens. No adolescent boy should be allowed to play with one of those.
posted by MrMoonPie at 2:25 PM on June 28, 2001