Solar cooking is a great alternative to conventional cooking – rather than burning fuel and producing carbon dioxide emissions, or using precious electricity, solar cooking harnesses the natural energy available from the sun!
Potatoes
For a start, cooking potatoes with a solar cooker differs a bit from cooking them in a campfire, which you are probably used to, because if you warp them in shiny reflective tin foil, the solar energy which you have gone to painstaking ends to concentrate onto the potato will simply be reflected!
Brewing tea
If you want to brew tea in a solar cooker, you can’t expect to get boiling water and then make your tea conventionally – instead take a jar and a couple of tea bags, put the tea bags in the jar along with some clean water (which you might have even got from your solar distilling apparatus!).
Soups
Soups are really easy to cook in a solar cooker. Furthermore, they are particularly forgiving if the amount of sunlight is suboptimal, as warmish vegetable soup is quite acceptable whereas rawish not fully cooked chicken is totally unacceptable!
Nachos
Everyone loves Nachos! So why not take a bag, spread them in a bowl and cover with grated cheese. Then place the bowl in your solar cooker to melt the cheese and give you toasty hot nachos!
Bread
Take some old baked bean tins and paint them black – you now have the perfect can for cooking bread! To cook some simple French bread you will need a packet of baker’s yeast, a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon and a tablespoon of salt, five cups of white flour and a couple of cups of water. Dissolve the yeast in one cup of slightly warm water, Sift all of the dry mater into a clean bowl, stir in the yeast – water mix, add the water from the second cup in small amounts until the dough is sticky. Grease a baked bean can which has been painted black, being careful of any sharp edges, add the bread mixture and leave it in your solar oven.
Solar Cooking Tips
In many campsites and caravan parks, open fires are banned because of the mess they produce and the smoke which can be unpleasant for other visitors – so while everyone else has run out of gas in their cylinder, or is eating could raw food, now would be a great time to crack open the solar cooker and make the rest of the campsite jealous!
You really want to cook on days when the sky is clear and the sun can easily be seen – on a cloudy day, cooking will be painfully slow.
One of the great things about solar cooking is that you can prepare everything in advance, leave it in you solar cooker, and when you return everything is cooked ready to eat – whereas you accomplices coking with traditional methods still have to muck about and cook their food!
Also – think like this – if you are cooking using conventional energy inside a home that is air conditioned, for every kWh of energy you input to your cooker, your air conditioning will use about another three trying to remove that heat from your home!