Cooking with Sunlight: Learn How to Cook Food With Solar Cookers
(Page 2 of 4)
May/June 2003
By Jennifer Andes
A solar cooker is a device that directs sunlight onto a dark-colored cooking pot, maximizing the amount of light energy that reaches the pot and minimizing the amount of heat loss. The essential elements of a solar cooker are sunlight, a black pot, reflectors, and a glass-covered box or a clear plastic bag. The black pot attracts the sun’s rays while the panel reflectors amplify them. Meanwhile, the glass or plastic prevents the heat from escaping, thus creating a “greenhouse” inside the solar cooker. As inventors and ecologists have experimented with hot boxes over the years, a variety of solar cookers have become available.
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The three basic types are:
1. Panel: The most affordable solar cookers rely on foil-covered panels or reflectors that concentrate sunlight onto a pot surrounded by a plastic bag. SCI, which has been selling panel cookers for $20 each since about 1994, markets its products internationally, with about 100 buyers per month. The “CooKit” includes plastic oven bags, a single sheet of foil-covered cardboard that folds to form the base and four reflective panels, and an instruction pamphlet that includes recipes. The panel cooker folds to the size of a three-ring binder and weighs less than two pounds. Cooking pots are not included; SCI sells them for ten dollars each, or they can be found at many stores. Lightweight, dark Granite Ware generally works best. Metal pots painted black on the outside or blackened in a fire also work well.
2. Box: More elaborate, box-shaped cookers are made from a variety of materials including cardboard, wood, bamboo, metal, stone, fiberglass, clay, tree bark, and cloth stiffened with glue. Insulation, which is essential for the cooker to reach hot temperatures, can be made from foil-lined cardboard, down feathers, spun fiberglass, crumpled newspapers, or any number of other materials. A glass panel covers the box, and reflectors on one to four sides direct the sun’s rays to the inside of the cooker. Illinois-based Sun Ovens International has manufactured a common box cooker, the Global Sun Oven, for the past fifteen years. About thirty dealers around the world, including SCI, sell the Global Sun Oven for about $229 each. Sales have remained steady, says Paul Munsen, president of Sun Ovens International, but tend to peak during energy brownouts or blackouts. The Sun Oven box cooker is sturdier than the cardboard panel cooker and gets hotter, so food cooks faster, which means it can be used during more months of the year.