Blue Dog’s Blog

We had a beautiful day in the Seattle area today. Anyone who lives here will tell you that we enjoy the sun whenever we can this time of year. I celebrated by working on my homemade solar oven. It’s not something that I’ll be using often this time of year but I will use it when I can. I can’t wait to use it in the summer — bake cakes without heating up the house. :-)Solar ovens are easy and fun to make. They make great projects for kids and they’re useful when backpacking or camping in an RV not to mention at home. I plan on using my solar oven like a slow cooker: sit it outside in the morning and have a hot cooked meal when I return home in the evening. The food will be ready in 2-4 hours but it won’t burn if you leave it in longer. You can prepare the sames things in a solar oven that you would on the stove top or in the oven: pastas, soups, stews, bread, cake, cookies, pizza, etc. Temperatures in the type of solar oven I am building will get up to about 225-250º F. This is a real oven, not a toy.Some commercial solar ovens can reach temperatures as high as 425-450ºF and will cook things in the same amount of time it would take for conventional cooking. However, you may have to reposition the oven as the sun moves. You can use it as I plan to, though, but cooking times will be a little longer than a conventional oven. Two commercial solar ovens that reach high temperatures are the Sun Oven and the Tulsi Hybrid Solar Oven. The Tulsi Hybrid allows you to use solar alone, electricity alone or a combination of solar and electricity making it a year-round oven even for places like Seattle.But unless you have time constraints for cooking your food, there’s no reason not to start out with a homemade one from cardboard boxes, foil and glue (or wheat paste) and see how you like it. They are inexpensive to make and you should be able to finish a simple one in 1 hour (panel style) to 3 hours (box style). If you don’t have boxes around the house, go to to a grocery store and ask for some of theirs. Or go to an appliance store and ask for a large piece of cardboard from a refrigerator box (perfect for the panel solar ovens).

Benefits

There are many advantages and benefits to using a solar oven. Here are a several reasons directly from the solar cooking wiki:

• Food needs little attention while cooking, leaving the cook free to attend to other matters.Scorching is very rare, so clean-up is simplified.
• Most of the preparation for a meal can be done early in the day, so there is less last-minute fuss.
• While food cooks in the sun, the kitchen stays cool.
• The gentle cooking preserves flavor and aroma, so the food tastes better.
• Foods can be preserved for out of season use at no cost in power, either by solar dehydration or, in the case of some acidic foods, by canning.
• In some climates, the fact that a panel cooker has potential to be used at night as a chiller could be very useful in preserving some types of short-term fresh foods or leftovers.

I hope you’ll consider giving it a try. For those of you who have looms on order from Decor Accents, Inc., the shipping box makes a great box for a solar oven. You’re part way there!

More Information

For more information on solar ovens and solar cooking, check out the following resources:

• Plans for building your own
• Solar Cookers International
• Solar Oven Society
• The Solar Cooking Archive