Cookin' in the Sun

摘要

Solar cooking is lots of fun, with many advantages. It is the simplest and most convenient way to cook without consuming fuel or heating up the kitchen. You supply no fuel and emit no carbon dioxide or smoke. Food does not burn. Below I describe several types of solar cookers.The simplest and lightest solar cooker is a panel solar cooker, such as the Haines 2 (see Figure 1). It weighs less than two pounds and costs about $65. You assemble it in about five minutes and face it toward the sun. For faster cooking, if your recipe takes more than an hour, you rotate the cooker a little every hour to face the sun again. Put your food in a black or glass pot with a glass cover and put the pot in the panel cooker. In an hour or two, on a sunny day, you will have cooked food. At 86 degrees air temperature, a quart of water can come to a boil in 48 minutes. When you've finished cooking, the cool solar oven folds into its shipping box of 1/3 cubic feet for storage.