Celebrate Green Blog

If you’re looking for the best way to celebrate green all summer long, you’ve got to consider solar cooking. Why heat up the kitchen or foul the air and your food with smoke (and lighter fluid residue), or pay for gas or electricity when you can cook anything from artichokes to zucchini for free using the sun?

The best solar ovens, like the one pictured here from www.SunOven.com, are marvels of efficiency, easy to transport and use. We’re not just saying this because we were given the oven to try. This baby is awesome!

At our family July 4th gathering, Corey experimented with a potato as we’d never used a solar oven before (although we did experiment with eggs on the sidewalk when we lived in Arizona). She placed 1″ pieces of potato in a dark colored pan as instructed, aimed the oven toward the sun, closed the glass and waited.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get the oven set up until about 4 p.m. But even though the sun was not at its highest, the thermometer reached 300 degrees in about 15 minutes and maintained that temp for the hour it took for the potatoes to cook.

Yes, it’s true. The one drawback to solar cooking (at least if you’re not doing it at midday), is that it takes a bit more time. But this oven is especially well-insulated, so what you’ve cooked stays warm quite awhile. And the taste (Those potatoes were downright juicy! You should have heard the raves.), health benefits and the lack of impact on the environment, make solar a great choice. Cooking time varies with the thickness of what you’re cooking, but given the right weather and enough time, you can bake cookies, cook meat, chicken or fish, casseroles or pretty much anything else.

Granted Sun Ovens and others like them don’t come cheap. The one we have is $289. (In fact, not much more than a good gas grill.) But, sales of the Sun Oven help finance solar cooking projects in countries on five continents where deforestation has made it virtually impossible to find wood with which to cook and where smoke from traditional charcoal and wood fires also causes major health problems.

One of the most exciting projects we’ve come across is this one where women in villages around the world are involved in self-sustaining micro-enterprise to turn out fresh baked goods while creating jobs and eliminating the cost of fuel. Bread, fresh from the solar oven. What a concept!

If you’re not wanting to buy a solar oven, you can easily make your own though it likely will not work nearly as efficiently as one that is purchased. In an upcoming post, though, we’ll share some do-it-yourself designs we’re going to try.

Have experience with solar ovens? Tell us about it in our comments section.