Solar Ovens

Cooking and baking with the sun is fun! There are lots of great solar cookers commercially available. A solar oven can serve your cooking and baking desires year-round. Save on electricity, pro-pane, or natural gas.

A parabolic reflector from a giant stadium lights, like the one shown in the above photos, makes an awesome solar cooker. The all-reflective design works great in combination with a dark colored pot that absorbs the sunlight and transfers the energy as heat directly to the food. The tight-fitting hinged glass cover holds in heat. Unfortunately, these out-of-service light fixtures are hard to come by. Let us know if you are aware of a source!

Highly effective solar ovens may also be constructed of very simple and cheap materials - cardboard, aluminum foil, and Elmer's glue. We discovered this website by Teong H. Tan to have excellent free designs and information. Below is a photo of the Sunny Cooker design that is made from a single 3ft square piece of cardboard and 6ft of 18" wide aluminum foil.

This is another all-reflective cooker that requires a dark colored baking pot. We use a dark-colored ceramic casserole. Dark colored enamel, cast iron, or anodized aluminum pots may also be used. The heavier materials, ceramic and cast iron, require longer cooking times. A plastic roasting bag (as pictured above) is an inexpensive way to create a greenhouse enclosure for the pot that holds in the heat. Various combinations of glass mixing bowls and a glass baking pan may also be used in place of the roasting bag to create a durable and effective greenhouse enclosure for different sizes of dark-colored baking pots. The photo below shows our cooker with a pair of 4qt Pyrex mixing bowls enclosing the ceramic casserole. This combination works great...even in winter!