What You Need to Get Started

Okay, apart from a solar oven you'll need a few bits and bobs to make it all work.
Don't worry, you can do it on the cheap, we did and it works for us.

Here's a list of the essentials:

Oven gloves
A black cooking pot with a black or glass lid
Oven bags OR a glass bowl big enough to fit over your pot
A clothes peg (to fasten up the oven bag :-)

Some other useful things are:

A little table to put the cooker on so you can turn it in the sun
without having to squat in the dirt
A small cooling rack to put your pot on during cooking so the warm
air can circulate under it
Sunglasses (there's a fierce reflection off that oven!)

For the very fancy solar chef:

An electric turntable that will turn your oven so it's always facing the sun!

I think that's about it.
You can get cheap cooking pots at Homeart or K-mart. Car boot sales also have a lot of perfectly good pots. We use a pudding basin for
cakes and smaller things. It produces a cutely shaped cake- like a giant muffin. Our big pot has a glass lid which is useful for checking how your food is doing.

Obviously, if you have a backyard set up like an outdoor room with a bar and comfy seating etc
it's a nice environment to cook and eat your food in but all you NEED is access to strong uninterrupted sunlight.

What Can You Cook?

If you can cook it in a slow cooker, you can cook it in a solar cooker but there some things that a solar cooker does even better and it is more verstile.

Stews are the most obvious and easy dishes to assemble and are a nice reliable dish. You could do some kinds of soup, vege dishes such as potato gratin, curries (but more on these) pasta sauces and stewed fruits but my favourite so far is cake!

Yeah, I know, just about every kitchen cooking gadget claims to make fantastic, easy cakes- pressure cookers, rice cookers, bread makers etc But a solar cooker can make quite a few kinds of cake extremely well because it retains most of the moisture inside the pot or oven bag. This means that even if your cake has been in longer than needed it will still be nice and moist. I have made one variety of cake twice and it came out consistently well. That's not really proof of course but being the family Dessert Queen I've baked a lot and the principle is sound. Of course I will cook many more cakes and report on them!

Okay, curries. You can get a basic curry recipe, bung it in your pot, cook it and get something which tasted okay BUT it won't be an authentic curry. Why? Well curry afficionados know that frying up the garlic, onion and spices first is part of the complex flavour of a curry. So, you can either put your spices in first until cooked then add the other ingredients or cook them up on the stove first. Some Indian curries really require a lot of high heat and precise timing so these will not turn out as the recipe intended but may still be tasty.

Stews and casseroles are a perfect dish as meat comes out beautifully tender. They are also dishes that cook for a long time over a low heat even using conventional methods, so I think you don't even need to use a specific solar cooker recipe.

With the solar cooker you don't get a dry crusty layer on top of the food or around the edges as can happen in a slow cooker. Also, washing up is nice and easy as there won't be any bits stuck to the pot.

I believe that by using some different methods you can cook pasta and rice and also fry bacon but I haven't looked into this yet. There is also another kind of solar cooker called a parabolic cooker which gets much hotter but I think these can't be made at home and are somewhat expensive.

So, what is a solar cooker?

The short answer is: a cheap and easy way to cook a variety of dishes using the Sun's energy as the heat source. It works in a very similar way to a slow cooker.

A solar cooker is basically some cardboard (recycled from a cardboard box) cut to a certain pattern and covered in tinfoil, which is then placed in direct sunlight. You mix your ingredients in a black pot with a lid on top, then put this inside a sealed oven bag and place it inside the cooker. A few hours later (how long depends on what you cook, sometimes it may be only half an hour) you have a delicious meal that hasn't cost you a cent in gas or electricity and if you are in a warm climate you haven't made your house a few degrees hotter by using the stove or cooker.

My husband bought our solar cooker about a year ago(you can make your own and I will post links and give tips on this) and last Summer it was just a novelty. We cooked a couple of things, they tasted okay but back in the cupboard it went.

Over the following year we became an energy conscious household, in Perth where we live the cost of power has gone up tremendously over a very short period! It's also been quite hot this Summer and as we don't have refrigerative air conditioning, the thought of cooking over a hot stove was kinda unbearable.

After googling some specific solar cooker recipes and getting some tips from a great series on Youtube we turned out some very tasty meals that were also very easy and quick to prepare (quick except for the cooking times that is!)

In this blog I'm going to provide a bunch on information on the pros and cons of this cooking method, provide a list of what you need, do an FAQ, plenty of useful links and then on a more regular basis provide the recipes for what we've actually cooked and eaten along with photos and a rating for the effort involved and how good or bad the food tasted.

The picture on this blog is the exact same kind of cooker we have but you can make your own. We found the bought one slightly more efficient (quicker) but a homemade one does definately work, I'm not trying to sell anything on this blog!

Solar cookers are being used a lot in places where people can't afford fuel to cook with or where the water is undrinkable and needs sterilizing, mainly India, China and Africa. Well, I say let the first world cotton on to a great idea, especially places like Western Australia where we get so much sun we don't know what to do with it!

Here is a link to a site on the Solar Panel Cooker pictured which explains in more detail how it's being used in impoverished areas http://geographyfieldwork.com/SolarCookers.htm