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.