Solar cooking
We’re just back from Burning Man – more about that later, but first a short post about solar cooking!
Prior to Burning Man, I made a solar cooker based on the CooKit plan – it cost about $10 in materials (a mylar emergency blanket, some thin (3mm) chipboard, and glue), and took about 2 hours to make. It’s easy!
In the desert we baked bread with the cooker nearly every day. We’d prepared some bread mixes at home with lots of grains and nuts in it. With baking powder, and two table spoons of vinegar, no complicated yeast procedure was necessary – just add water, mix, put in the pot (I have a nice black anodised aluminium pot with Teflon inside (the EtaPower Pot from Primus – a great camping pot!)), and bake! To bake, I put it on a small stand (6cm pot stand from Ikea for about $2), put a clear bag over the whole thing, and put it in the centre of the CooKit. About 2-3 hours later, the bread was finished! Because it bakes relatively cool (the same bread would take 45 minutes in a standard oven) and slowly, it didn’t make much difference if we left it for an hour or two longer – great if you’re away from camp for a while and can’t be back on time! In adition to the bread I also cooked a very tasty rice curry – add all the ingredients (rice, beans, onions, garlic, curry powder, salt, coconut milk, …), put in the pot, and leave to cook for ~3 hours. Perfect!
The cooker is even very compact to transport – just a flat piece, ~100x30cm when folded up. The only requirement: sunshine! One day when there was too much dust in the air, it didn’t get hot enough to cook, but the rest of the time it worked like a charm.
Try it out – it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it will still be working long after your camping gas cookers have run out of gas!
Tags: bread, cookit, solar cooking