Cooking with Solar Energy

Two years ago I received a solar oven for my birthday. It's an SOS Sport, made by the Solar Oven Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's about two feet wide and 12 inches high, and it came with two 2-quart cooking pans.

I started experimenting with my oven and soon discovered that all you need are a few simple recipes and a bright sunny day. If you are home on a sunny summer day, you can cook all of your meals in the solar oven, from your eggs to your brats.

Here are some of the things I've made in my oven: rice pudding, roasted vegetables, marinated chicken wings, zucchini bread, roasted eggs (like hard-boiled, only you don't use water), and baked squash. Summer cooking times range from 20 minutes for steamed greens to 2-4 hours for meat dishes. In Minnesota, everything takes longer in the spring and in the fall, when the sun is lower in the sky.

You can think of your solar oven as a crock pot without a cord. Use your favorite crock pot recipe, put half in each of the cooking pots, and put the pots in the pre-warmed solar oven. You can leave the oven untended for hours while you run errands, check in at work, and go for a run.

The oven comes with a thermometer so you can tell when your oven is warm enough to start cooking. Temperatures may get as high as 350° in the summertime, but usually you are cooking at between 275° and 325°. You can also purchase a reflector that will focus the suns rays into the oven, increasing the temperature. This is especially helpful if you live in a cooler climate and want to extend your cooking season into the spring and fall.

My solar oven came with an instruction booklet that gives safety tips and instructions on how to cook various types of food. The booklet also included recipes developed by the Solar Oven Society's gourmet cook (try Halibut Steaks with Sweet Corn, Tomato and Cucumber Relish!).

The solar oven isn't just for camping. I use it in my back yard all through the summer. It's great to be able to have a cooked meal without having to heat up the kitchen. I've used it as early as late March, and as late as early October.

In northern latitudes, it's hard to use a solar oven during the winter months, but it can be done if you have enough southern exposure and you insulate the exterior of your oven with blankets or straw bales. In warmer climates, you should have no trouble using the oven year-round, and you probably won't need the reflector either.