Solar Rays Make for Tasty Days
Beth Townsend was intrigued a few years ago when she saw a solar cooking demonstration at the annual San Diego Earth Day fair in Balboa Park. She checked out the same demo again at last year’s fair.
Inspired anew, she went on to become a solar cooking devotee and a founder of the San Diego Solar Cooking Club, a loosely organized group of like-minded folks.
Club members _ there is no formal membership, the only requirement being a shared interest _ exchange ideas and arrange get-togethers to share solar-cooked meals through Meetup.com.
The club sponsors demonstrations at community events, and its members have also hosted workshops to teach people how to make solar ovens.
On a cloudless, sunny day in early November, Townsend and fellow solar cooking enthusiast, Jim La Joie, gave me a demonstration in a City Heights park.
They set up a variety of solar ovens, each of which had something cooking in them. Among the dishes: turkey thighs seasoned with garlic, olive oil and Italian seasoning, a soup made from home-grown beet, non-yeast soda bread with raisins, whole wheat Jalapeno cheese bread, and tofu-broccoli casserole flavored with fish sauce.
Townsend brought along an octagon, parabolic solar cooker made by ClearDome Solar Thermal, a San Diego-based company. The cooker sells for $189 on the company website. A major drawback is that it needs to be turned frequently to refocus its orientation toward the sun but it’s a beauty to behold with its dramatic shape that is reminiscent of Frank Gehry’s architecture.
Her other oven is a home-made box cooker, designed for mid-day cooking when the sun is high in the sky. It’s comprised literally of a aluminum lined box and a four-sided funnel on the top that is also lined with aluminum to concentrate the sunlight. Inside the cooker is the soda bread steaming in a small pot with a glass lid.
“When the sun is on it, it does very well,” Townsend said.
But even before the sun reached it mid-day zenith, at around 10: 45 a.m., the box cooker’s internal temperature reached 145 degrees, according to the thermometer inside.
La Joie introduced me to a third type of solar cooker: the panel cooker. As its name indicates, it’s made up of flat reflector surfaces joined together like an open-arm embrace. The bottom panel holds the cooking pot. Panel cookers are probably easiest to make. What’s great is that it’s foldable. Design patterns are widely available online.
Solar Cooking International sells panel-style cookers for $25 a piece.
La Joie has been doing solar cooking since the early 1970s. Years ago, he learned about it from reading Mother Earth News and made his first solar cooker then.
“I was so impressed it that it actually worked _ the first one I made, the first time I cooked a meal in it _ I felt good,” he said.
Nowadays, weather permitting, he does solar cooking twice a week or at least every weekend. He always takes a solar oven on camping trips.
Townsend also started out by making her own solar ovens by trial and error. She made her first one in April 2007 staying up a couple of nights to do it.
“It’s just been a process of building and refining different ones, trying out different designs,” she said. “The hardest part is finding pots that work well.”
The pots should be dark in color to better absorb the heat. They shouldn’t have plastic handles or knobs that can melt in the heat.
La Joie has resorted to using Springform pans. He’s also bought inexpensive pots that he’s modified for solar cooking by removing plastic components. Right now he’s experimenting with using glass tops. Alternatively, oven bags can be used to trap the heat.
Townsend and La Joie both spoke passionately about the potential of solar cooking to help not only with reducing carbon emissions, but reducing water-borne illnesses in third-world countries. Solar cookers can be used to boil water to eliminate bacteria, and they can replace the use of firewood and charcoal for cooking in third-world countries.
“You are competing with the stove knob in this country. In other countries where you have to walk a mile to get firewood, this is very attractive,” La Joie said.
He’s come up with a few innovations to improve solar cooking. His solar cooker is designed such that the user can raise or lower the panels by up to 50 degrees to better capture the sunlight as the sun moves across the sky.
He’s also developed a device, which he calls Sun Sight, to guide users to refocus the solar cooker to eliminate shadows. In addition, he’s rigged a turntable to a solar oven so it automatically adjusts itself to capture the most light. That’s so that he can set out the cooker in the morning before he goes to work and have a meal _ say rice and beans _ done by the time he gets home.
At 10:30 a.m., the solar oven cooking the Jalapeno cheese bread had reached 260 degrees. It had been cooking since 9 a.m. At 10:40 a.m., the turkey thighs had reached 140 degrees and the beet soup was boiling.
“With solar cooking, I don’t care how hot the oven is, I care about how hot the food is. When the meat thermometer says it’s safe, it’s safe,” La Joie said.
How hot does it get? That’s the No. 1 question people ask when they see solar cooking in action, he noted.
Around noon, it was time to eat. The turkey thigh was moist and juicy. Both the Jalapeno bread and the raisin bread were delicious, as were the tofu casserole and beet soup.
Meat, cooked with the sun, “doesn’t dry out as much because you are cooking slowly. It stays much more moist,” La Joie said.