Now You’re Cooking With… Solar?
By Catharine Sutherlund T
he closest most of us have come to harnessing the sun’s energy for cooking is roasting our own unsuspecting shoulders on the beach or an attempt
to fry an egg on pavement. Those who have discovered the ease and culinary bounty of bonafide solar cooking, however, have testimonies of their own to offer. “You can cook anything in a solar oven,” said Vivian
Harte, chair of Citizens for Solar, a Tucson non-profit solar energy organization. “Solar ovens keep nutrients and moisture in the food better, which makes the flavor of the food incredible.” Harte’s evidence? Her daughter’s favorite dish growing
up was solar-cooked cabbage. The time-honored family recipe was revealed by her husband, Toby Schneider (aka “Solar Toby” as he’s known around town) and couldn’t be simpler: Select a head of green cabbage. Strip off any wilting outer leaves. Rinse well. Place in cooking pot with lid (Schneider recommends enamel cookware, such the popular blue or black speckled Stansport line, but any
Tucsonan Rob Crossland built this solar cooker out of an old crock pot and metal strips cut in the shape of flower petals. The petals reflect the sun’s heat, concentrating it on the food in the crock pot.
dark-colored, lightweight pots will work). Bake in solar oven for 1.5 hours, depending on your oven and time of year. Enjoy! “The really great thing about solar cooking is that
nothing burns,” added Schneider, an engineer with a penchant for solar-baked sourdough bread (he routinely bakes four loaves at a time). “You can put your bread in the oven and go off to the grocery store or run all your errands – you would never do that with a conventional oven.” But solar cooking is about more than taste appeal and easy cleanup for Harte and Schneider. Both are avid solar advocates who have built more than 60 solar cookers in the past decade, thanks to the do-it-yourself solar oven workshops they once held regularly in their front yard. They nixed the workshops when the cost of commercial solar ovens – the popular Global Sun Oven retails at $299 – dropped below the cost of building materials.
Toby Schneider, nicknamed Solar Toby by friends, checks a loaf of bread in his Sun Oven, a commercially available solar cooker. It takes about twice as long as a normal oven to bake bread, he said.
14 Tucson
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