I haven’t written about it in a while, but we continue our adventures in solar cooking.  Here is a photo of my original little cooker.  It is a purchased model, made from the same mylar and foam material you might find on an automobile sunshade. 

It folds down flat, and you unfold it when you need it.  I have to use a black pot in this one - you’ll see it (somewhat) inside the plastic bag. 

I know, I know, ugh, plastic.  This model requires the use of a Reynolds oven cooking bag (the kind the disposables folk use to cook a turkey in).  I do reuse the bag - I’ve only had to replace it once so far.  But I still hate the idea of it.  The bag acts as insulation, trapping a pocket of air around the pot, so I can’t very well do without it.  Perhaps if I had a large enough glass dish to enclose the pot I could use the glass rather than plastic, but since the pot is a 5 quart, that would be a pretty big glass dish.

I’ve been cooking in this solar cooker all summer.  Rice, lentils, beans.  Today I’m doing spanish rice.  I’m learning to get the right quantity of liquid for rice - as I mentioned in my previous post, cooking rice like this, it tends to retain more moisture than if I didn’t have the insulating bag.  Thus it turns mushy if I don’t reduce the water below what I’d use on the stove.

   Here is my newest acquisition, a Solar Sizzler.  It’s a large reflective plastic disk which focuses the rays on the bottom of the pot.  My son once said we should be able to do solar cooking with a magnifying glass, the way he burns holes in leaves.  Well, the Solar Sizzler works kinda like that, only it focuses that white-hot spot up from below, heating the bottom of the pot like you’d expect on a stovetop.

Cooking with the Sizzler is a lot quicker than cooking with the solar oven or the mylar solar cooker.  The latter two are more like slow cooking in a crock-pot.  The Sizzler is like cooking on a hotplate.  Today we cooked our lunch in it.  It took about twice as long as frying on a stove, but that still isn’t very long.

I also used the Sizzler to brown the onions and peppers for our spanish rice dinner.  I hooked the handle of my Lodge cast iron pot onto the Sizzler’s tripod and used the Sizzler for the browning process.  Then I slipped the oven bag around the pot, and moved it to the mylar cooker for the duration.  This was the first time I’d transferred a dish between the cookers.

I reported in my last bulletin about solar cooking that I had built a cooker.  Sorry no photo, folks, I didn’t think of it while my son had his digital camera out.  The homemade solar oven with reworked reflector does not heat as well as the mylar cooker, so I have tended to use the mylar one instead.  My next rework of the homemade one will involve putting glass into the opening.  If this doesn’t improve its abilities, I’ll demolish it and give up. 

In the meantime I continue to use the mylar one heavily, and to explore with the Sizzler.  We’ve had some humid days, and some days when I wasn’t organized enough to get food into the cooker early in the day.  But during the heat of summer, solar cooking has been absolutely a delight.