Solar cooking

The Copenhagen solar cooker is a clever design that has the cooking pot sit flat while the reflectors are adjusted around it. Since the reflectors are flexible, you can get a fairly good amount of sunlight reflected to the pot whether the sun is low or high in the sky. It's also very inexpensive, highly portable, lightweight and quick to assemble.

The Copenhagen solar cooker is amazingly affordable for such a high quality, excellent preforming solar cooker if you wish to buy one, owing mainly to it's ingenious design. But if you're a DIYer, you probably want to make your own. This page is all about how to make and use your own Copenhagen solar cooker.

This is Art's hybrid solar oven which can be used not only for baking but also frying and even brewing coffee that percolates. All this is possible because it reflects sunlight down using a funnel reflector and also reflects sunlight up to the bottom of the cooking pot using a parabolic reflector.

Perhaps the simplest solar cooker to make is the car sunshade solar cooker. Just go get a car sunshade, use clips, velcro, clothespins, ... to give it shape, get a cooking bag to put your cooking pot in, aim it all at the sun and you're done! The page at the above link shows you how to do all this along with optimization tips.

Another simple to make is the Modified CooKit solar cooker. All you need is a single piece of 3'x3' cardboard, some aluminum foil and glue and you're done! The page at the above link shows you how to make it.

In April 2011 I designed, built and started using my first solar cooker, my cone solar cooker. It works like a charm! Since I live in an apartment building, one of the design criteria was that it shouldn't use up much storage area and the collapsible cone met that requirement quite well.

While designing and making it I took copious amounts of video. I then put together a 4 part series that covers the complete design and making of this solar cooker. So if you like seeing how things are built, you'll enjoy this series.

In May 2011 I noticed a derelict rear projection TV by the side of the road and found a 2'x4' fresnel lens in it. Within weeks I'd made this fresnel lens solar cooker and started cooking with it.

This is Bruce's fresnel lens solar cooker showing various improvements as they were made. One particularly nice feature is that the food is on a very stable grill that is always at the focal point as the lens is pivoted.

This is Don's prototype fresnel lens solar cooker. The frame was built from whatever scrap wood he could find laying around. With temperatures approaching 90F but with 75% or more cloud cover he still managed to catch enough sun to cook a burger. The lens came from a rear projection TV.

Click on the photo for a larger version. Note the pull rope for adjusting the angle of the lens and that the lens is mounted in the original black frame from the TV.

This is my fresnel lens solar cooker but with a mirror added so that I could cook with sunlight from the bottom. This way I don't have to wear goggles while cooking and food gets cooked by heating the pan or pot as when you cook on a stovetop unlike previously when the concentrated sunlight would hit the food directly from above.

Soya rice vegetable concoction.

Gluten-free pumpkin sourdough bread/cake.

Winter solstice sourdough sunshine cake.

No-knead bread and pizza crust.