With high fire danger becoming more common, some campgrounds prohibit the use of open flame for cooking. What do you do when you can’t heat up your food? Try a solar cooker! Solar cookers use reflection and the “greenhouse effect” to harness the power of the sun. Here’s what happened when I tried one with Yumbini:
Solar Cooker Set Up
There are many, many solar cookers on the market – from simple to very expensive. Or you can make your own! Personally, I love crafty projects. And I love science. Put the two together and I’m all in.
I followed this video to make the world’s simplest solar cooker: from a pizza box! A deeper box might have worked better, but the basics are the same: a clear top and reflective flap(s) to concentrate the sun’s rays.
Be sure to cover the bottom of the solar cooker with black paper or cloth (such as an old T shirt). Also pay careful attention to the stick holding the flap(s); it can get blown around by the wind.
Then I found a very shallow bowl that would fit the height of the pizza box. A darker colored bowl is better because it absorbs more heat. A cast iron frying pan would have worked great but it was too big.
Cooking
You need a sunny spot on a sunny day. Solar cooking is best as a lunchtime event so you can take advantage of peak sun rays between noon and 2 pm. In my case, the day was sunny, but not particularly warm, about 70 F.
Before testing with Yumbini, I made a trial run with just water in the bowl. After an hour, the water reached 140F, about the temperature of hot water from the tap. I was encouraged enough to give Yumbini a try!
I poured Yumbini Cowboy BBQ Pinto Beans & Rice and ¾ cup water (measured in the empty pouch) into the bowl, and closed the lid! I positioned the solar cooker so the flap was pointing directly at the sun. I moved the box every 15-30 minutes so there were no shadows.
Results
I checked on my solar cooker every 30 minutes and was impressed that the Yumbini rehydrated quite quickly – within a half hour. After one hour, the Yumbini was 120 F. After 1.5 hours, the Yumbini was 130 F and the bowl was very hot to the touch.z
At that point, Aki and I decided to chow down! I’m pleased to report, the Yumbini was a perfect texture (not dry as I had feared) and a good eating temperature (though, I admit, not exactly piping HOT).
The advantage of Yumbini is that the beans and rice are already precooked (and dried). So really you only need to heat it and soak up the water. I had dreams of my Yumbini simmering in a solar oven. That could happen in a more sophisticated arrangement, but not in my pizza box. But it really didn’t matter! Even with my simple box, I was able to prepare tender, warm beans and rice heated by the sun!
Only one caution: please don’t heat Yumbini in a solar cooker for more than two hours. Holding any food between 40 F and 140 F for extended periods can cause spoilage.
Other Solar Cooker Ideas
I’m going to call my pizza box solar cooker Yumbini a win, with lots of potential for improvement! Good for camping in high fire danger areas and good for a fun science experiment with kids.
Thinking bigger, have you heard of the organization Solar Cookers International? They are helping the 2.1 billion people worldwide who cook over wood, animal waste, or charcoal fires make use of solar instead. Supporting solar cooker research and adoption, their website is full of information. And it includes test results from various types of solar cookers. According to their estimate “If everyone currently cooking with polluting fuels, cooked with solar cookers ¼ of the time, over 1 trillion dollars could be saved annually across the globe”.
So solar cookers are the wave of the future! And Yumbini makes it easy!
Here is a step-by-step guide (with more photos) for preparing Yumbini in a solar cooker from our recipes page.
And if you want to donate to Solar Cookers International to help people around the globe, click here.
