This is a solar powered cooker Greg built to cook with. In this picture he is cooking pea soup, which he told me will take about 45 minutes to cook. I was a little dubious if this contraption would really heat up enough to cook his soup, but if you enlarge the picture you will see the wood the glass pot is in is a little charred.
5 comments:
Great post. What did the soup taste like? Or did you not get a chance to try it.
:) 45 minutes is less than a crock pot would require and it will take that long to consume the contents of the bottle Dave is holding in his hand (you know, once you enlarge the photo... :)
Solar soup? Cool!!! I think Greg is smart to start testing his invention before Thanksgiving. Ask him how long a solar turkey cooks.
This is Greg here. What I actually said is that it would take about 45 minutes for the soup to come to a boil.
I once cooked a whole 12 lb chicken (by boiling) using this solar cooker in October, though I haven't attempted turkey before. Because of the size of the chicken and the need for the heat to make it all the way to the center, I think it took 2-3 hours.
There is a tendency for people to underestimate how powerful this solar cooker is. When I built it, one of my goals was that it would be competitive in terms of cooking time with more conventional cooking methods. To get into numbers, the dish intercepts about 2100 watts of solar energy and some percentage of that actually makes it into the food, somewhere in the range of 15%-25%. For comparison, a typical electrical range top heating element provides about 1200 - 1500 watts, but not all of that heat makes it into the food either. Still I find the range top more powerful, but not by a huge amount.
Not that this has much to do with cooking, but some other feats this dish has achieved are melting electrical solder and charring wood. Nothing has ever caught fire though, which I think is great from a safety perspective.
I have a website with additional photos here.
Greg, I think it is fantastic to develop something that ingenious. It would be highly inconvenient to use this is a Manhattan appartment, even with the reassurance that nothing has caught fire yet. ;)
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