Lapin Kulta Solar Kitchen Restaurant by Finnish food visionary Antto Melasniemi and Catalan designer Martí Guixé, debuted at this year Milan Design Week.
The Lapin Kulta Solar Kitchen Restaurant is based on the concept of solar kitchen where cooking is by pure solar energy. The Lapin Kulta Solar Kitchen Restaurant rethinks our perception of the kitchen, cooking, food, drinks in relation to nature.
Did you know you can cook entire meals without any electricity or gas? It’s true. If you have access to the sun then you can cook with it.
Cooking with the power of the sun is commonly referred to as solar cooking, and you don’t need expensive gadgets or equipment to do this successfully either. Solar cooking requires sunlight of course, a bit of time, a few everyday items, and a willingness to experiment.
In the most basic form, solar cooking can be done easily as long as you have decently strong sunlight for a few hours. The stronger your sunlight is of course, the easier your solar cooking will be. In the desert southwestern areas of the United States for example, you can literally just lay food out in direct sunlight in the summer and it will cook quickly for you. We’re going to look at a little more than the basics here though.
There are two primary ways to cook food with solar power. One is to use what’s known as a parabolic cooker, and the other is to simply use reflecters.
A parabolic cooker is actually just anything you have on hand which has a slighly bowled, or parabolic shape to it. Round satellite dishes are excellent examples of this type of inward curved surface. The slight curve of a surface like this will allow you to concentrate the natural heat of the sun onto the food you’re cooking.
Parabolic cookers can be made with simple cardboard, or any slightly concaved material such as an old (small) sattelite dish, a small wok, or even a bent and curved trash can or barbecue lid. Using old materials for this is great because it allows you to recycle and it doesn’t usually cost a thing.
Most people choose to make their first solar oven with cardboard because it’s readily available, easy to work with, and free.
The best parabolic solar cooker will have slanted sides though, not upright ones. A slant of about 60 degrees outwards is ideal. Once you find the object you plan to use for your solar cooking, then you simply cover it with tin foil, mylar, or mirrors. Mirrors can actually be dangerous because too much heat is generated, so it’s best to start with aluminum foil. Cover your concaved object with the foil so that the shiny side is facing out. This will capture more of the sunlight shining down on your solar cooking, and help focus it onto your food.
Simple reflector style solar cookers are another popular option, and in many cases you don’t even have to put things together to make this work. With this style of solar cooking, you simply put a pot or pan out into direct sunlight and surround it on three sides with reflective material to help direct the solar heat to your food.
With either solar cooking design though, you’ll want to use either glass or dark metal cooking pots and pans. Dark metal helps attract and absorb the natural solar heat from the sun, and glass allow that solar heat to pass through easily yet stay trapped inside for cooking.
Depending upon the strength of the sunlight you have available and the solar cooker design you’re using, it can take anywhere from one to three hours to fully cook common meals for three to five people.
Of course you can also use regular solar panels or a solar power generator kit to power a more conventional energy efficient stove or oven when the sun isn’t strong enough to use your solar cooker, or if you prefer to cook foods in a more traditional manner.
Executive Summary about Solar Cooker by Detlef Warner
Cooking with a solar cooker is one more way that you too can go green!
A solar cooker, or solar oven, is mechanism that uses sunlight to cook food rather than electricity or gas. Solar cookers come in several different varieties: A box cooker, panel cooker, and a parabolic cooker. While a box cooker is a better choice when you’re looking to cook a large amount of food, a parabolic cooker is capable of cooking the food faster.
Solar cookers will take more time than a traditional oven, with the exception of a parabolic cooker, so you should plan on allowing approximately two times the regular cooking time. Solar cookers are readily available both online and in stores. You can construct a solar oven out of something as simple as cardboard and in a short amount of time be cooking your first solar meal!
How to Make a Solar Cooker? – Making a Homemade DIY Solar Cooker
Executive Summary about Solar Cooker by Dinna Bonevi
Isn’t it a wonderful idea to make a homemade DIY solar cooker, then cooking under the sun? Clues are: it’s energy source is free, environment friendly, comparable to latest cooker but with great discount, pocket friendly and absolutely can’t operate without the help from the mother sun. I’m talking of having a solar cooker, cooking under the sun project.
Will you spend some bucks or rather choose the pocket friendly unit? I guess all of us prefer money saving units. Absolutely it could, the sun continuously gives us the heat and solar energy more than we ever need. So, the solar cooker, cooking under the sun project is definitely durable when we speak of operational source of energy.
Let’s try to make use of readily available sources within the vicinity for our solar cooker.
Things needed:
- Foils or mirrors as reflectors
- Conductive Materials
- Stand (for the food)
The construction of a solar cooker is very easy. A solar cooker is usually a box style that’s made with conductive supplies. The longer it is exposed to the sun the hotter the unit gets. The reflectors help centralize the solar heat on the food that will be cooked.
The solar cooker could reach as high as 300 degrees temperature. Knowing on how to make a homemade DIY solar cooker project is another fun project for everyone. Enjoy the heat and let’s eat!
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