Make Your Own Solar Rice Cooker!

Materials list:
* One wine box
* Two nesting glass jars, one with lid.
* Glue or scotch tape Masking tape
* Black paint, either spray or brush on
* Scissors
* Aluminum foil.

Directions:
1. Disassemble box and remove the mylar bladder, and cut as shown. Fold corners at 45 degrees, mark and cut corner.

2. cut off small 4th end flap.

3. Cut and glue bottom flaps in place, weight them down and let the glue dry.

4. Use the cut-off end flap to build out the base of your cooker. Glue and let dry. Give every seam a second application of glue to help hold it together and make it stronger. Let it dry overnight for max strength.

5. Cut the wine bladder with scissors right along the edge seam. Pull apart in 2 halves and wash off the wine. & remove inner plastic.

6. Check how the foil pieces will fit onto the frame, and then glue them into place. Use glue, spray-glue, or scotch tape.

7. Gather the jars you'll need. You can get a good gallon glass one from your local bar. They use them for olives and cherries. Your inner jar can be what I use which is a spaghetti sauce jar cleaned out. Some of these are mason-type jars, and are even marked with ounce measurements. You MUST make sure first that the smaller jar is going to fit into the larger one. If it doesn't fit inside it won't work. (of course you could use an oven bag as your inner container, but I haven't tried that yet.)

8. Put some masking tape on your smaller jar (as shown) and then paint it black. Flat black is best. After paint dries remove tape and you now have a window to check out your food while it is cooking.

9. Set the smaller painted jar (with lid not very tight!) on the cooker surface. Place the larger jar over the smaller one. You now have a double insulated glass cooking area. As the sun reflects off the foil onto the jars, they get hotter and hotter, and eventually start cooking. Please note, this is a sloooooow cooker. But it does get quite hot. I've measured 200 degrees, and with extended front foiled flaps can probably reach boiling. It will burn you severely if you don't take care. Use gloves or potholders when handling both jars, as the outer one gets hot, too. And never, ever, set a hot jar down onto a cold metal or other surface. Set them on wood or cloth, else they may suddenly break.

10. Set your cooker up in good sunlight and let it bake on the black paint for a couple of hours to let it cure.

11. I've only cooked rice in this cooker, but you could certainly cook potatoes, carrots, probably cabbage, and most other vegetables. I wouldn't try cooking meat, because it can develop toxins if not cooked quickly and hotly enough. Biscuits might work, but use your creativity. You MUST always use great care when handling hot jars. Please. You could probably also use a blackened tin can instead of an inner jar to make hobo bread.

To cook rice, mix 1 part rice to 2 parts water in the black jar. Do not fill it up to the top, as it expands while cooking it will overflow and make a big mess. Fill about 2/3 full or less, rice really expands. Also, you should put the lid on the jar, but not very tightly. You don’t want a highly pressurized glass container sitting around waiting to decompress suddenly.

Now, you have to set it up. Figure out where the sun will be when you want to eat (evening) and point the western most edge of the cooker to right where the sun will be then. You don't want to set it to be at the middle focus point, but rather you are looking for a position where the sun will gradually through the day pass directly over the cooker in an arc, and by the time it hits the end of that arc, you will have had a couple of hours of cooking time. Start your cooker early in the morning as that lets the rice pre-soak a little bit. And, again, set it so that the sun will just be going off of it when you want to eat. The rice gets hot, hotter, starts cooking, keeps cooking, gets cool, and if you time it right, your rice will be steaming hot and ready to eat. Please remember, that when handling hot jars with potholders, the jars can slip. Get a good grip. You can customize your cooker by adding extra lower foiled flaps to extend the sun gathering surface, and by finding a place that gets good sunlight but is out of the wind. The cooker I made today is setting in the sun, the paint is curing, and the thermometer reads just about 225 degrees. Of course, the jars are empty.

Another fun cooker is to make one built with cardboard triangles. While it is not really a geodesic dome, foiled inside, it is called an icosahedron. Take 15 large cardboard triangles and glue aluminum foil onto one side. After you tape all the triangles together, it will look kind of like a bowl. Cooks pretty well, and uses the double jars system as described in the wine box cooker.