cooking-beans-in-solar-oven

How To Cook Dry Beans With A Solar Oven

cooking-beans-in-solar-oven

So – along with your other food preps, let’s say you’ve stored countless pounds of dry beans. Have you considered alternate methods to cook them, just in case?

In the event that you cannot cook your beans over an electric stove (grid down; collapse), or if you no longer have gas or fuel to cook them that way (you’ve run out), one way to cook your beans is with a solar oven. Here’s how…


 
It is amazingly simple! You literally can’t go wrong.

Set your pan of beans (and added water) in the solar oven and forget about it… at least until you’re ready to eat.

A solar oven is like a slow cooker or a crock pot of sorts – for the most part you cannot burn your food. It doesn’t get hot enough to burn but plenty hot enough to slow cook.

When you put a covered pot of food in there, the heat and steam will remain in the pot keeping the food moist while it slow cooks for several hours or more in the sun.

Here’s how simple it is:

Pre-soak the beans in water overnight.
Add the beans to a dark colored pot (with a cover).
Cover the beans with 1 to 2 inches of water.
Add spices or other ingredients according to taste.
Set it in the solar oven and forget about it for hours…

As with any solar oven you will need to align its position-angle with the sun to maximize the solar heating efficiency — and it will help to periodically readjust the oven position every so often as the sun traverses the sky.

What I’ve done in the past when I knew that I would not be around to reposition the solar-oven-mirror angle, was to first line it up directly with the sun, but then continue to shift (advance) its position-angle to where it will become optimized in about an hour. This gives me an approximate 3-hour time frame where the solar cooker is getting some serious heating.

The efficiency of solar oven cookers vary widely depending on its type, its design, and other factors. Having said that, unless you have a highly specific solar cooker – most of them are like slow cookers and you don’t have to be terribly concerned about tending to the oven other than an initial alignment. An occasional shift of position will keep it optimized with the sun’s rays.

I have built several homemade solar ovens over the years. They’ve all worked.

My primary solar cooker though is my Global Sun Oven.
I’ve had it for years and it has cooked many a meal. You get what you pay for…

 
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8 Comments

  1. I have a solar oven…however, living in Ky., I also have beans in a can, and alternative ways to cook them for the winter months and rainy, cloudy days in the summers. You wouldn’t waste precious energy cooking beans for 4 hours. I hope!!

    1. Cloudy days (and winter months) are definitely an issue (pretty much a no-go situation) for a solar oven. Partly cloudy days can be salvageable though. Short of that, you’re back to conventional cooking – about 45 minutes to an hour.

      There’s another way too… bring the beans to a boil and then remove the pot and put it in a tightly insulated containment – maintaining the heat for hours afterwards.

  2. If solar ovens aren’t much of an option, one should have a pressure cooker for beans (about 10 minutes to cook them, as opposed to 2-3 hours on a stove).

    1. Excellent idea. Thanks. A pressure cooker is a great energy saver – which will be especially important after TSHTF when fuel supplies become a big concern – be it conventional fuels or even a wood fire.

      1. Hopefully not an electric pressure cooker. I’m guessing a rocket stove would produce enough heat for a stovetop pressure cooker.

    2. Any suggestions for a pressure cooker that can be used on a campfire or DeadWood type of stove. It seems the plastic handles might be a problem for shtf or outdoor use.

      1. Suggestions? No, I haven’t used any in this manner. You are probably looking for camping gear. I know that GSI make three models out of Aluminum.

      2. Hawkins HACL3T New Classic Cooker 3.0L Tall, Small, Silver
        is available on Amazon.

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