Category — Solar Cooking

Our San Marzano tomatoes are ripening in full force now. Their meaty flesh and relatively thin skin make them great for tomato sauce but also for drying. Ah, sun dried tomatoes. There’s nothing like their zesty flavor in mid-winter. To prepare some, I recently fired up my $15,000 solar dehydrator. That might seem like a lot to pay for a solar dehydrator but mine also gets over 20 miles to the gallon.

That’s right, I use my car as a dehydrator.

I know I’ve complained about temperature of the interior of the car on a sunny day. It feels hot enough to cook something. I even have one of those solar reflectors to decrease the heat. (We’ve got another use for those too… as part of a simple but effective solar cooker that we’ve written about here.) Instead of “wasting” the heat of the car, I put that heat to use to dry tomatoes.

We prepare tomatoes for drying by washing and drying them, then cutting and removing the seeds. I find seed removal most effective if I quarter the tomatoes lengthwise and just pinch out the seeds and juice between my thumb and middle finger. Then spread the tomato sections out on racks; I place them nearly crowded on the rack because they will shrink as they dry. Set the racks on trays or cookie sheets because that allows for easy transport and adequate air circulation. We weren’t going anywhere that day so we put the trays out in the back deck of the wagon which was parked in full sun on an 84 F day.

Obviously we can’t dry tomatoes in 20 minutes, but we can get our part done and let the sun do the rest. We had had a slight problem on some plants with blossom end rot this year so maybe a half dozen tomatoes had a speck of black at the tip that was easily cut off. In the interest of accurate reporting, I should say that I was able to do one tray in 20 minutes, but that included picking, washing, preparing and getting the tomatoes into the car. I subsequently readied two more trays, using about 20 tomatoes per rack.

The concern is not whether this process will work but whether the tomatoes might end up over-cooked. The goal is not tomato jerky, not to make completely dried out tomato pieces. What we want is something more like a fresh raisin or a fruit roll-up texture– still pliable, still slightly moist. Home-drying works best with the paste-style tomatoes, like Roma, Amish paste, the long ones shaped like bulbs or torpedoes, which have more “meat” and less liquidy juice to start. The drying time also depends on the weather so drying can take a day or two.

If the day turns gray or a car is not available, sun-dried tomatoes can also be made or finished in the oven. Put prepared tomatoes on racks or cookie sheets into a 150 F degree oven. Drying might take 10 to 20 hours. Check the tomatoes periodically and move the racks around as necessary.

The easiest and healthiest way to store sun-dried tomatoes is in Ziploc bags in the freezer. Fill bags with cooled tomatoes and zip them closed. All this hard work will result in a product about 80% lighter than what we started with, but don’t be fooled. These little babies pack a lot of punch. Another storage method is to fill a clean jar with tomatoes, top it off with olive oil, and keep in the refrigerator; this, however, is not a low-calorie selection.

I’ve heard hard-core organic folks muse whether the off-gassing from the PVCs in the car upholstery compromise the purity of the tomatoes, but we haven’t worried about that. We enjoy the fruits of our labor long into the winter, tossing sun-dried tomatoes in sauces or on pizza, in soups and scrambled eggs. When all we can get at the grocery are the pale imported tomatoes of winter, we can raid the freezer for bite-sized bits of sunshine in the form of home-grown, home-made, sun-dried tomatoes.

Ah, Michigan! Land of lakes and surprises! Just when we thought it was safe to start thinking about of digging and planting, whammo!

Snow Day April 6, 2008

The upside is that we got a Snow Day from school. We spent the day resting and recharging, and that felt very good. The gift of a day off is always something for which to be thankful.

The last snow of the season seems to catch everyone by surprise, but we know it’s coming. When our son Will was just a baby, a friend with the same birthday told us that it always snows at least once after their birthday, which is April 4. It seemed impossible, yet 23 years have proven her statement: In Michigan at least, it always does snow at least once after April 4. The snow doesn’t always stick and very rarely does it merit a snow day, but snow is snow. And it’s here for just a little longer.

A “green” study group formed at our church last year, initially as a book study group. They have now transitioned into a group that meets monthly for a potluck and discussion. We’ve always missed the meetings for one reason or another, but today we decided to show up. The dish we planned to pass is a scaled up version of the Solar Apple Crisp. Scaling up a recipe for a solar oven still involves a lot of guesswork — for us, at least — because it tinkers with the important ratio of surface area to mass. The glory of solar cooking in a box style oven is that you really can’t over-cook many foods because the temperatures don’t get high enough to scorch — at least not in Michigan. Friends who’ve built parabolic style cookers, however, say they can easily burn food on one side before it’s cooked all the way through.

This version of Solar Apple Crisp stars a small cast of ingredients:

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Maybe energy costs are driving you to desperate measures. Maybe you’ve read some of our solar recipe reviews here, and now your stomach is rumbling. Maybe you are just the adventurous type. Whatever your motivation, you can quite easily assemble a simple solar cooker that will allow you to solar cook right away (or as soon as the sun is up).

To make your own windshield shade funnel solar cooker, you will need:

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Today was a gloriously sunny day so decided to “fire up” the ol’ box-style solar cooker while we worked around the garden.

The first round was a batch of “Solar Granola Bars” and a broccoli cheese “Solar Soufflée.” This first round cooked in roughly 3 hours (11:30 – 2:30) Janice has posted the recipe for the Granola Bars elsewhere on the site — and frankly, I think they taste a bit too good to be saddled with such a depressingly healthy name. To me, they’re some kind of brownie. The soufflée contains three eggs whipped with a bit of shredded cheese and some chopped up broccoli leftover from dinner last night. This batch also had a generous addition of fresh garlic. Coat the cooking vessel with something to keep it from sticking (a spray of Pam, a bit of olive oil, butter…) The great thing about solar eggs is that they fluff as they cook so their texture is quite wonderful.

As we were eating our eggs, our daughter tasted them and wanted some for herself so she made another batch. Since the cooker was going to be tended, I quartered a couple potatoes and halved two small onions and drizzled them with oil. These “Solar Roasted” vegetables will be a great start on hash browns for tomorrow. The really nice thing about the box cooker I built is its capacity. We could have easily had another pot in there.

It’s supposed to nice most of the weekend. I wonder what we’ll make tomorrow.