Solar Cornbread Lives

That’s right we used the solar cooker this weekend and by all accounts it was a success. A while back my dad sent me this recipe for cornbread for which we were able to find all of the ingredients locally in the market. This was a bit of a challenge but we came up with everything we needed after a month or so of keeping a lookout. We used sour milk where it called for buttermilk, we found what I think was just pounded corn and used that where it called for cornmeal, and the other things we found pretty much as they were called for in the recipe. We originally planned to try cooking it in dutch oven or something in the cooking shed but then we got the solar cooker.

If you read the last blog entry then you know that we recently acquired a solar cooker on loan from Peace Corps for testing. This is a very simple device consisting of two pots and a cardboard reflector. One pot is made of clear glass and the second is made of enamel coated metal and is black. The black pot is slight smaller than the glass pot and sits inside it with a tight fitting glass lid. You put what ever you want to cook into this pot and set it in the middle of the cardboard reflector and point it at the sun. The idea is that the solar reflector concentrates the sunlight on the pot. The light energy enters the glass pot and is absorbed by the black metal pot turning to heat energy. The glass pot lets the light energy through but won’t let the heat back out just like the windows on your car on a hot sunny day. This is how a fairly simple setup does something pretty sweet like make cornbread.

So after mixing up all the ingredients which was pretty simple we poured the batter into the pot and put the whole thing up on the roof of our shed in the back of the house. This involved a slightly precarious maneuver of me on a chair with a stool on top of the chair to get up high enough but I managed not to die or drop the bowl. After that it was pretty much just leave it up there and rotate it slightly every hour or so to center it on the sun. While it was cooking it was pretty amazing how much heat was being generating. I opened up the lid at one point to look inside and the batter was sizzling around the edges of the black pot and it was too hot to touch. So three hours later it was finished, cooked to a golden yellow complete with browned edges. It is delicious especially with some Gambian honey on top. The recipe made an extra large batch so we had enough to give to our host family and some other PCVs around the area and everybody was loving it. All this for about 60 Dalasi or about $3 U.S. of ingredients.

That’s it for now just thought some of you might be interested. If you want to check out the manufacture who make the solar cooker go to www.she-inc.org. Also I posted a few new pics today. Some are of the cornbread and some of other random things so make sure you read the captions for all the details. Later…