/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Other tips,

The more food you pack into a solar cooker the longer it takes to cook the food. The denser the food the longer it will take to cook. To help cook faster you can chop foods up into much smaller pieces. For other foods you simply need to rethink what you are doing. If you want boiled eggs, you need to realize that you don't need water to cook the egg in the shell when using a solar box cooker. If you added water and tried to boil it for the egg it would take much longer.

Canning jars such as glass mason jars act as pressure cookers when they are properly sealed. The black painted jar heats up and the air and water pressure cooks the contents. Be careful when using a mason jar with pasta. It can obliterate the pasta in a very short amount of time, reducing it to mere mush. Mush pasta is god awful. A mason jar can cook rice and beans faster.

You can also can vegetables with a solar cooker using mason jars. However, I would consider this a Water-Bath method of canning and not pressure canning, so only can foods that are safe for water bath canning. If you do use a painted jar, put a piece of tape up one side prior to painting it. Then remove the tape so that there is one stripe of paint missing. You will be able to see the contents of the jar and determine when it's boiling or whatever.

In regards to paints, for jars you can use anything, but for anything that will be exposed to vapors while cooking, like loose food inside a solar box cooker, I recommend using oven/grill safe paints that don't give off toxic fumes when hot.