INTRODUCTION - Capturing heat: Five earth-friendly cooking technologies and how to build them

This booklet is an introduction to more efficient ways of cooking food using renewable resources. The five stoves and ovens presented here are like well-proven recipes: each has been built and tested and used at the Research Center. They all use solar energy to cook food; some use it directly and others are designed to burn biomass, like wood, that stores sunlight in the form of chemical energy.

Aprovecho uses each new design before teaching people about it, to make sure that a design is worthwhile. The staff at Aprovecho concentrate primarily on household technologies, figuring that cooking is the most important job that is done involving technology. If people don't cook, they don't usually get to eat!

So, here are five "recipes" for ecologically sensitive ways of making the foods that you love. Many of these designs have been built in various countries around the world. Each culture has produced a stove slightly different from antecedent designs. In many ways this process is very much like a recipe where each culture produces exotic and wonderful variations of a theme. We invite you to make your very own stove and then make something delicious with it! Why not share successes, both technological and culinary, with neighbors and friends who might appreciate both?

more efficient ways of preparing food, raising crops, building composting toilets, cisterns, etc. Today, our focus has widened a bit to include research into solar technologies: desalinators, dryers, refrigerators, water heaters and cookers. The wood burning stove designs have become a great deal more efficient and they fit into an integrated "system" of cooking that has evolved over the years.