Ethicurean writes a step by step tutorial to make your own solar cooker out of basic equipment you probably have lying around your home (two cardboard boxes, aluminum foil, a piece of glass, and the tools to hold everything together). He even describes the physics of why this works.

Here’s how the effect works in a solar oven: energy in the form of sunlight comes through the glass cover and is either directly absorbed by the cooking pot or reflects off the aluminum foil. Some of the reflected energy hits the pot, some of it exits through the window. The glass cover serves two purposes. First, it separates the pot from the ambient environment, thus preventing air current from cooling the pot. Second, the optical properties of the glass keep the heat of the pot inside the cooking chamber.

When an object is at a different temperature than its surroundings, it loses or gains heat by one of three modes: conduction (heat transfer through solid contact, like your hand touching a hot surface), convection (heat transfer through fluid contact, like a cold breeze) or radiation (heat transfer by electromagnetic waves, like sunlight or the heat lamps in outside dining areas). In case of a solar oven, radiation is the main mode of interest.

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