Greening Your Kitchen

Your oven is an energy hog. No, really. Even if your oven is an Energy Star rated high efficiency beauty, it's an energy hog because of the way it heats and cooks your food. Basically, an oven cooks your food by heating the air around it to a high temperature and keeping it there for long enough to change the chemical structure of your meats, cakes, cookies and bread. That means that in order to cook your two pound roast that takes up a mere 1 cubic foot of space, you need to heat up 4 cubic feet of space. In short, cooking in a standard oven is one of the most inefficient methods of cooking foods known.

There are more efficient methods of cooking food. For instance, a convection oven uses less energy than a standard oven because it moves the waves of heated air around the food, exposing it to more heat in less time. Small ovens use less energy than big ovens, simply because you're heating less dead space to cook the food you want to cook. And if you're brave enough to step outside the conventional oven box, you'll find some lower energy alternatives among the counter top oven appliances, notably the Nu-Wave Pro Infrared Oven. Tested last month by Consumer Reports, the NuWave Pro uses convection, conduction and infrared heat to cook foods faster - from frozen to perfect in less than half the time, and does it using less energy than a conventional energy. By Consumer Report's measurements, it used about 2/3rds the energy to cook a whole chicken - .6 kilowatts per hour as opposed to .9 kilowatts per hour. It also took an hour less to cook a 10 pound turkey - yes, it's big enough to cook a turkey - and half an hour less to cook a four pound chicken.

Consumer Reports also says that it does a pretty darned good job of cooking most meats and fish, though it tended to dry out vegetables more than roast them, and things like pizza and apple crisp came out soggy. As someone who's been using a countertop oven simiilar to the NuWave as my main oven for over a year, I can vouch for the results, and also note that there are ways to get around those dried out veggies and french fries.

We use ours for everything from toasting muffins to baking bread, which it does beautifully without heating up the whole kitchen in about half the time.

Of course, even the NuWave doesn't come anywhere close to the eco-friendliness of a great little green gadget that won the FT Climate Change Challenge last month. The Solar Powered Cardboard Box oven created by John Bohner and dubbed the Kyoto Oven is a riff on the old Girl Scout project (or Boy Scout, if you were a Boy Scout) of making an oven out of a cardboard box. It consists of two cardbard boxes, one inside the other, and an acrylic top. The inner box is painted black to absorb heat and the outer is lined with tin foil to concentrate it. Out in the sun, the box heats up enough to boil water and bake bread using nothing more than solar power. It costs about $5 to put together, and is already in production in a plant in Nairobi for distribution to villagers in Kenya.

It may not be the most high tech of green techie toys, but it's proof that sometimes low-tech is just as much fun and a lot better for the planet.

Deb Powers writes about coffee and Fair Trade at the Coffee Break blog and about feminist and political issues at Not My Mother's Blog.