uiTzi
A uiTzi is a high-end solar oven built for serious cooks. Named after the Aztec sun god, its mirrored wings concentrate the sun's energy into a spacious oven that bakes hazelnut tortes, simmers stocks and stews, roasts a leg of lamb, dehydrates fruit, or makes a quick lunchtime frittata. Made from only wood, glass, mirror, silicon, and natural insulation (corn husks, recycled newspaper, wool etc.), there's no more natural way to cook your food. Created by a sculptor/chef design team, a uiTzi is a centrepiece for your terrace or garden in rain and snow, and a powerful oven the moment the sun comes out.
It's Hot!
On a good sunny day an empty uiTzi will touch 300, even 320 degrees Farenheit. Once it has something to cook its temperature drops to a perfect slow-cooking temperature somewhere around boiling point. If you're part of the growing movement away from fast, industrial, nutritionally-depleted foods that make us obese and cancer-prone, a uiTzi can help re-orient your cooking style towards an appreciation of slowness, a love of naturalness, and give your body the boost that comes from eating real food cooked in the most delicious way possible.
How to Cook With It
When you wake up in the morning, swing your uiTzi around to face the sun. It takes about half an hour to pre-heat and then all day long it’s a hot oven. You can put things in and take them out when they’re done, giving it a little rotation occasionally as you go. Sun heat is slower than gas, so things take longer to cook, but it’s also more forgiving. If you have to run an unexpected errand - no problem. Your food will be happily cooking when you get home.
Throw chopped vegetables in a large frying pan with a vented lid around 11:30. After half an hour give it a stir and add cheese or eggs or last night’s leftovers and put it back in for another half hour. That's lunch.
Put a stew in around midday and it’s ready for dinner.
A fruity or egg-based desert can be put in around mid-afternoon and forgotten about. It stays in the uiTzi until you're ready to eat it.
Granola takes an hour. Roasted beets take an afternoon. Sumptuous marmalades and chutneys sit out in the uiTzi all day long (and maybe the next... and the next), their flavors intensifying, getting richer and thicker and steadily more delicious.
Rather than a timer telling you when your food is done, you learn to look through the glass, or smell it, or jiggle it. Mostly you know that it's done when the sun goes down.
What it Cooks
A uiTzi cooks everything from cakes to casseroles, roasts to rhubarb, rainbow trout to tomato sauce. It's especially good at the kinds of slow-cooked foods our grandmothers made, without chaining us to our stoves or turning our kitchens into Turkish baths. Soups, stocks and stews simmer peacefully for hours without ever boiling over. Meat cooks brilliantly in a uiTzi - a free-range chicken or a goat's leg that becomes tough in a conventional oven will melt off the bone in a uiTzi. Egg-based deserts like custards and flans never curdle or burn. Fruit dissolves into miraculously rich and concentrated compots, marmalades and jams. A uiTzi will roast the sweetest and most succulent beets, carrots and sweet potatoes you've ever tasted. Bake lasagna, caramelize onions, sun-dry tomatoes (and apples and quinces). It sun-roasts nuts and granola. And it'll happily reheat your left over pizza... The possibilites are endless. Click our Oven dropdown to see a hundred things that cook beautifully in this powerful solar oven.