Communal Solar Bakery

Project Summary

Bread is the primary food staple in Morocco. Commonly, families in small and large towns knead the dough at home and take it to a wood fired communal bakery. Our proposal is to build bread baking solar oven to serve several families. Our test oven would have a capacity between10 and 100 loafs. Oven performance increases with size and the large usage justifies using more expensive higher performance material/design (e.g., better reflector, better insulation, humidity condenser, etc.)

Benefits of this project:

• Contribute to 'city greening' effort in Marrakech and other cities by replacing wood-fueled bakeries with solar ovens
• Reduce baking cost and pollution from using wood fuel
• Be a show case for solar cooking and passive solar energy products.

We hope a successful test will encourage local bakeries to replace a portion of their fuel-based baking with solar baking and learn how to build the oven.

The technical challenge for this project is to get the necessary temperature and humidity levels to develop excellent crust on the bread. Should the users decide to use the oven as the primary oven, the solar oven could be retrofitted with a propane burner. During baking time, the propane burner could be adjusted to be turned on/off automatically to keep the oven at a prescribed temperature. An example of a commercially produced large solar oven can be found at the following link.

Tasks and Status

• Review design of current large commercial solar ovens
• Propose an oven design adapted specifically for Moroccan bread
• Contact local resource for participation and for finding space to build oven