If even one person here doesn't yet have a fast-reading food thermometer I have to evangelize for them here. Good ones that instantly read used to cost like $75, and the cheap kind would take literal minutes to arrive at the real temp, but I think someone in China figured out the secret and brought the price down to like $14. Mine has a magnet and I keep it right next to the microwave and air fryer. It has made it tremendously easier to get food correctly heated through, in both devices.
The other thing I believe in strongly is, for most things, using 40-60% power and heating the food about twice as long as your original instincts say, for more even heating.
In particular, anything that has a lot of liquid benefits from using lower power for longer.
Of course, putting a quart of spaghetti sauce in an open container and microwaving it at 100% will result in some very cool sauce explosions as localized steam in the source rapidly expands and blows giant sauce bubbles all over your microwave.
Yes microwaves can go far through ice but only 15 or less milimeters into water depending on the water's temperature. Microwaves are best for ready to eat frozen foods or reheating leftovers spread out over a plate.
Completely agree with the reduced power recommendation. That really helps evenly heat foods that start popping in the microwave or have hot spots when taken out. The few extra minutes are usually not a big deal anyway.
Yeah, the instant thermometers are very nice. Also though, i was recently asked about my favorite nonstandard kitchen appliance and my laser thermometer is my single favorite kitchen gadget, i use it every single time i cook anything. Granted, it reads the surface, but it'll tell you the exact temperature the skillet is at , at every location so you can tell when the cast iron is sufficiently heated to perfect a steak. I prefer my food at about 120°F which is right around the steam point.
Also interesting point related to the article, if i point my laser thermometer at the microwave while it's going it'll bug out and return random temperatures between the actual temperature of the window and about 500°F. I'm sure i could figure out why but i just haven't had the time yet
If you're screwing around with microwave sources, I'll pass on a warning I got from one of my profs.
Microwaves will heat your body up, but in a relatively harmless way. e.g. If you microwave your hands a bit, blood flow will transfer that heat out and things will remain pretty okay unless you really overdo it.
Your eyes are an exception. They're orbs of aqueous humor that's mostly water, but have relatively little blood flow when compared to most other tissues in the body. Microwaves will heat them up, but bloodflow won't distribute the heat away quickly. Protect your eyes around microwave sources.
If anyone has a school-age child needing a science experiment, my niece created a list of various items and what she expected their behavior to be in a microwave at different cooking times.
And then tested her hypothesis in a cheap microwave (out in the yard in case of explosions), documenting what happened with photos and making a conclusion for each. She got top scores from the teacher for following the scientific method.
Our microwave oven died on Christmas Eve, and I ended up getting one of those newer flatbed ones. The novelty of putting something in there and watching it not rotate has not worn off yet.
I read somewhere that you can place a candle under a bowl (with allowance for oxygen to get in) and you can capture the plasma given off by the candle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5BFIVDUQPE
I want an IR camera and I want to input my desired temperature. That's all.
Then I want the microwave to cycle on when the camera says everything is below temp, and cycle off as soon as any hot spot hits temp. Then wait for the hot spot(s) to dissipate before cycling back on.
Seems like a foolproof way to cook evenly without overcooking.
I kind of approximate it now by cooking something frozen on high for a couple minutes, then on 20% power for five minutes, then 10% power for another five minutes. But it would be nice to have it all automated.
When I was a kid(~1980), I remember our microwave had a removable temperature probe you could insert into the food. I don't know if it was just for informative purposes or if it controlled the cooking however.
Those disappeared, though, because they're solving the wrong problem.
Those would tell you when the center of your food was cooked, but by then the outside of your food was insanely over-cooked. Most of your chicken breast has turned into dried-out rubber.
The real problem isn't to get the center hot enough, that's easy. It's to prevent the outside from getting too hot. And you need a camera for that.
I think a probe would be really great, because knowing the surface temp doesn't tell you how hot the thickest part of the food is. Although GP has an interesting point that if you cycle it for long enough, I guess the heat should approach equilibrium and the surface and insides should match.
Yup that's exactly the idea, for it to approach equilibrium.
And the microwave should be able to deduce how close it is by the rate of cooling of non-hotspots while the cycle is off. If it's cooling quickly, the inside is still frozen. If it isn't cooling at all, the inside is nice and warm.
The only problem is that the camera would not survive the first time you use that oven. High power microwaves happily destroy all manner of electronics.
Shielding is straightforward; styropyro on YouTube made a ridiculously overpowered oven, 20 kW, was able to film the interior via a small hole, camera was basically fine.
Because if the microwave can do it in 10-15 min, the toaster oven is going to take 40-60 min or worse.
Waiting 10-15 min to reheat something evenly is doable for me. I can make a side salad, toast some bread, empty the dishwasher or whatever while I wait.
Waiting 40-60+ min requires real advance planning, which is often just not feasible.
If you've ever used a toaster oven to warm up a frozen personal-size lasagna, sometimes it can take as long as an hour and a half.
I know someone who worked at a failed startup that attempted almost exactly this minus the AI. It used an IR camera paired with a secret method to beam form the microwaves to uniformly heat the food no matter how it was dispersed across a plate. This means you could have a pile of water rich vegetables and a steak on a plate and it would heat evenly. It worked great nut IIRC the issue that caused it to fail was calibration of the IR sensor took a ton of effort and they could not scale that to a production scenario. Edit: should mention it let you dial in a temperature so the method is workable, just needs to scale to production.
Some microwaves take a useful shortcut with a sensor for water vapor, so they know when something has started to steam and can reactively change the amount of time remaining.
Obviously this is great for things like soups, but not-so-much for things which don't reach 100C in an even fashion.
IR sensors aren't reliable if there is a lot of water vapour coming off the food (it measures the temperature of the water vapour). Great for oil and other dry heat (but again beware, with shiny metal they tend to measure the mirror image of what's reflected by the metal, not the metal itself). These effects are more visible using an actual thermal camera.
We can make a solid guess at volume using visible light and a rotating view (already provided by the unfortunately-common carousels), with a bit of CV and math.
We can therefore deduce density.
We can measure outside temperature using IR.
And we can measure the power put into the things being microwaved.
And we can also measure the temperature and humidity of the air that is exhausted from the microwave chamber.
With all of that data, we can do some cool things.
But with only single-button input, there's a lot we can't do:
We can't know if the user is cooking a hamburger from raw meat (yes, raw meat can be used in the science oven), or reheating one that was already cooked, or finishing one that was par-cooked.
We can't know if they're softening butter to spread onto toast, or melting it to pour over popcorn
We can't know lots of things. So we need more than one user input.
The slope to getting back to where we started is very short: Some preset buttons that most people will never understand, a speed control that most will never use, and a keypad for a timer.
Agree. I think 90% if people use their microwave to reheat leftovers or cook pre-packaged meals. All they need is a timer. And I'd prefer a dial to a keypad.
My wife bought a countertop convection oven that has nearly 100 pre-defined cooking programs and 10 different "quick set" buttons. How do we actually use it? Set a temperature and time. With a dial. Could have be so much simpler.
I use mine mostly for warming up shitty frozen burritos.
It has an inverter and a humidity sensor and 20 or so different preset buttons that use them, with sub permutations.
None of them work well at the job of warming up two shitty frozen burritos.
What does work well is this: One minute at power 10, and 3 minutes at power 3.
When others see me programming this in they think I'm a madman, and sometimes they even audibly question my sanity.
And I'm not sure that they're wrong.
---
The microwave I grew up with had a mechanical timer knob (with a simple mechanical bell), a second knob to set duty cycle (probably borrowed from an electric range), and a start button.
It worked fine. I like being able to program things, but I'm usually standing right there anyway so I'm perfectly capable of turning the duty cycle knob down after about a minute passes and getting the same results that I do today.
(And that method did in fact work fine back then, too, even though people also thought I was crazy when they'd see me doing that)
And for bonus nachos: The timer also worked perfectly as a simple mechanical kitchen timer. Just give it a twist, avoid the start button, and it spins down until it goes "Ding!".
There was some experimentation early on--I even have a microwave cookbook--but, outside of some vegetables, very few people actually try to cook using one. And, yeah, I don't know the last time I did anything other than set time. I rarely even do anything other than full power. I do use the popcorn setting from time to time but even that is pretty much unnecessary if you listen to the popping.
I have to replace my microwave because it caught on fire in the middle of the night and I'll probably get a 4-in-1 Panasonic which will also replace my second oven which I basically never used.
My parents used to cook taco meat and bacon in the microwave.
It worked OK-ish.
It's hard to actually get the Maillard process going in a microwave with a couple of pounds of ground cow, so proper browning wasn't a thing.
They'd just put the moo into a glass mixing bowl, turn the machine on, and give it rigorous toss with a wooden spoon every couple of minutes. Ground beef crumbles were the result.
For bacon, we had a special angled plastic tray with drainage slots for the grease. They'd layer up bacon separated by paper towels, and start the machine.
This worked better than the taco meat did, in my opinion, but it still sucked because picking little bits of greasy, stuck paper towels off of hot bacon is annoying.
I've never done either of these methods myself, because I naturally want to do things better than they did. In my adult life, ground taco meat goes in a skillet on the stove (and uses a cheap wire potato masher to break it up), and bacon goes in the oven on a sheet pan.
I actually have one of those bacon tray things. It's just very messy as you say and doesn't really save effort overall. Probably better using a standard oven for big batches.
re: ground beef or meat in general, slow cookers have sort of the same problem with respect to Maillard reactions. You're generally better off using a dutch oven, browning, and then cooking in the dutch oven--unless you want to do prep and then toss in a pot and forget for the day. I have a slow cooker but wouldn't buy one today.
(I'm straying pretty far from topic, and I for one don't care much. It's still about cooking food, right?)
I think the bacon tray thing I remember was made by Anchor Hocking. I've found them while thrifting and I leave them on the shelf for someone else -- bacon in the oven (or in a cast iron skillet) is just simpler, even including the differences in mess.
Man, slow cookers. My mom gave me one once. As such things were at that time, it was nice: Big, Crock Pot-branded, removable guts, stainless outside, glass lid, one knob, two or three speeds. She still has a big thing for them and was very pleased to give it to me as a gift.
A then-SO persuaded me to donate it during a downsizing. I was a little bit bummed, but then: I recognized that I had never really used it.
That was a decade ago. I've found that I haven't missed it a bit. The only thing it was really good for was shredded chicken sandwiches from locally-canned chicken (which seems to be an Ohio-only thing), and that was something I only ever made one time in my decades of cooking.
Otherwise it was just a glorified food-keeper-warmer, and there's other ways to do that.
I've politely refused other gifts of slow cookers.
---
But these new-fangled Instant Pots (and their similar kin) are pretty sweet, I think. They don't really do even a quarter of the stuff they're advertised to do, but they're really good at doing things like beans and braised meats fast.
An electric pressure cooker allowed deciding to make a supper of chili with dry beans (another Midwestern thing) became a decision that could be made in the early evening instead of the night before. And with the Keep Warm function, it'll stay at a reasonably-safe serving temperature automatically -- much like the slow cooker's most-useful trick.
Swissed steak (you know, the economical dish that is ideally made with whatever low-grade hunk of cow is on sale cheap today along with some tomatoes and onions)? Fast, proper, spoon-tender, and delicious.
I don't use it as much as I could, but it's always pretty rewarding when I do.
(It's hypothetically no better or safer than a properly-used old-school stove-top pressure cooker, but the automatic timer and temperature/pressure regulation makes proper use a whole lot easier.)
You can put some thermal paper, or a sufficiently large chocolate bar in there (without the turntable) to see the interference patterns yourself without any fancy gear.
> My father was a radar officer in WWII, and recalled warming his hands on cold British mornings in front of the beam emitted by a "magnetron" inside his primitive radar transmitter. Then he went back to work detecting Nazi aircraft. But, it is a short distance from warming to cooking- in 1946 engineers at the military contractor Raytheon noticed microwaves could not only warm, they could heat and cook food.
In the 1990s I was a contractor at DRA Malvern in the UK, which was one of the successor organisations to the WW2 radar research establishments. The greybeards I encountered always felt that they had invented microwave cooking even if Raytheon got the credit later. Sausages cooked using the lab magnetrons, they said, although unfortunately there were no photographs.
The future of cooking was something that famous futurist Arthur C Clarke got wrong. He might have predicted geostationary communications satellites but in his short story The Sentinel - which was the inspiration for the film/book 2001 - the crew of a small lunar rover fry their sausages in a conventional frying pan.
The article doesn't mention issues with putting metal - dishes, silverware, twist ties, whatever - in the microwave. IF you know what you're doing, that's pretty harmless. (If not - sparks, fire, and other excitement often results.)
My (limited) understanding is that the shape is a large factor. Something about sharp edges or points concentrating the electric field induced by the microwaves, leading to a high voltage buildup. So forks are a bad idea, while spoons will likely not result in any sparks.
Yeah, Mr. ElectroBOOM has a pretty informative video [1] trying a handful of different configurations of metal objects in a consumer microwave oven. Turns out it's hard to make "interesting" things happen with metal even if you intend to.
Alton Brown used to have a recipe (I'm Just Here for the Food?) for homemade microwave popcorn where you can use a typical metal staple and it won't spark, something to do with the amount of metal, and also actual size of the microwave wavelengths used being bigger than a staple, iirc.
This last part is such pseudoscience that it makes me suspicious of everything I was nodding along with before:
> Of the 70,000 chemicals in widespread commercial production, only around 500 have been competently screened for human toxicity. Since most products are a blend of numerous ingredients, it is axiomatic that all products contain at least one ingredient that is untested and not known to be safe. This includes everything from hand lotion to plastic water bottles to deoderizers.
Do you not understand what the word axiomatic means? If there are 70,000 chemicals and only 500 have been tested, does that mean *every single product* *must* contain an untested ingredient? No, because products don’t randomly pull ingredients out of a hat. Proof by counterexample: pure water in a bottle made of the many materials that have been tested for food safety. But hey, why bother with facts when you can just make shit up and call it "axiomatic"?
The other thing I believe in strongly is, for most things, using 40-60% power and heating the food about twice as long as your original instincts say, for more even heating.
Of course, putting a quart of spaghetti sauce in an open container and microwaving it at 100% will result in some very cool sauce explosions as localized steam in the source rapidly expands and blows giant sauce bubbles all over your microwave.
Also interesting point related to the article, if i point my laser thermometer at the microwave while it's going it'll bug out and return random temperatures between the actual temperature of the window and about 500°F. I'm sure i could figure out why but i just haven't had the time yet
Microwaves will heat your body up, but in a relatively harmless way. e.g. If you microwave your hands a bit, blood flow will transfer that heat out and things will remain pretty okay unless you really overdo it.
Your eyes are an exception. They're orbs of aqueous humor that's mostly water, but have relatively little blood flow when compared to most other tissues in the body. Microwaves will heat them up, but bloodflow won't distribute the heat away quickly. Protect your eyes around microwave sources.
And then tested her hypothesis in a cheap microwave (out in the yard in case of explosions), documenting what happened with photos and making a conclusion for each. She got top scores from the teacher for following the scientific method.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/24081775/Candle-i...
With accurate heat tracking, it’d only need a button to open the door and no knobs.
Then I want the microwave to cycle on when the camera says everything is below temp, and cycle off as soon as any hot spot hits temp. Then wait for the hot spot(s) to dissipate before cycling back on.
Seems like a foolproof way to cook evenly without overcooking.
I kind of approximate it now by cooking something frozen on high for a couple minutes, then on 20% power for five minutes, then 10% power for another five minutes. But it would be nice to have it all automated.
Those would tell you when the center of your food was cooked, but by then the outside of your food was insanely over-cooked. Most of your chicken breast has turned into dried-out rubber.
The real problem isn't to get the center hot enough, that's easy. It's to prevent the outside from getting too hot. And you need a camera for that.
And the microwave should be able to deduce how close it is by the rate of cooling of non-hotspots while the cycle is off. If it's cooling quickly, the inside is still frozen. If it isn't cooling at all, the inside is nice and warm.
IR and microwave wavelengths are nowhere even close to each other.
The grill in my microwave door lets through visible light. And the electronics already present in my microwave seem just fine.
https://youtu.be/mg79n_ndR68?si=F5RTVUWdxglMFm7X
Waiting 10-15 min to reheat something evenly is doable for me. I can make a side salad, toast some bread, empty the dishwasher or whatever while I wait.
Waiting 40-60+ min requires real advance planning, which is often just not feasible.
If you've ever used a toaster oven to warm up a frozen personal-size lasagna, sometimes it can take as long as an hour and a half.
https://www.eater.com/2015/2/11/8022235/never-burn-popcorn-a...
Obviously this is great for things like soups, but not-so-much for things which don't reach 100C in an even fashion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0
We can make a solid guess at volume using visible light and a rotating view (already provided by the unfortunately-common carousels), with a bit of CV and math.
We can therefore deduce density.
We can measure outside temperature using IR.
And we can measure the power put into the things being microwaved.
And we can also measure the temperature and humidity of the air that is exhausted from the microwave chamber.
With all of that data, we can do some cool things.
But with only single-button input, there's a lot we can't do:
We can't know if the user is cooking a hamburger from raw meat (yes, raw meat can be used in the science oven), or reheating one that was already cooked, or finishing one that was par-cooked.
We can't know if they're softening butter to spread onto toast, or melting it to pour over popcorn
We can't know lots of things. So we need more than one user input.
The slope to getting back to where we started is very short: Some preset buttons that most people will never understand, a speed control that most will never use, and a keypad for a timer.
My wife bought a countertop convection oven that has nearly 100 pre-defined cooking programs and 10 different "quick set" buttons. How do we actually use it? Set a temperature and time. With a dial. Could have be so much simpler.
It has an inverter and a humidity sensor and 20 or so different preset buttons that use them, with sub permutations.
None of them work well at the job of warming up two shitty frozen burritos.
What does work well is this: One minute at power 10, and 3 minutes at power 3.
When others see me programming this in they think I'm a madman, and sometimes they even audibly question my sanity.
And I'm not sure that they're wrong.
---
The microwave I grew up with had a mechanical timer knob (with a simple mechanical bell), a second knob to set duty cycle (probably borrowed from an electric range), and a start button.
It worked fine. I like being able to program things, but I'm usually standing right there anyway so I'm perfectly capable of turning the duty cycle knob down after about a minute passes and getting the same results that I do today.
(And that method did in fact work fine back then, too, even though people also thought I was crazy when they'd see me doing that)
And for bonus nachos: The timer also worked perfectly as a simple mechanical kitchen timer. Just give it a twist, avoid the start button, and it spins down until it goes "Ding!".
There was some experimentation early on--I even have a microwave cookbook--but, outside of some vegetables, very few people actually try to cook using one. And, yeah, I don't know the last time I did anything other than set time. I rarely even do anything other than full power. I do use the popcorn setting from time to time but even that is pretty much unnecessary if you listen to the popping.
I have to replace my microwave because it caught on fire in the middle of the night and I'll probably get a 4-in-1 Panasonic which will also replace my second oven which I basically never used.
It worked OK-ish.
It's hard to actually get the Maillard process going in a microwave with a couple of pounds of ground cow, so proper browning wasn't a thing.
They'd just put the moo into a glass mixing bowl, turn the machine on, and give it rigorous toss with a wooden spoon every couple of minutes. Ground beef crumbles were the result.
For bacon, we had a special angled plastic tray with drainage slots for the grease. They'd layer up bacon separated by paper towels, and start the machine.
This worked better than the taco meat did, in my opinion, but it still sucked because picking little bits of greasy, stuck paper towels off of hot bacon is annoying.
I've never done either of these methods myself, because I naturally want to do things better than they did. In my adult life, ground taco meat goes in a skillet on the stove (and uses a cheap wire potato masher to break it up), and bacon goes in the oven on a sheet pan.
re: ground beef or meat in general, slow cookers have sort of the same problem with respect to Maillard reactions. You're generally better off using a dutch oven, browning, and then cooking in the dutch oven--unless you want to do prep and then toss in a pot and forget for the day. I have a slow cooker but wouldn't buy one today.
I think the bacon tray thing I remember was made by Anchor Hocking. I've found them while thrifting and I leave them on the shelf for someone else -- bacon in the oven (or in a cast iron skillet) is just simpler, even including the differences in mess.
Man, slow cookers. My mom gave me one once. As such things were at that time, it was nice: Big, Crock Pot-branded, removable guts, stainless outside, glass lid, one knob, two or three speeds. She still has a big thing for them and was very pleased to give it to me as a gift.
A then-SO persuaded me to donate it during a downsizing. I was a little bit bummed, but then: I recognized that I had never really used it.
That was a decade ago. I've found that I haven't missed it a bit. The only thing it was really good for was shredded chicken sandwiches from locally-canned chicken (which seems to be an Ohio-only thing), and that was something I only ever made one time in my decades of cooking.
Otherwise it was just a glorified food-keeper-warmer, and there's other ways to do that.
I've politely refused other gifts of slow cookers.
---
But these new-fangled Instant Pots (and their similar kin) are pretty sweet, I think. They don't really do even a quarter of the stuff they're advertised to do, but they're really good at doing things like beans and braised meats fast.
An electric pressure cooker allowed deciding to make a supper of chili with dry beans (another Midwestern thing) became a decision that could be made in the early evening instead of the night before. And with the Keep Warm function, it'll stay at a reasonably-safe serving temperature automatically -- much like the slow cooker's most-useful trick.
Swissed steak (you know, the economical dish that is ideally made with whatever low-grade hunk of cow is on sale cheap today along with some tomatoes and onions)? Fast, proper, spoon-tender, and delicious.
I don't use it as much as I could, but it's always pretty rewarding when I do.
(It's hypothetically no better or safer than a properly-used old-school stove-top pressure cooker, but the automatic timer and temperature/pressure regulation makes proper use a whole lot easier.)
You can then eat the chocolate.
In the 1990s I was a contractor at DRA Malvern in the UK, which was one of the successor organisations to the WW2 radar research establishments. The greybeards I encountered always felt that they had invented microwave cooking even if Raytheon got the credit later. Sausages cooked using the lab magnetrons, they said, although unfortunately there were no photographs.
The future of cooking was something that famous futurist Arthur C Clarke got wrong. He might have predicted geostationary communications satellites but in his short story The Sentinel - which was the inspiration for the film/book 2001 - the crew of a small lunar rover fry their sausages in a conventional frying pan.
The article doesn't mention issues with putting metal - dishes, silverware, twist ties, whatever - in the microwave. IF you know what you're doing, that's pretty harmless. (If not - sparks, fire, and other excitement often results.)
Do you know of any resources that explain what scenarios belong in the "harmless" category?
https://youtu.be/OyTmJX_TC84?feature=shared
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyTmJX_TC84&ab_channel=Elect...
> Of the 70,000 chemicals in widespread commercial production, only around 500 have been competently screened for human toxicity. Since most products are a blend of numerous ingredients, it is axiomatic that all products contain at least one ingredient that is untested and not known to be safe. This includes everything from hand lotion to plastic water bottles to deoderizers.
This seems kinda okay though. It’s very different to saying “known to be unsafe”. There are tons of untested (or insufficiently tested) things.
Words have meaning.