Your kitchen may have a bunch of cooking appliances, from a stove to a toaster to a coffeemaker to a crock pot to a microwave. Of all those gadgets, only the microwave manages to cook without heat. Open it up, and the only thing hot in there is your food (and sometimes not all of it). If your glass or ceramic dishes get even a little hot, that's from the hot food in it, not from the microwave. How a microwave works without generating heat has some great benefits, like less energy use per item cooked, and not making your kitchen overly hot in the summer. But there are also some weird effects to this cooking method, which have to do with the exact chemistry of the food you're heating up, and the exact nature of the microwaves themselves. Some foods end up soggy or dry or both. You know that cold pizza turns out much better warmed in a toaster oven than in a microwave, and reheating rice is better if you cover it with a wet paper towel. But you can harness this weirdness by using a microwave to dehydrate some foods you'd have never thought of. Minute Food teaches us why microwaves are so weird, and how you can work around that strangeness. The video is only 5:16, the rest is an ad.
Sunday, April 30, 2023
The Weird Thing About Microwaves
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Sometimes when a microwave fails, the magnatron explodes. Figuratively, because that's what it sounds like. If you've ever heard it, you know exactly what I mean. If not and one day you do hear it, relax; the worst is over and you're not going to die.
The best way to warm up a piece of pizza in the microwave is the rice trick they mention: wrap it in a damp paper towel before heating it, then run until you see steam. It even softens the hard crust.
Tell your son no if he wants an Easter egg warmed up, though. You'll hear a 'thud', then open the microwave to see tiny pieces of egg evenly distributed across every surface.
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