Of course, EVERYONE thinks that they do it right, but I want to take a moment to explain why morphballganon actually IS right.
A major purpose of heating the food is to kill bacteria, and most bacteria die at a temperature that is too hot to put in your mouth. If it’s “just the right temperature to eat” you’re gambling with food poisoning.
I intentionally heat my food way beyond the temperature that it should be. I often take a while to eat, and I want my food to stay hot the whole time. I think my (suspected) OCD also plays a part in why I feel it needs to be so hot.
Cold, everytime. Eating something cool or at room temp - when that thing was at one time perfectly delicious before being chilled - means the flavour is still delicious, just not the right temp. You are never getting that steak back to medium rare after a 2 minute nuke. Plus you can eat it without the fear of burning your mouth.
I microwave at lower power settings for longer times, and I stop to stir and taste at regular intervals. My microwaved food is usually the temperature I want it to be.
Using low power on a microwave almost feels like cheating. For anyone unaware, a microwave can only be on or off, so setting a microwave to 50% power really just makes the microwave run for only half of the total runtime. A minute at 50% will be on for 10s, off for ten, etc.
It cooks way better, especially things like stews or other semi-liquidy things that tend to get hot and cold spots.
Edit: looks like my info is old considering my microwave is from 2004, lol. In 2006, LG patented using an inverter to drive the magnetron. The main benefit (according to the patent documentation) is that it’s cheaper to produce. A secondary benefit is that you can, in fact, provide lower power to the magnetron. Seems like a handful of producers must be paying LG to use that method, but probably more will start when the patent expires next year.
I haven’t seen one in the wild, but they are out there.
I’ve never seen a dial set to wattage, but just a “power level”. Either way, though, changing a microwave to only be on half the time will cut the average watts in half.
Here’s GE’s explanation of it. There are probably some fancy newer models that can do some different things, bit for the most part, it’s just on or off. You can even hear it click on and off if you listen to it run.
No, pretty much any microwave by Panasonic actually lowers the power. The difference is dramatic. Look for their “Inverter” logo. I’m not sure about other brands.
That used to be correct. I bought a microwave with an inverter and it can actually heat constantly at different power levels. Curiously, it has a 0 Watt power level as well 🤷🏻♂️
I got a steam owen, and it’s a game changer. The reheat setting is 10 minutes at 120 C, the food comes out tasting as if freshly made, evenly hot, but almost ready to eat. If I wait for 2 minutes after I pull it out (make a coffee for after-lunch dessert), the food is just right.
Yea my dude. If your food containers get hot in a microwave, they are not microwave safe. Could melt your plastics or shatter your earthenware. Or just burn the shit out of you too I guess.
Every microwave I think I’ve ever used here in the US has some form of power setting.
The problem is that it’s completely nonstandardized, so saying “power level 6” can’t be applied to arbitrary other microwaves to get a comparable effect.
I think that it’s rarely useful, because generally you might as well just run at full power for less time and then wait afterwards for heat to spread.
What I really wish we had would be at least semi-standard settings across microwaves. Like, instead of a time setting – microwaves apply energy at different rates – the base unit should be a number of watt-hours to be applied, something like that.
not popular in the UK
Trivia: the UK invented the gizmo that can output that shit-ton of power in the form of microwave radiation in a microwave. It was an absolutely critical technical development in World War II – it let radars be vastly more powerful then they had been, and it was a “Eureka” moment, a major nonobvious breakthrough that other countries wouldn’t have just gotten iteratively shortly.
The cavity magnetron is a high-power vacuum tube used in early radar systems and subsequently in microwave ovens and in linear particle accelerators.
The cavity magnetron was a radical improvement introduced by John Randall and Harry Boot at the University of Birmingham, England in 1940. Their first working example produced hundreds of watts at 10 cm wavelength, an unprecedented achievement. Within weeks, engineers at GEC had improved this to well over a kilowatt, and within months 25 kilowatts, over 100 kW by 1941 and pushing towards a megawatt by 1943. The high power pulses were generated from a device the size of a small book and transmitted from an antenna only centimeters long, reducing the size of practical radar systems by orders of magnitude. New radars appeared for night-fighters, anti-submarine aircraft and even the smallest escort ships, and from that point on the Allies of World War II held a lead in radar that their counterparts in Germany and Japan were never able to close. By the end of the war, practically every Allied radar was based on a magnetron.
The Tizard Mission, officially the British Technical and Scientific Mission, was a British delegation that visited the United States during World War II to share secret research and development (R&D) work that had military applications. It received its popular name from the programme’s instigator, Henry Tizard, a British scientist and chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee which had orchestrated the development of radar.
The mission travelled to the U.S. in September 1940 during the Battle of Britain. They conveyed a number of technical and scientific secrets with the objective of securing U.S. assistance in sustaining the war effort and obtaining the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of these technologies, which Britain itself could not due to the immediate demands of other war-related production. American historian James Phinney Baxter III later said “When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one cavity magnetron to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores.”
The problem is that it’s completely nonstandardized
We have a similar problem in that I’ve seen microwaves that run anywhere between 800-1000W so microwave instructions on certain food items will often be useless. Though I have seen a few that specify the microwave wattage as well as the length, so you can just adjust the time in your head if you need to.
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