What's the problem with Microwave Ovens?

[HTFB]

I had a flatmate once with this superstitious fear. Perhaps adapting my idiolect, so that the verb for putting food in the microwave was no longer to cook or even zap but to nuke, may have been a little unkind.

[andygates]

I just discovered that you can nuke corn on the cob.  Happy me!  Nom nom nom...

[hellymedic]

I just discovered that you can nuke corn on the cob.  Happy me!  Nom nom nom...

Nom nom nom!
What setting? How long?

[Blade]

The reason not to use a microwave is that the food tastes like excrement 

But how do you know that? 

[Notsototalnewbie]

A big crack has appeared in my microwave door (plastic bit by the top).

The black mesh bit of the door is intact.

Just wondering if I should still be using it...I've stopped for now.

[border-rider]

The plastic is just cosmetic - it's the mesh that's the screen

As long as the crack is age/impact related and not caused by the door twisting, it'll be fine.  If the door twists then it may leak a bit more than it should - but even if that's so it'll be fine as long as you don't press your nose up against the door seal

[LEE]

Mrs AF is pathologically opposed to them on the grounds that they irradiate you!!!!

Any thoughts appreciated.

Try standing outside the microwave oven

[andygates]

I just discovered that you can nuke corn on the cob.  Happy me!  Nom nom nom...

Nom nom nom! What setting? How long?

5 minutes at Full Chernobyl with a splish of water at the bottom of the bowl.  Corn on the cob's dead cheap round here when it's in season and it just became an official snack food! 

[goatpebble]

If you have already found an alternative hob (the woodburner) and you just want to roast, bake and toast, then why not buy a countertop convection oven?

They are cheap, small, and efficient. I recently spent a month using one. We could roast enough chicken for 4 people, and roast potatoes or vegetables were really easy. It cost 50 euro from the local supermarket.

You could just turn on the top element to grill toast, it was easy to clean, and took up very little space.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The reasons to avoid microwave ovens are aesthetic (they really are ugly, even the 'smart' ones!) and culinary (for some/many items) not health or nutritional.

[GruB]

Wow.  I try and learn something new every day and this thread has hit it for me today.
I always wondered how they worked and if it was safe to stand in front of them etc.
Thanks all.  I am enlightened now 

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Do they still recommend people with pacemakers don't use them?

[border-rider]

It depends on the pacemaker, and how it is fitted & programmed.  Newer ones that are fitted corrrectly are relatively immune; old ones less so.  But the issue there isn't really  the microwaves, it's the big pulsy harmonic-rich low frequency magnetic fields from the transformer and the magnetron.    They penetrate the body much better than microwaves, and are far more likely to cause pacemaker problems.

[pcolbeck]

Microwave is good for:

frozen peas
frozen sweetcorn
baked beans
scrambled egg
spring greens
accelerating baked potatoes (ie get them started in the microwave then crisp off in the oven)
defrosting stuff (but be careful people)
porridge
Uncle Bens instant rice
reheating food

My Dad believes you can do sausages in the microwave but he is gravely mistaken.

[Maladict]

I will have to experiment with changing wifi channel as my wifi doesn't like microwave oven goodness at all.

Experiments reported on t' web suggested a 75% traffic loss in the worst-case choice of channel at 8 feet from the oven (about where I tend to sit with the laptop).

[Really Ancien]

Poppadoms do a treat in the Michaelwave. Keep an eye on them because they catch fire very easily, that's how I know that if you melt the little clover-leaf thing that drives the turntable you can easily get spares, because Panasonic make a lot of the gubbins for other brands. Try your local repair shop for bits.

Damon.

[David Martin]

Cos the surface doesn't get that hot.  In a conventional oven, the air temperature is about 200 C and there's a load of infra red hitting the surface and being absorbed in basically no depth.  The surface gets really hot and the rest of the food heats by conduction from the surface

In a microwave, the air temperature is much, much less (the microwaves of course don't heat air) so the surface is losing heat to the air.  Plus the heating is more spread though the surface layers so the whole food gets hot without the surface reaching such a high temperature - though the surface (usually*) is the hottest part

The  reason you get cold spots in the middle of food is that the microwave cooks them so fast that the heat doesn't have time to even out.

*not in some special cases like jam inside frozen icecream, or stuff in a meringue shell, or anything where the surface doesn't absorb microwaves very well.

The other reason is that the energy used is different. Microwave energy is pitched at water molecule bond rotation. Infrared energy (like your bog standard cooker) is pitched at bond vibrations. Different effects and the cooking pattern is different. Microwaves are really good for foods with furans in, like cabbage and other green veg. And really poor for thiols (eg meats).  Essentially they act as a very localised boil in the bag machine rather than a roaster.

..d

[matthew]

My Dad believes you can do sausages in the microwave but he is gravely mistaken.

I believe my Grandfather was involved in developing the microwave for cooking uses but I can't confirm this. Unfortunately he passed away from a massive heart attack just before his 70th birthday.

The story was they used to take in their lunches (sausages) uncooked and then point the microwave source at the plate like a wand to cook them!! However I can't say how well they were cooked.

Matthew

[rogerzilla]

They're also good for light bulbs and CDs.  If you use someone else's microwave 

[border-rider]

The other reason is that the energy used is different. Microwave energy is pitched at water molecule bond rotation. Infrared energy (like your bog standard cooker) is pitched at bond vibrations. Different effects and the cooking pattern is different. Microwaves are really good for foods with furans in, like cabbage and other green veg. And really poor for thiols (eg meats).

Well, 2.45 GHz isn't pitched at anything much. The lowest water bond rotational relaxations are at about 10 GHz; below that they're a dielectric rather than loss mechanism.   There's some wacky counter-ion relaxation stuff at 100 kHz-10 MHz, but above that until 10 GHz, pretty-much zilch.

Microwave heating works by macroscopic current flow (Joule heating) in high conductivity stuff.  That's how we do microwave dosimety: by measuring internal current density/field strength in lossy phantoms.

The food chemistry (apart from its conductivity) only affects the issue in as much as nice singed meatiness only occurs at higher temperatures than you can get from a conventional microwave oven.  Aside from that, its a matter of water content and salt.

[Really Ancien]

I can tell if meat has been defrosted in a microwave prior to frying or roasting. Many's the time I've put on a fixed smile over a hastily prepared stir-fry, chez nous.

Damon.

[border-rider]

Would anyone care to comment on the many reports regarding the supposed link between microwaved food and the increase in colon cancer?

Interesting one.  I guess that any such effect would be to do with the changed food chemistry because of the different cooking temperature and (in response to Damon's post also) the way that microwaving affects water content.  I'd have expected it to go the other way though since (as I understand it ) there's a potential link between browned/charred food and some cancers.  That's one for the food chemists, I guess

What I can say is that microwaving itself won't change the chemistry except through the way it heats.

[Really Ancien]

Hard to separate out the the effect of microwaved food from the diet and lifestyle of the kind of people who eat a lot of microwaved food. I'd have thought.

Damon.

[Maladict]

BBC NEWS | Programmes | 4x4 Reports | Cancer risk in microwaved food

[border-rider]

BBC NEWS | Programmes | 4x4 Reports | Cancer risk in microwaved food

Interesting. That's a temperature thing.  I guess that potato gets hotter in a microwave.  As it would if baked...