Food cooked in Microwave

How Food Cooked in Microwave

Microwaves are just all over the place now-a-days and the reason is the huge time savings that you get when you use one. Most manufacturers have not just used that aspect, but they have added a host of other features that enhance this fast cooking times with varied levels of power and time durations. This has made microwave very popular.

People use microwave for thawing frozen food, quickly reheating dinner, actually cooking dishes, or even softening or melting butter. So how is the food cooked in a microwave and how does it do all these varied things.

Food cooked in microwave - The Main Idea

The main idea of the microwave cooking concept is to generate heat from within the food rather than from the outside. The conventional cooking styles require you to heat a vessel that will conduct heat and cook the food. With microwave the concept is completely reverse.

The microwaves pass through the food and excite water molecules. These excited water molecules vibrate releasing heat energy. This energy in turn heats the food. This heat energy can be used to thaw frozen dinner, or melt butter, or even cook food.

Care to be taken

Now you would have realized that while cooking food in microwave you get a lot of steam regardless of what food material you place inside.

The source of the steam is the water content present in the food being cooked. So it is clear that when you cook food in microwave, you lose some water.

If you have added water externally, you lose that, but if you haven’t then the moisture is coming out of the food itself.

Hence you should take the following care:

Cook food for just the right duration. It is better to undercook the food and let it stay in the microwave. The heat will cook the rest of the food.
Cover dish with a microwave safe lid to retain the moisture inside the dish. Covering also prevents splashing within the microwave.

Cooking With A Microwave

Now when you are cooking food in a microwave you must understand the concept of density of food stuff so that you do not cook soft and dense foods together.

The denser foods take longer to cook and if softer foods are cooked at the same time, they may get overcooked. This idea is not just for cooking food, but reheating or thawing too.

Typically meat takes longer to cook than vegetables. Even among meat depending on what you are cooking, it would take varied time durations.

So bacon slices may take as little as 45 seconds to about 75 seconds to cook. On the other end, meat loafs could take as much as 10-15 minutes.

Another aspect that determines the cooking time is the microwave power. So you need to understand these concepts well while trying to cook.

Most modern microwave ovens come with very informative manuals. These manuals have details on the approximate times and power levels you must use to cook various foods.

The more innovative ones come with all this information fed into the system as presets. You just have to navigate the different menus and you can pick the correct setting for your foodstuff.

More >>> Cooking with a microwave -- The right way!

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