It's sad that the stigma persists of microwaved food being somehow lesser than "real" cooked food. A microwave is just another tool in the kitchen. People shouldn't be embarrassed to use it.
I mean, it frequently is. I don't know about you but my microwaved food doesn't always get heated evenly. (Sure, maybe it would if I put it there 10x longer at 10% power, but then that would defeat the point of my use of the microwave.) And it's hard to cook things in a microwave... it's far more suited to reheating pre-cooked food. Not that I'm a chef, but it's not a wrong perception IMO.
Unless you have an inverter type microwave it's always full power when cooking at 10% it's actually just 10% active time with the magnetron running full blast. As a tool, a microwave is like a blunt instrument unless you have the nicer microwaves. 10% is akin to running the flame to ultra high and only putting the skillet down 6 seconds every minute. Not efficient and not good technique. Coupled with the fact that microwaves operate by exciting the water molecules in the food and you have uneven cooking if there is a large discrepancy between the water content of different foods on the same plate. Finally, without special gear, you can't really brown or crisp anything in the microwave so the end result is more mushy than most people desire.
> Unless you have an inverter type microwave it's always full power when cooking at 10% it's actually just 10% active time with the magnetron running full blast.
I'm aware of this, and I do actually have that kind. And what I said should hold true about getting even heat distribution regardless of that. I didn't claim it was a good (or bad) cooking technique.
Food is heated evenly in a microwave only if water is spread evenly in your food. It works well for soups or sauces. Not so well for pasta (it will dry out), bread or meat.
You're mixing lots of things up here. "It will dry out" has everything to do with the amount of heating and nothing to do with its evenness. Soups/sauces heat well despite uneven heating because of secondary effects like better convection/conduction (not sure which particular effects are more significant) due to the sheer amount of water relative to the rest of the food. The water distribution of the food is not the problem here; the problem is the radiation pattern. A uniform radiation pattern and uniform water content will give you even heating, and a water content that exactly compensates for an awful radiation pattern will also give you even heating.
No, what's sad is that so many people can't cook anymore. It's especially bad in the United States.
It's impossible to prepare a good tasty meal with a microwave. And oven-ready food is garbage. You can't even re-heat most of your left overs properly. Ever tried to re-heat a slice of pizza in a microwave? Use a skillet or a grill, and it's as good as new.
Cooking real tasty food requires many many tools (most of which have been used for many centuries), a lot of ingredients and skill. It's an art form, essentially. And a couple decades ago, everybody knew how to do it.
> It's impossible to prepare a good tasty meal with a microwave.
That's bullshit. That's so bullshit that France (they might know a thing or two about good food) has discussed passing laws to require restaurants to denote which food on their menu is heated up in a microwave.
It was a huge scandal when it came out, because most people didn't even realize their food was being microwaved!
Yes, the microwave does a terrible job of reheating the slice of pizza that was left out overnight, but using the wrong tool for the job doesn't mean the tool is bad. A really good, properly seasoned cast-iron skillet is terrible for making coffee with, but that's no reason to throw it out.
Don't microwave pizza that's been left out overnight. Instead try food from Picards ( http://www.picard.fr/ ). They don't exist in the US but they sell exclusively microwave food, and it's just not on the same level as the sad microwave TV dinners for one that they sell at Safeway.
The microwave's just another tool in a modern kitchen, next to the sous vide machine, the Thermomix, and the Tnstant Pot. The way the microwave cooks food makes for healthier steamed vegetables, though regardless of how you steamed the veggies, slathering them with butter negates some of their health benefits.
> That's so bullshit that France (they might know a thing or two about good food) has discussed passing laws to require restaurants to denote which food on their menu is heated up in a microwave.
Doesn't that proof my point? How do you think that food was cooked? With real tools, that's how. Not in a microwave. You can't cook food in a microwave.
But yes, I should clarify that I've meant 'store bought oven-ready food'. It's awful and probably the main cause for the stigma.
And yeah I agree that the microwave is just another tool in the kitchen and awesome for some things, but you can't cook most meals with it, just prepare parts of it quickly.
If you can heat food with it, you can cook food with it. Obviously, microwave cooking has different behavior than, say, baking in a conventional oven, but so does braising, pan-frying, cooking in a convection oven, or, well, any other cooking method.
I agree that no good food come out of the microwave, but the reason is in the ingredients not in the owen. Cooking good Chinese food, for instance, do not require "many many tools", just the basics you'd find in every kitchen in China, but it requires freshly cut veggies and meat, and different spices, and none of what you eat was processed in a factory (except msg maybe)
Amen. Good ingredients, a love for food and the ability to tune out those that try to explain that one cannot cook or that cooking requires intense training and a container full of tools.