At work, every now and then someone comes in and orders a burger and asks for a patty straight off the broiler, no microwaving. Sometimes they ask us to put the patty through twice. Our patties are not designed to be put through the broiler twice. They become charcoal BRICKS after being put through the broiler twice. Also, with no microwaving, you end up with a really hot patty while everything else is cold, and your cheese is unmelted. Not nice. So I guess there are two parts to this question:
Why do some people want no microwaving?
Why do some people want their meat cooked twice?
I guess it could be some hippy thing about microwaves destroying nutrients, or they might be wary of germs or something, but really, if you want healthy and sanitary, what are you doing at Burger King? :dubious:
Because MICROWAVES carry TOXINS and cause BRAIN DAMAGE and destroy the LIFE-FORCE of your precious, precious food. I read it in a flyer I saw on campus once, so it must be true! :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
I think that it probably has more to do with freshness. Despite the timers in the holding cabinet, and despite the quick turnover of meat, if it’s heated in the microwave, that customer has no way to tell how old it is (other than the fact that it’ll probably be rubbery if it’s been sitting in the cabinet long enough.)
(I’m speaking from an ideal situation here, I don’t know if your BK likes to circumvent procedure, but I’m guessing not. If your store had a reputation for never throwing old meat away, I could understand her complaint)
As for the cooked-twice thing, either some of them are GERRRRMophobes, or they like their meat burnt and flavorless. We got the same request all the time at McDonald’s. (not the microwaving thing, McD’s meat isn’t ever microwaved, unless it’s bagel ham, but that’s already cooked and so we warm it up in there.)
I once encountered a lady who would not even allow the microwave to be turned on when she was in the house. She seemed to think that cooking food in a microwave was the equivalent of putting your meal in the local nuclear reactor.
OK, this is Gramps’ list of motivations, in no specific order. He likes:
soccer
sex
bothering people
And he is afraid of:
a) death
b) God
c) std’s
He basically saw “hating microwaves and thus getting the wife to not buy one” as a way of achieving his #3 like. A few months back he had a minor stroke; he’s still not as dexterous as he used to be but a lot more than most 91-year-old guys. Mom bought a microwave while she was there helping through the hospital stay and had it delivered to their place; he grumbled and griped and yelled and screamed, and she said “that’s ok, Dad, you don’t have to use it. You use the old pot, I use the microwave whenever I’m here, and Mom can use whatever she wants.”
He still shoots glaring glances at The Thing, but he’s been known to admit that yes, it’s easy to use one-handed and the old pot isn’t.
Meat just doesn’t taste as good if it’s cooked on the microwave compared to meat cooked on the stove. It’s more rubbery and less flavorful. I cook meat in the microwave if I’m warming it up, but if I’m going to a restaurant (yes, even BK) I want a fresh piece of meat. And bread/buns are destroyed if you put them in the microwave too long, they get hard spots on them. It’s best to put the buns in a bread warmer or toast them in an oven/toaster for best results.
(Aside: BK is by far my least favorite fast food place. Wonder why? Maybe there’s an overall lack of industry standards.)
And there are some people (my mom included) who like their meat BLACK. Because if you eat meat with any pink on it at all you will DIE. No arguing with these people.
… or that being near one in operation was the equivalent of putting your head in a reactor, the theory being that unless you’ve tested it, personally, you have no way of knowing whether or not you’re getting nuked.
The fact that there are people there all day every day using the thing probably wouldn’t register on her logical radar…
My dad didn’t like them, I suppose because they were “new fangled” and “machine-y”. But he also had someone doing all his cooking. So when my mom died, we bought him one. I taught him how to cook and now he makes enough for 2-3 meals and nukes the leftovers. He’s very happy.
My son, on the other hand, dislikes them because he has an emotional attachment to food and food preparation. There’s no love in microwave cooking. He’ll re-heat, but hates anything that begins it’s life in the microwave. Where’s the stirring? The tasting? The hovering over the stove? Nope. He likes the pomp and circumstance of a home-cooked meal.
I once worked with a woman who considered herself to be infinitely more sensitive than everyone else. She claimed that microwaved food tasted “grainy” because the microwaves skipped some of the molecules in the food, so something like every other molecule was a different temperature.
She also said that digital music sounded “grainy” to her sensitive ears.
My wife used to work with a real whacko. She insited that microwaving “changed the molecular structure” of foods. She wouldn’t even drink microwaved water. She was a treat to take to restaurants. As ytou can imagine, microwaving was only one of her hangups. The wait staff woudl often have to endure a grueling question and answer game in order to serve her food.
The answer to your question is that some people are just fricking nut jobs.
Well, even the FDA acknowledges that reheating food in plastic containers can cause some migration of plasticizers into the food. This is highly dependent on the kind of plastic, kind of food, length of cooking, etc., and the FDA generally says, “Use approved containers and don’t worry.” I still worry. Needlessly? Maybe. Plus I won’t let my kid sit with her nose pasted to the front window of the microwave. I know I’m being silly, but why take a chance?
Microwave ovens are one of the worst things that happened to fast-food restaurants. If I buy a hamburger, I want one fresh off the grill, not one that’s been sitting in a tray of cold grease for the last 30 minutes. When microwave ovens were first installed, many managers and crews got lazy and used them as the solution to their production flow problems. These are the same people who would leave sandwiches under the heat lamps until they had turned into inedible bricks. What’s really vile are the people who chuck the entire sandwich into the microwave, toppings and all. Microwaved lettuce and tomatoes are gross.
Sometimes I wish the ghost of Ray Kroc would return and lay his wrath down on all the poorly run burger franchises. Fast food does not have to taste like shit.
Didn’t we discuss this? McDonald’s does. not. use a microwave for their meat.
While we’re at it, the employees don’t spit in the burgers, unless they want to get fired on the spot, which in my 5 year career, I’ve never seen. The meat actually comes from cows. No, it’s not graded prime, but it’s also not lips and assholes. There’s a widely available formula; they use part dairy cows. Also, you’re not special for knowing that the “secret sauce” is Thousand Island dressing. Nowhere in the restaurant is it called “secret sauce”.
[minor hijack] You know, I used to be one of those people, mostly just because my mother was one of those people, and so that was my default setting. But then one day, someone explained to me about how the meat just had to reach a certain internal temperature (I’ve since forgotten), and to go to a decent steakhouse and order myself a big old slab of rare meat. I did die that day. And went to heaven. Then I came back down and ate another bite, and died again and again and again. And it was awesome. And I’d do it again. [/hijack]
We do have a bread warmer, and the meat sits in heated trays. The only reason I can think of for microwaving is to make the burger a more uniform temperature, instead of layers of hot and cold.
Thing is, “fresh off the grill” is not really how fast food works. If everyone wanted a burger fresh off the grill it wouldn’t be fast food anymore. The way I see it, if you care enough to worry about it you shouldn’t really be eating at Hungry Jack’s anyway. I think you’d be happier in a place where the goal is not to get you out the door in under three minutes. Besides, it seems burgers made their way would taste more like shit, not less.