Doing a working holiday in a subtropical country brings with it the learning curve of kitchen nuances. One is that people don’t leave butter on the counter and keep it in the fridge, because it becomes a puddle in the summer. However during the winter, with their lack of central heating its bloody cold.
Everyone knows the fine line between nuking butter just enough, and waaay too much.
What’s up with the strange heating pattern of butter? From the inside out?
Okay, random-ass-guess.
If the entire brick of butter subjected to even heat application, would that mean butter around the outside of the brick is not adjacent to butter being heated, thus will be cooler than butter in the center? Plus the effect of melted butter perhaps absorbing more microwave energy and creating a melted butter cavern in the center of the brick?
Everyone have their pistols loaded as I turn out the lights?
click
What do you put the butter ON when you microwave it?
It makes my plates all oily and hard to clean. Can’t use paper plates. Any ideas?
Never had trouble with it - just throw 'em in the dishwasher. Do you have the same trouble with other oils?
Remember that microwaves don’t heat evenly, which is why you always have to stir microwave dinners. I’m sure the butter probably just picks up the hot spots. When you melt butter in a sauce pan it melts evenly just fine.
Top tip when microwaving a small quantity of butter – put a cup of water in with it to slow the process down. It makes it a lot easier to judge the timing and avoid the aforementioned puddle.
I nuke the butter at 10% power for 30 seconds, then stir, then 30 more seconds, repeat, etc, until its melty enough. YMMV.
My new Kenmore has separate buttons for either melting or softening butter, adjustable for the number of sticks. Works like a charm. My old microwave would soften part of the stick and melt the rest.
Brilliant!
Piggyback question: with two different microwaves now, after the butter begins to go nuclear, the sound of the microwave oven changes. The audible part becomes deeper and more…hollow, somehow. And I could swear that there’s an even deeper, inaudible but *painful *tone that’s underneath it, that gives me an insta-headache. Any idea what that’s all about? It’s come to the point where I hear that sound start and I go, “shit! The butter’s melting!” from across the room. My kid thinks I’m psychic. But I feel it in my ears, like a physical pressure.
Microwaved food exhibits thermal runaway: melted water/fat absorbs microwave energy more readily than solid water/fat. So as soon as you get a spot that’s begun to melt (due to uneven microwave distribution in the first place), that spot gets hotter faster than anything else. It’s why your frozen chicken will have thoroughly cooked spots right next to still-frozen spots, even if you’ve got a turntable in action to counter the uneven distribution of microwave energy within the oven cavity.
Microwaved foods do not cook “from the inside out”. Microwave rays do penetrate, but they are at their most intense at the surface of the food, and decrease in intensity as you move toward the interior of the food. Depth of penetration is said to be about 1 inch. This is a fuzzy definition of course, because the intensity does not decrease to zero at any arbitrary point. But it helps to explain why a moulin of seemingly interminable depth will suddenly open up in the side of an otherwise solid stick of butter: you’re heating a whole layer of the butter (rather than just the outer surface with hot air), and when some localized volume transitions to liquid, thermal runaway starts and things happen very fast after that.
The last item is that we usually melt a rather small quantity of butter, in a microwave oven that’s really designed to warm up an entire dinner plate full of food in a short time. The effect is a bit like targeting a mosquito with a shotgun.
FWIW I’ve found that when reheating “solid” foods like lasagna or casserole, I get the best results (i.e. the most even reheating) if I cut the one big chunk into smaller cubes about 2 inches on a side and spread them out just a bit before microwaving. Same can be said for butter.
I put cold butter in and microwave for 5 seconds. let it sit there - Just before eating, I zap it another 5 seconds and it’s usually soft enough to spread without being melted.