I was reading the recent thread about cooking steak in the oven and I thought, “Hmm… maybe I could emulate this by cooking my steak in the microwave?” A quick search on Google indicates that this is not rare, but sufficient details seem to be lacking. For instance, am I correct in assuming that different power microwaves will require different times? How about steaks of different thicknesses - as I noted in the other thread, the ones sold over here are ~1 cm thick, not the ~2.5 cm you have in America - and cuts?.
Blasphemy!
“Properly” “Microwave” “Steak” - pick two and get back to us.
Beef pretty much requires applied heat to form the flavorful crust. No amount of steam heat will accomplish that. May as well boil it.
You missed the other thread about the reverse sear.
Wait – are we being asked how to use the microwave to sear? Or just use the nuker for the low-temp portion, and then sear as normal?
The latter.
Well done.
These puns are making me blue. 
I’d think to do it right, you’d probably have to flip it a couple of times, and run it on a low temp. That is, if it can be done at all.
I think I’d probably try a steak on 50% power and flip it (and turn if no turntable) every 4 minutes or so, and check the internal temp as you go.
I’m not so sure the water in the outer layers wouldn’t be heated to boiling or past (cooked to shit, in the vernacular) way before you’d get to 130-140 on the inside. Think about microwave defrosting and how fast it goes from frozen to entirely cooked patches on the outside.
The biggest issue is that turning down the “power” just cycles the microwave off and on. So at 10% power, the outside of the steak keeps getting short blasts of microwaves.
I would think it hard to microwave the steak evenly. You’ll probably overcook parts of it (and make it tough) and leave other parts under-cooked.
- Put a cast iron pan in the microwave.
- When the microwave explodes, put the pan on the flaming remains of the microwave.
- Put the steak in the pan.
I mean, yeah, you could use a microwave to raise the internal temperature of the steak. If I was going to attempt that, I would first acknowledge that this is just a steamed steak. At that point, the answer for even cooking should be obvious: steam it.
So my first attempt would be what I sometimes use do reheat a whole crab: wrap a couple of layers of wet paper towel around it, and wrap the whole thing in plastic wrap. You could try to figure out a low-power setting for continuous heat, but my preference (with a whole crab) is about 3 minutes on high to get started, then let it rest for a minute and use 30-second increments of additional heat as necessary until the crab stays hot while resting. Use your last 30-second cycle to melt some butter to go with the crab. (Or with the steak, too. If you’re going to steam your steak, you might as well commit another heresy by putting butter on it too.)
Microwave is fine to reheat leftover steak that was conventionally grilled the previous evening. It’s kind of my go-to for morning-after steak and eggs.
Stop judging me.
“Cooking” steak, as the OP has it, and reheating food, which is what microwaves do, are two different things.
Well, you could cook a steak in a microwave, in a very narrow interpretation of the word “cook”. It probably would be overcooked coming out, and any attempt to sear it for flavor would just make it more overcooked and tougher.
Microwaves can cook stuff quite well, but not things like steaks, due to the nature of the beast. You can cook potatoes quite well in a microwave, as well as all manner of vegetables, but none of them are as temperature sensitive as a steak.
Why would you even consider such a thing?
I think a microwave would be fine for making carpaccio.
What would you use it for? Carpaccio is raw meat.
You could use the top as a cutting board. That’s as far as I would go.
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