Krispy Kreme donuts, fresh out of the fryer, are wonderful. If you let them cool to room temperature they become just donuts. “Oh, but if you pop them in the microwave for a few seconds they are just like fresh,” I’m told, but it is a lie. They are soggy and flat and the topping is senselessly hot, as it was not applied before the donut was fried, but shortly after, in the open air, so it forms a hard coating on the outside while it soaks into the donut on the inside. The difference between fresh and microwaved is so great I wonder if some people even have mouths, tongues, and taste buds.
We all know how vile bagels from the freezer section are, but did you know that, when they are fresh out of the oven, some brands are delicious? Worked by a bagel factory and they had fresh, hot bagels for sale in their little store. Scrumptious until they cooled, and microwaving them just made them tough and way too chewy.
Anyone who says that microwaves cook from the inside out has never microwaved a frozen burrito. The ends can be charred while the middle is rock hard. A lie that somehow entered the Collective Unconscious and got stuck.
I used to have a microwave with a popcorn button. When it was done the display would say “Enjoy your popcorn”. I got rid of it, I don’t like machines telling me what to do.
I think the general rule of thumb for microwaves here is that leavened things don’t do well when reheated. Although a donut is fried, it’s made of dough with leavening.
Microwaves don’t exactly cook from the inside out, but they’re closer to that than most conventional cooking is. Conventional cooking is only from the outside in: It’s only the very surface that gets heated directly, and everything else is from heat flow from the surface. With a microwave, energy is deposited into the food to a depth of a few centimeters or so (but still more at the surface than in the interior), so at least some heat gets into the inside without having to be conducted in from the surface. Get something big enough, though, and the inside can still be cold.
Another lie told about microwaves is that they’re good for defrosting. They’re about the worst tool possible for defrosting. Liquid water is better at absorbing microwaves than ice is, so as soon as you have a few small pockets thawed out, those pockets will start getting hotter and hotter much faster than the still-frozen parts which need it most. You can end up with parts of the dish boiling and parts frozen at the same time.
My father-in-law insists that foods cooked or reheated in the microwave will cool off faster than if cooked by conventional means. To me that makes about as much sense as the old “boiling water will freeze faster than room temperature water” UL.
The reason people think microwaves cook from the inside out is because they’re often heating up something like a Hot Pocket- when they take it out after a couple minutes the outside may be warm but not too hot, so they take a bite and burn their mouth on the lava- hot filling. Microwaves work by causing water molecules to vibrate faster, which creates heat. The insides of something like a hot pocket contain more water than the crust. Same reason dishes don’t get very hot in a microwave.
“I’m sorry Dave but I can’t do that”!
One of the directors at my work was given a satnav (some years ago now).
Returned it the next day with the comment “I’m not having that woman tell me what to do”!
Aside: One of my classmates in undergrad was named Dave. At one point, we were working on a project on some computers owned (and administrated) by one of the professors, who was elsewhere in the room on a different computer. And just as Dave entered the command to compile his code, the professor used remote access to the computer to make it play that sound clip.
I’ve tried microwaving bacon after reading all over online about how great it is, and found it tasteless. I think the problem is that if you microwave it on paper towels, all that fat gets absorbed. If you fry it in the pan, the meat ends up cooking while soaked in all that lovely pig fat, some of which gets drained off later. The fat is where all the flavor is.
Frozen food companies that claim their microwaved sandwiches taste like they’ve just come off a panini press are the biggest, fattest liars around. Plain old cold bologna on Wonder bread tastes infinitely better than any microwaved sandwich I’ve ever tried. (Or, at least that’s my perception, since I haven’t eaten bologna since I was a kid.) Frozen sandwiches and microwaves simply don’t go together so they ought to stop trying.
Only if you add mayo, ripple chips and cheez whiz to said bologna sandwich. Then it becomes something heavenly; or at least you’ll be closer if you eat more than one…
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As a lifelong New Yorker, I can only say that real Brooklyn bagels are *supposed *to be tough and chewy. I haven’t had a real bagel in about 30 or 40 years. Since the eighties, most bakeries just make rolls with a hole in the middle and call them “bagels,” but they’re not even close.
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