Our microwave has a turntable. (Side question: Are there any microwaves for sale today that don’t have a turntable?)
Anyway, I asked my husband to put the rectangular container of leftover pasta sauce in the microwave. When I went to pull it out, the container was all the way over to the edge of the turntable. I remarked on this, stunned that somehow centrifugal force had moved the container so far off center.
As you’ve no doubt guessed, my husband had placed the container there on purpose because he “had read somewhere” that this would make the food heat more evenly.
Really? If so, how does that work? Does the shape of the container of food matter? How about the type of food – liquid versus solid?
(It may have been my imagination, but I thought the sauce wasn’t as hot as it would have been if put in the center of the turntable.)
I arrange food in a “donut” shape to heat the food uniformly. Food at different radiuses can get different amounts of radiation, so putting everything at the same radius combined with the rotation keeps things similar.
Many things I’ll finish in a stove-top pan or the toaster oven to crisp it up.
For something soupy, I center it, but stop the oven at halftime to give a good stir. And then another stir when time is up.
A friend of mine has a microwave with a table that translates left and right instead of rotating.
Because of waves canceling each other out, you naturally get some “cold” spots in a microwave. I would think the only reason to avoid centering your food is if one these cold spots happens to be dead center near the bottom. Which I guess is possible.
Otherwise the reason for the turntable is to keep parts of the food moving through these cold spots instead of stagnating in them.
That “What If” article changed how I microwave food. Now if I’m heating something that’s hard to stir, like a piece of lasagna, I’ll do 6 minutes on 50% rather than 3 minutes on high. It does seem to help with the “hot outside, frozen center” problem.
Back to the turntable, the answer is to place the food so it is NOT symmetrical in there. The worst thing is a circular bowl centered on the turntable’s axis.
The whole point of the turntable is that is the oven cavity is filled with hot spots and weak spots in a fixed, but essentially random arrangement in there. Your goal is let the turntable sweep the food through the hot & weak spots thoroughly so that every area in your food gets more or less the same dose as any other area of the food.
Since you can’t know where the hot & weak spots are, just put your dishes in there as anti-symmetrically as is convenient and you’ll be good.
I’m also a big fan of reheating at 50% power. The only time I use full power for reheating is for coffee that I let get too cold.
I also never reheat without a cover. Nothing is ever going to come out of the microwave crispy so it should at least be evenly heated. A cover that holds the heat in helps a great deal. Again, the exception is beverages where it doesn’t matter.
I typically put the food in asymmetrically for the reasons stated above–but I also move the food about halfway through the cycle. Maybe I just rotate 180 degrees if it’s on a turntable, or just shift it around and rotate arbitrarily if on one of those lateral movement styles (what I have now). Either way, the point is that however the cold spots lined up before, it’s likely to be totally different after I move the food.
That sounds like a good explanation LSLGuy. Thanks. Because I’ve heard that too, and I’ve been following that advice but I’ve never verified, or thought much, about it.