Soups… you give a bowl a good cooking in the mike. You take it out; it’s boiling, and you’ve just about baked the meniscus to a crisp. But is the liquid nice and hot throughout? No, it is not.
Chinese food, famed for its gravy and goop. You pop it into the microwave and push “Sensor Reheat.” It’s in there for about 10 minutes, and when it’s done the plate is almost too hot to touch and the food is sizzling ominously. Some chucks of this and that must be eaten with extreme care, but then…
“Ma, my baby corn is freezing cold!”
In contrast, the mike does water/coffee/etc. pretty well. I just pop a cup of coffee in for 30 s, and it is perfect every time.
The mike also does well with foods that don’t have that much water in them. E.g., a chicken breast.
My WAG is that parts of the liquid in soups/gravies superheat and end up behaving in ways that transmit heat very inefficiently. What say ye experts?
WAG: The liquid heats much faster than the solid particles, making it such that what seems to be a nice hot bowl of soup is a nice hot liquid broth with mini-glaciers floating about.
Dude, you’ve just gotta learn to use the power level settings. It takes longer, but it allows food to heat evenly by counting on things besides just microwave radiation.
Seems obvious to me. You have a mix of many dissimilar items, some of which (perhaps including the plate itself) absorb microwaves very efficiently, while others do not. As Balthisar said, you need to give conduction time to do its thing.
My educated guess: Liquids (coffee, tea) heat more evenly because convection. Chicken breast heats more evenly because it’s a flatter shape, and because it has less water content and therefore the microwave penetrates deeper. Soups and gravies are mostly water so the microwave is absorbed by the outer layer and cannot penetrate deeply. But they are highly viscous so there is very little convection. So the only way for heat to get to the center is conduction, which is slow. Also, soup/gravy in a bowl is a compact shape (not flattened out), so it’s a long way to the center.
So the solution would be to (1) take longer time, with lower power setting if necessary, and (2) put the food on a flat dish instead of a deep bowl.
also some ceramics and glasses are much worse than others in the microwave. Try changing the container to say plastic polythene, and you might get better results