5 Tips to Immediately Improve Your Cooking | America's Test Kitchen

Microwaves get a bad rap. Some folks think they're unsafe, others associate them with convenience foods and finally there are some folks who just think they're unnecessary. My team and I are here to tell you microwaves are great.

>> [music] >> Now, you can't believe the infomercials because this, it can't do everything. But, it can do a whole lot more than reheating or defrosting. When I develop recipes, there are so many times where I call for a microwave because it's so good at heating small amounts of food.

Who wants to dig out a pot to bring a quarter cup of water to a boil or turn on the oven to toast a tablespoon of nuts? There are right ways and wrong ways to use a microwave, and in order to make the most of this appliance, we really need to understand how they work.

Microwave ovens contain a device called a magnetron, and that magnetron, it generates microwaves. Those are the things that are heating up your food.

Microwaves are a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and when you think about that spectrum, you should know it has two sides. There's a safe side, and then there's like the scary side. On that safe side, you're going to find things like visible light, radio waves, and microwaves. They're squarely

on the safe side. Manufacturers have designed these to keep the microwaves on the inside. Why would you want them on the inside if they're safe? You want those microwaves heating up the food that's inside the cavity, not whatever's out here. Now, microwaves can pass through glass, and so in order to allow

you to see what's going on in the oven, they will put a mesh on that door. That mesh has holes that are small enough that the microwaves just can't pass through. Obviously, you can't see microwaves, but you can hear when a magnetron is generating them. Magnetrons don't generate microwaves of various

power levels, instead, they're just on or off. So, when you go to adjust the power level of your microwave, what you're doing is telling it how long to be on and how long to be off. Microwaves only act on the surface of the food.

Their heating may be the top quarter, half inch of the food. When you run a microwave at full power, you're bombarding the surface of your food with heat. By reducing the power level, you're giving it a little break. During that break, heat in the surface, it'll have time to move towards the center.

The result is more evenly heated food. >> [music] >> I'm going to demonstrate how useful that power button is with the stick of butter. My goal is just to soften it, not to melt it.

I'm going to microwave this for 45 seconds at 50% power. And if you're listening carefully, you'll hear that magnetron flip off right around 30 seconds, and it'll come back on right around 11 seconds.

And there it came back on. Got that? This looks great. This is nice and uniformly softened. If I had microwaved this at full power, I would get hot spots where the butter is fully melted and cool spots where it's pretty solid. Reducing the power level is one way to help food heat more