The other thing I believe in strongly is, for most things, using 40-60% power and heating the food about twice as long as your original instincts say, for more even heating.
Of course, putting a quart of spaghetti sauce in an open container and microwaving it at 100% will result in some very cool sauce explosions as localized steam in the source rapidly expands and blows giant sauce bubbles all over your microwave.
Also interesting point related to the article, if i point my laser thermometer at the microwave while it's going it'll bug out and return random temperatures between the actual temperature of the window and about 500°F. I'm sure i could figure out why but i just haven't had the time yet
Microwaves will heat your body up, but in a relatively harmless way. e.g. If you microwave your hands a bit, blood flow will transfer that heat out and things will remain pretty okay unless you really overdo it.
Your eyes are an exception. They're orbs of aqueous humor that's mostly water, but have relatively little blood flow when compared to most other tissues in the body. Microwaves will heat them up, but bloodflow won't distribute the heat away quickly. Protect your eyes around microwave sources.
And then tested her hypothesis in a cheap microwave (out in the yard in case of explosions), documenting what happened with photos and making a conclusion for each. She got top scores from the teacher for following the scientific method.
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/24081775/Candle-i...
With accurate heat tracking, it’d only need a button to open the door and no knobs.
Then I want the microwave to cycle on when the camera says everything is below temp, and cycle off as soon as any hot spot hits temp. Then wait for the hot spot(s) to dissipate before cycling back on.
Seems like a foolproof way to cook evenly without overcooking.
I kind of approximate it now by cooking something frozen on high for a couple minutes, then on 20% power for five minutes, then 10% power for another five minutes. But it would be nice to have it all automated.
Those would tell you when the center of your food was cooked, but by then the outside of your food was insanely over-cooked. Most of your chicken breast has turned into dried-out rubber.
The real problem isn't to get the center hot enough, that's easy. It's to prevent the outside from getting too hot. And you need a camera for that.
IR and microwave wavelengths are nowhere even close to each other.
The grill in my microwave door lets through visible light. And the electronics already present in my microwave seem just fine.
Waiting 10-15 min to reheat something evenly is doable for me. I can make a side salad, toast some bread, empty the dishwasher or whatever while I wait.
Waiting 40-60+ min requires real advance planning, which is often just not feasible.
If you've ever used a toaster oven to warm up a frozen personal-size lasagna, sometimes it can take as long as an hour and a half.
Obviously this is great for things like soups, but not-so-much for things which don't reach 100C in an even fashion.
We can make a solid guess at volume using visible light and a rotating view (already provided by the unfortunately-common carousels), with a bit of CV and math.
We can therefore deduce density.
We can measure outside temperature using IR.
And we can measure the power put into the things being microwaved.
And we can also measure the temperature and humidity of the air that is exhausted from the microwave chamber.
With all of that data, we can do some cool things.
But with only single-button input, there's a lot we can't do:
We can't know if the user is cooking a hamburger from raw meat (yes, raw meat can be used in the science oven), or reheating one that was already cooked, or finishing one that was par-cooked.
We can't know if they're softening butter to spread onto toast, or melting it to pour over popcorn
We can't know lots of things. So we need more than one user input.
The slope to getting back to where we started is very short: Some preset buttons that most people will never understand, a speed control that most will never use, and a keypad for a timer.
My wife bought a countertop convection oven that has nearly 100 pre-defined cooking programs and 10 different "quick set" buttons. How do we actually use it? Set a temperature and time. With a dial. Could have be so much simpler.
It has an inverter and a humidity sensor and 20 or so different preset buttons that use them, with sub permutations.
None of them work well at the job of warming up two shitty frozen burritos.
What does work well is this: One minute at power 10, and 3 minutes at power 3.
When others see me programming this in they think I'm a madman, and sometimes they even audibly question my sanity.
And I'm not sure that they're wrong.
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The microwave I grew up with had a mechanical timer knob (with a simple mechanical bell), a second knob to set duty cycle (probably borrowed from an electric range), and a start button.
It worked fine. I like being able to program things, but I'm usually standing right there anyway so I'm perfectly capable of turning the duty cycle knob down after about a minute passes and getting the same results that I do today.
(And that method did in fact work fine back then, too, even though people also thought I was crazy when they'd see me doing that)
And for bonus nachos: The timer also worked perfectly as a simple mechanical kitchen timer. Just give it a twist, avoid the start button, and it spins down until it goes "Ding!".
There was some experimentation early on--I even have a microwave cookbook--but, outside of some vegetables, very few people actually try to cook using one. And, yeah, I don't know the last time I did anything other than set time. I rarely even do anything other than full power. I do use the popcorn setting from time to time but even that is pretty much unnecessary if you listen to the popping.
I have to replace my microwave because it caught on fire in the middle of the night and I'll probably get a 4-in-1 Panasonic which will also replace my second oven which I basically never used.
You can then eat the chocolate.
In the 1990s I was a contractor at DRA Malvern in the UK, which was one of the successor organisations to the WW2 radar research establishments. The greybeards I encountered always felt that they had invented microwave cooking even if Raytheon got the credit later. Sausages cooked using the lab magnetrons, they said, although unfortunately there were no photographs.
The future of cooking was something that famous futurist Arthur C Clarke got wrong. He might have predicted geostationary communications satellites but in his short story The Sentinel - which was the inspiration for the film/book 2001 - the crew of a small lunar rover fry their sausages in a conventional frying pan.
The article doesn't mention issues with putting metal - dishes, silverware, twist ties, whatever - in the microwave. IF you know what you're doing, that's pretty harmless. (If not - sparks, fire, and other excitement often results.)
Do you know of any resources that explain what scenarios belong in the "harmless" category?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyTmJX_TC84&ab_channel=Elect...
> Of the 70,000 chemicals in widespread commercial production, only around 500 have been competently screened for human toxicity. Since most products are a blend of numerous ingredients, it is axiomatic that all products contain at least one ingredient that is untested and not known to be safe. This includes everything from hand lotion to plastic water bottles to deoderizers.
This seems kinda okay though. It’s very different to saying “known to be unsafe”. There are tons of untested (or insufficiently tested) things.
Words have meaning.
