Tips On Cooking Food Using Microwaves

Microwave ovens have become a part of every household kitchen today. In the presence of a busy lifestyle, the microwave oven provides an effective alternative because it lessens meal preparation time by about two-thirds as compared to the traditional method of preparing and cooking food.

Although it heats up your food, there's really no guarantee that your food will turn out to be well cooked once you take it out of the oven. “Cold spots” or uncooked sections might still be evident because of the uneven way the microwaves enter the oven. Because of the irregular flow of waves, the food will also absorb the heat unevenly.

Defrosting

Food that was readily bought out from the supermarket's freezer must be removed from its plastic wrapper first before putting it inside the oven. The same goes for those that were packaged using foam trays. The heat will melt the wrapper and will transport its chemicals to the food, thus making it already unsafe to eat.

Do not forget to cook the meat or poultry once you're done defrosting it in the oven. Although the defrosting process has also begun heating some parts of the meat, not all of the parts are fully cooked. Harmful bacteria are still present on some of the portions that didn't absorb regular amount of heat.


Cooking

As what was mentioned a while ago, the microwave oven does not spread out the right amount of heat to every part of the food. If you will be cooking your food inside the oven, it is recommended to arrange your food according to its size.

For example, put large pieces of meat all together inside the oven, and then put the oven in medium heat first. Do not cook it in high power right away. The best thing to do is to keep it in medium heat and just prolong the time of cooking so that the heat would be gradually distributed in all parts of the meat.

Also, you can rotate your food once in a while to prevent the occurrence of cold spots.

Reheating

If a food has already been cooked and will just be reheated, remember to put it in a covering or a container that is microwave-friendly. These include cookware such as glass, plastics and ceramic containers that are labeled as good to be used on microwave ovens.

Do not use containers that are intended for refrigeration because this will just melt once it is put inside the oven. An example of this is margarine or a butter tub. Chemicals present in this kind of container will just contaminate your food.

Once the food to be reheated is now in the oven, do some constant stirring to even out the heat. Always remember to put back the covering of the container every time you're done with the stirring.

Follow these tips to ensure that your food is safe to eat. Also, keep your microwave oven manual handy so that you can always refer to it every time you have concerns about food preparation and cooking times. Remember, microwaves are cool, if you know how to use them.