The Red Microwave.com

Fine Tune Your Microwave Cooking

Microwave cooking is easy and convenient, but for the best results, it is as much a skill and art as regular cooking- a skill that can be perfected over time with patience in abundance, and some willing tasters who will happily eat less than perfect meals as well. The microwave cooks at high speeds and is popular for its meal-in-minutes ability. This has made cooking so much simpler, but one thing people need to understand is that it involves the concept of cooking by time. The perfect preparation comes out only if the timing is perfect. Ever so often you take out your preparation and find the vegetable or meat rubbery, chewy and excessively dry. This is because they have been grossly overcooked. Microwaves are not intelligent or discerning like humans who can watch over the food being cooked and know when to switch off. For as long as the oven is running, the microwaves will keep acting on the food.

The timing question is resolved to a large extent by the recipe being followed. Due to the popularity of microwaves, numerous cookery books have been written and compiled with recipes specially for microwaves. Even in regular cookbooks, microwave timings are separately mentioned. However, microwaves function at different levels of heat and a bit of fine tuning helps to get the best results and the dish prepared is delectable to taste and delightful in appearance.

The Fine tuning Process
The process of fine tuning has to begin much before the food reaches the microwave, if you wish to turn out the best preparation. It requires an eye for detail, the ability to identify quality, and having a lot of patience in selecting the best ingredients, cutting them into equal pieces, and mixing the exact proportions, leaving approximation for the enemy. Thus the following steps could aid the fine tuning process:

• Decide on a recipe or menu according to the time at hand. Having less time but wanting to cook an elaborate food item is unlikely to yield the result you may want to see. This is because short cuts do not yield the best results.
• Select the best quality ingredients available. Less than the best is unlikely to bring out the best taste and flavor, or even looks. Stale vegetables that look wilted, pale or dry must be rejected. Meats must also look fresh and moist for a succulent steak or even a stew.
• Wash in the bowl in which the vegetables have to be microwaved, ensuring that very little water stays. This water is sufficient to steam and cook them. Only a bit of the moisture evaporates, and therefore more water will make the vegetables softer than you may want and also ruin their color. In case the excess water is discarded, it will take away with it all the water soluble minerals and vitamins.
• Even-sized pieces get cooked just right. They get the same level of crispness, have the same color, texture and taste due to the uniformity in getting the microwaves.
• If it is not possible to have even sized pieces due to the shape of the vegetable, like cauliflower or broccoli, place the bigger, thicker pieces towards the outside, the ones that take longer to cook, and the softer, quick cooking part to the inside since this will get lesser heat.
• Salt needs to be reduced in microwave recipes. It should ideally be added after cooking so that no darkened spots appear on the vegetables.
• Slow cooking of vegetables does not help and instead affects their color and crispness. They must ideally be cooked on high heat. Slow cooking needs to be used for stews and casseroles that need to simmer for longer to get the right flavor.
• It is safer to start with a lesser time and if necessary extended for another couple of minutes, rather than overcooking by keeping the bowl in for longer at the first instance.

These tips help in fine tuning recipes in the microwave. If a bit of effort is put into writing out the timings used and then altered subsequently, a couple of trials will get you the perfect timing for making the perfect recipe.