Saturday, February 03, 2007

In the past few classes we have talked about food chemistry. It seemed like I have the least knowledge of food and cooking in the class. However, I do cook sometimes too! with my microwave oven which is the only thing that I use in my kitchen.
In a conventional oven, the heat has to migrate from the outside of the food toward the middle . You also have dry, hot air on the outside of the food evaporating moisture. So when you put a bread in a conventional oven, the outside can be crispy and brown while the inside is moist.
In microwave cooking, the waves penetrate the food and excite water and fat molecules pretty much evenly throughout the food. No heat has to migrate toward the interior by conduction. There is heat everywhere all at once. The whole heating process is different because you are "exciting atoms" rather than "conducting heat."
So in a microwave oven, there is no way to form a crust. That is why microwavable pastries sometimes come with a little sleeve made out of foil and cardboard as we can see in a hot pocket. You put the food in the sleeve and then microwave it. The sleeve reacts to microwave energy by becoming very hot. This exterior heat lets the crust become crispy

1 comment:

Mrinal Shukla said...

I agree with you in cooking because I too make use of my microwave as a primary source of cooking. However, whenever I make hot pockets, I never use the sleeve because it is difficult to take the hot pocket out of the sleeve when it is really hot and stuck to the sleeve due to the cheese. In class, I began to wander whether collecting multiple sleeves and making a tray with the sleeves could be used in cooking for that extra crispy taste. This could lead to more uses of the microwave and wider variety of treats made simply using the microwave.