"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
Probably not. Microwave heating (you can't very well call it
"cooking") has been around for 60 years. If there were a risk,
it probably would have been discovered by now.

Why can't you call it "cooking"? If the device changes the
structure of the food in some way by the process of heating it,
then I would call that cooking.

Try making a cake sometime in a microwave, and you'll understand.

It is perfectly possible to 'cook' a cake in a microwave oven. What you
can't do, easily, is to produce the external crust, which is a product of
water removal and scorching, by direct application of heat to the outside.
This is a specialised way of cooking, called baking. In order for it to
work, it's a case of carefully balancing the heat and duration of
application that's being used, such that it penetrates all the way to the
centre of the cake mix, thus cooking it, before it has scorched the outside
to the point where it becomes a heat insulator, and stops enough heat
penetrating. It is the heat only that cooks the food, and it doesn't matter
whether this gets into that food by radiation, convection, steam, blowtorch
or whatever. Baking, frying, steaming, griddling, charbroiling, pressure
cooking and so on, are all just variations on a theme, producing different
nutritional and taste variations. The common theme to them all is heat.
Further, many microwave ovens also contain a conventional oven, which can be
used in combination with the microwave part. In this type of oven, the cake
will be cooked very quickly, and have a crust ...


I make scrambled eggs in the microwave. When I take them out,
they have changed from raw eggs to cooked eggs, exactly the
same as if they had been cooked in a pan...

Most foods are "cooked" by the external application of heat (either
conduction or convection). A microwave oven heats the food directly, which
produces rather different results.


Not really it doesn't, in terms of the actual process of "cooking" ...



The one thing microwaves do very well is to denature protein (that is,
coagulate it). This is why scrambled eggs come out okay. It's also the
reason your eyes have to be protected from microwaves.


I particularly like the way microwave ovens handle bacon.

So, how's that, then? Is your bacon still raw when it comes out?
Merely heated?

Mostly the latter. I like the way you can easily choose the amount of
"doneness", and it's almost impossible to burn the bacon.



Hmmm. I'm not sure that I would like my bacon to be merely heated, and I'm
frankly surprised that you, as an American, like it that way. Everywhere
that I've ever eaten breakfast in the U.S., the bacon has needed a chainsaw
to get through it, and you had to be careful not to take another diner's eye
out with a flying shard when it shattered under your knife and fork ! Don't
get me wrong - I actually like it like that ... My wife owns several cafes
(that's cafe as in U.K. not U.S.) and we go through a lot of pounds of bacon
every day. It is cooked daily, a little in advance, by grilling, and then
kept refrigerated. When it is needed, it is quickly microwaved to the
correct temperature, before being used in whatever dish it is needed in.
This is a good example of the bacon already being fundamentally 'cooked' by
the original grilling process, such that the microwave is merely reheating
it. Very little additional cooking takes place by the application of the
microwaves. You would not tell the difference in the hot product, between it
having been reheated, or having just come off the grille.

Arfa