Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

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I have a couple of these pyrex bowls that I took when I left home for Uni some decades ago and they were already some decades old. I have no lid for them so I cover them with regular plates or with a wooden chopping board (even when I microwave them), with the upside that with the board as a cover I can stack another bowl on top in the fridge.

But for food heating I find it very easy to just take the food from whatever container it’s in and put it in a regular bowl which I can microwave covered by a plate to contain the inevitable food explosion.

Every one of the few times I microwaved even in high quality plastic containers they became soft and harder to handle. Also I always had the (probably very subjective) feeling that it subtly changes the taste of the food. Kind of how bottled water tastes when the PET bottle is left in the sun for a while.

Anyway, I find the bowl+plate as an infinitely reusable option, easy to clean, and just takes a bit of extra care handling when hot. Also bowls and plates stack very nicely in the cupboard and not too expensive in IKEA.

> microwave covered by a plate to contain the inevitable food explosion

The default (maximum) power setting dumps so much energy so fast into the water in your food that some of it boils, and the expanding steam spatters food everywhere. This is also what causes the "burned on the outside, still cold in the middle" effect with leftovers, which aren't engineered to be microwaved on high the way most frozen packaged meals are.

Use a lower power setting for longer, and pause to stir if possible. That way there's more time for the heat to dissipate into the bulk of whatever you're microwaving, and few to no tiny, messy steam explosions.

I actually use lower power in multiple shorter “sessions” with some minutes in between, which even without stirring lets the heat transfer more uniformly through the food - almost exclusively leftovers.

I discovered this accidentally since usually I go about other stuff while heating the food in the microwave (not the stove) and more often than not I completely forget about it even with the “ding”. Putting it though another session at low power, I noticed, makes the food very uniformly heated.

But ever so often after a while heating there’ll be the random drop of water under some fat or something like that, and without a lid it will paint the inside of the oven a lovely shade of splatter. No downside with covering the food.

I've never microwaved wood, but I'm going to start, thanks!

I use a cutting board that’s a single piece of oak if I remember correctly (no gluing of multiple blocks like with many bamboo boards). I did also use the typical bamboo board but the adhesive mixed with heat and steam made me a bit uneasy. Not sure how healthy that is, or how well one of those would take too many repeated partial (mostly above the bowl) heating cycles.

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