Anyone with a microwave will know how convenient and quick they are to cook or reheat food. And for those evenings when you’re in a rush and don’t have time to cook, a ready meal is always a popular choice.
All you need is a few minutes in the microwave and you’ve got a quick and easy dinner. However, it’s quite common for your food to be piping hot on the outside, but undercooked or even still frozen in the middle. And according to the consumer experts at Which?, there’s a good reason for this – and it’s all down to how you’re using the microwave.
The pros recently took to TikTok to detail exactly how people are using their microwaves incorrectly, and how this is ruining the taste of their ready meals.
So if you want to avoid those half-frozen microwave meals, then there’s one mistake that you should stop making – and that’s cooking everything full-blast on the same setting.
The experts instead recommend setting your microwave power to 50 percent, which works out at around 400 to 500 watts.
Then, when you put your food in, cook it for twice as long as the instructions say. The experts said: “This gives a more even heat to your food.”
For certain dishes, this issue can be helped slightly by giving it a good stir to redistribute the heat. However, with other meals such as lasagne, this just isn’t possible.
But if you cook at half power, this gives the heat a chance to spread out through the food, without drying out the edges.
This is ‘really important’ when it comes to defrosting food, according to the experts. They said: “Microwaves can’t actually melt pure ice, all they can do is heat up the water around it which melts more ice.
“This takes time. So unless you use defrost mode, which is around 20 percent power, by the time the middle is defrosted, the outside is tough enough to pave a patio.”