My coffee habit is to make a jug in a filter machine, every couple of days or so. Then when I require a petit cafe I pour myself half a glass and heat it to just below boiling for 50 seconds in the micro. Just right, tasty and convenient.
Likewise with soup. I buy packets of Royco and mix the powder in 200 ml of water and raise it to boiling point for 3 minutes in the micro. That is taken as soup or put on my cooked dinner as gravy, as required.
First thing for breakfast, before a couple of pieces of lightly grilled bread in the air cooker, is a bowl of porridge. 3 heaped desert spoons of Quaker oats liberally mixed with milk takes 2 minutes in the micro to heat almost solid. I then add honey and more milk as required.
As you can see, my micro is important to me. But last week it appeared to be suffering and, although the last one had lasted very many years and this was only bought a year ago, I thought it was on its last legs. This was because one day everything I use it for seemed to take much longer, especially my cafe Calva after my evening meal which needs almost boiling point because of the cold Calvados being added after heating.
Now, I don’t keep much in my freezer, just bread because I don’t use a loaf quick enough to avoid staleness, occasionally a Toulouse or Chorizo sausage, or beef pieces if I am planning a slow cooked Bourgignon, but little more than that and only for gradual defrosting by early planning to leave it out in a box all day or in the fridge.
One day my planning failed, and there was no breakfast toast to be had, so I fetched a frozen piece out and gave it a couple of minutes in the micro. Fine. But now 2 days or so later, this all came back to me and I looked up to see the dial still set on almost lowest power to defrost.
Just being a pedant for a minute or two, depending on my setting. You don’t adjust the power on a microwave, you adjust the amount of time the microwave is producing microwaves. Only on 30% is defrost, on 100% cooking things quickly
I wonder if it’s watts over time? Some kind of calculation? Yes things could have moved on but I doubt it for the majority of the market. If you listen to the sound you’ll hear when the magnetron is energised over just the fan and turntable noise.
I have just been in the kitchen to check the micro belonging to She Whose Views Must Be Taken Into Consideration, and that has “watt” settings from 80 to 800 as well.
But they may be achieved by pulsing a fixed power magnetron on and off, I don’t know.
ETA yes Auntie Google says it’s usually done by having the magnetron turn on and off in cycles.
Apparently (so a quick Internet search tells me) it is very difficult to modulate the power output of a magnetron - some industrial units do it but they are expensive (five or six figure expensive and I’m not talking Yen).
Microwave ovens fake it by switching the power on and off very fast.
We used to have a microwave oven in the kitchen that I knew how to use.
Now we have one of those combination things that’s an oven, a fan oven, a grill, and a microwave all in one. It even has combination settings where it does more than one of those things at the same time.
There are lots of buttons and a couple of rotating knobs that do different things according to which button was last pressed. The thing beeps every time a button is pressed or a knob turned. From the amount of beeping that I hear coming from the kitchen I rather gather that it is not exactly plain sailing to operate the thing. I find the beeping to be indicative of it being a good time to keep well clear of the kitchen.
When I wish to reheat my coffee I use the old cheap microwave downstairs that we bought from a house clearance sale for €10. That one I do know how to work.
On the same principle, my induction hob in the UK is obviously pulsing the power, but doing so at a high enough frequency that it’s not obvious on a low power setting - by contract the relatively cheap Ikea hob at the French house does a couple of seconds on, the same again off (or longer) at low power settings. Likewise most of the older microwaves I’ve used to 5-20 seconds on, then 20-10 seconds off.
Don’t you just hate those electric hobs where the blasted thing simply will not stay continuously on when you just want to boil a pan of water, even when it is on the highest setting. Grrrrrrr.
I have no knowledge of them. just one small hotplate that is brought out every 2 or 3 weeks or so if I fancy something fried, otherwise I am an air cooker, steamer, micro kind of bloke.
