Microwave and Conventional Cooking

In microwave cooking, the radio waves penetrate the food and excite water and fat molecules pretty much evenly throughout the food. No heat has to migrate towards the interior by conduction. There is heat very all at once because the molecules are all excited together. The whole heating process is different because you are exciting atoms rather than conducting heat.

You often hear that microwave oven cook food “from the inside out”, what does that mean? Here’s an explanation to help make sense of microwave cooking.

Let’s say you want to bake a cake in a conventional oven. Normally you bake a cake at 350^oF or so, but let’s say you by mistake set the oven at 600^o inside of 350^oF. What is going to happen is that the outside of the cake will burn before the inside even gets warm. In a conventional oven the heat has to migrate the heat has to migrate from the outside of the food towards the middle you also have dry, hot air on the outside of the food evaporating moisture. So the outside can be crispy and brown, while the inside is moist.