Easy Microwave Cooking Recipes And Tips | For Times You Want Something Quick...

The best microwave cooking recipes all have a common strand running through them. And that is, that they take advantage of the unique characteristics of the microwave oven.

Now here's the thing.

A microwave is just another way of getting heat into food, but it does so in a way which is unlike any other method of cooking.

All other methods of cooking rely on heat traveling into the food from somewhere outside the food.

But a microwave works by generating heat within the first 1" to 1½" below the food's surface. It does this by making the molecules of water, sugar and fat spin rapidly, until the friction of their increased movement generates heat.

We explain this fully in our page, "How do microwave ovens work?".

This means that the conventional slow cooking recipes that require much higher temperatures above the surface of the food, such as baking, roasting and grilling, do not work in a microwave oven.

However, recipes that required some kind of wet cooking, such as steaming, stewing, casseroling, poaching, braising and so on, will all work well.

Start with our page on microwave cooking tips, which has 10 useful Top Tips.

We also feature quick cooking recipes that highlight certain areas of cooking, such as

In the vegetable section, we show you how to microwave asparagus. And because it is such a weird vegetable, we also tell the story in pictures of how it grows, and where it comes from.

Our page on a microwave baked potato, shows you how to choose the right potatoes to get those white fluffy insides, and why it is so difficult to get the same results as you would get using a conventional oven.

And our sweet corn page has the quickest, easiest, and cleanest way of making microwave corn on the cob. You can also find out how to tell which is the freshest corn in the supermarket, and which cobs to avoid because they are getting old and stale.

Microwave cooking recipes for sweet corn

Our eggs section is full of information covering everything you always wanted to know about cooking microwave eggs. We go over basic techniques like

how to poach an egg, how to boil eggs, and how to make scrambled eggs

and then look at some more unusual egg recipes, like

how to make deviled eggshow to make egg saladan egg drop soup recipeand your own egg foo young recipe. Deviled eggs microwave cooking recipes

The sweet side doesn't get forgotten either. Take a look at our page on microwave candy recipes!

You'll see the principles behind candy making, and even a sugar temperature chart that shows what candies are made at which temperatures.

And for those of you in a real hurry, our microwave fudge recipe has a couple of videos that show you how to make lip smacking chocolate fudge in 5 mins or less. Microwave cooking recipes for chocolate fudgeThose of you who are partial to something that is not so quite so soft - (and without that mind numbing meltiness you get with chocolate fudge) - you can find out how to make microwave peanut brittle here. Microwave cooking recipes for peanut brittle

You absolutely must use good food. And by good food we mean preferably fresh unprocessed produce. Something that doesn't come out of a packet or from a freezer. There is an old saying in the computer world which is "Garbage in, Garbage out". That saying could just as well be applied to microwave cooking. Eating ready made pre-processed food from a packet is not the same as eating fresh produce, no matter how many "Gourmet!" and "Luxury!" labels the food manufacturers place on the packaging. And it will cost more than regular food! You need good tools. Get yourself a good dish or set of dishes you are happy cooking with. There are some very low cost dishes of microwave cookware on the market. Don't take timings literally. All ovens have different power magnetrons. And recipes very rarely state what power was used to make that perfect dish. If the recipe was put together using one of the most powerful microwaves on the planet, you will get completely different results than if you are cooking with an 800 watt Panasonic compact microwave oven. Vegetables and fish are the simplest to cook. Beware eggs as they can easily exploded unless the yolks have been punctured. Meat cooks better in smaller chunks, and at lower power. When in doubt cook for less time and at lower power. It is easy to add more cooking power. You can't take it away so easily. Let your food have some standing time. This lets the heat get right to the centre of your food.

And remember.....you will not get it right the first time.

Microwave cooking has never been about just following the recipes. If it was that easy, there would never be good cooks and bad cooks. And everybody would cook the same, lol.

But you know and I know, there are some people who are good cooks, and make a success of most things they try. These are the people who look at the food as it is cooking, who test it and gauge it, to see if it is how they want it to be.

That's what to aim at.

And as a last note, Indian food culture is awash with microwave cooking recipes. Microwaves are big in India, and the culture is strong on creative uses of vegetables, fish and meats. The names are unusual to Western ears, but the food is fabulous. We will try to feature more Indian cooking recipes from bloggers in the sub-continent, and hope to set up a page just for them.

Contact us if you are interested in featuring your recipe on these pages!

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