Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Smart Home
  3. News

No nukes! Nine foods you should never put in the microwave

Bruce Brown
By
GettyImages

Microwave ovens are super convenient for making popcorn or reheating coffee, but nuking food isn’t always a good idea. Warming up leftovers can be OK, but microwaving many favorite food items destroys their taste and texture in a hot minute. Insider polled chefs worldwide for suggestions of foods you should never zap in a microwave oven. We added insights from some of our own experiences ruining perfectly good food in a microwave oven.

Puff Pastry


Puff pastry baked goods have a yummy, light taste and texture thanks to the butter used in the recipes. When you warm it up in a microwave oven, however, the butter melts, the layers collapse, and the result is an unappealing, greasy mess. In our experience, nuked croissants get hard and inedible.

Related Videos

Pizza


Microwaving leftover pizza is a common guilty pleasure, but it never tastes as good as a fresh pie. Nuked pizza is a pale reminder of the crispy original. You can reheat pizza in a hot skillet, oven, or broiler, but we vote for a using toaster oven to regain the closest-to-fresh taste and texture with minimal hassle. If you don’t want to take the time to put the pizza in a toaster, eating it cold is better than microwaving.

Bagels


Microwaving yesterday’s bagels is a binary decision — just don’t do it. Microwaved bagels turn out hard and nearly impossible to chew. Reheat bagels in a toaster, but keep them out of the microwave.

Eggs


The first word that comes to mind when thinking about cooking or reheating eggs in a microwave oven is “yuck.” Prepare to spend time cleaning out the oven after you toss out the scattered egg remnants.

Quiche


Well-prepared quiche has flaky crust surrounding ingredients layered in an egg and cheese mixture. Microwaving quiche destroys the character of the crust, and the nuked filling can vary from soupy to rock hard. Reheat quiche on medium heat in a conventional oven for just a few minutes. Like leftover pizza, cold quiche can be a joy — we like it with a touch of habanero sauce.

Fish


If you don’t like fish and didn’t intend to eat it anyway, nuke away — but only if you live alone. The odor of microwaved fish is no joke and the taste and texture, if you actually decide to eat it, can be nearly impossible to swallow. The meat of some fish species blows up when microwaved and cleaning fish bits from of a microwave oven, by comparison, makes cleaning exploded eggs a fun way to spend the afternoon.

Steak


If you think of steak as a noble food, don’t do it the dishonor of cooking or reheating in a microwave oven. You can still eat microwaved steak, it won’t explode like fish, but the unpredictable taste and leatherish texture banish any pleasure from the experience.

Soft Tacos


Soft tacos and the fillings we put in them work great as go-to meals and snacks. Reheating a soft taco gives it a nuked-bagel-like consistency (hard) and the innards become an indistinguishable mess.

Baby Formula


Never microwave baby formula — it can be dangerous. Microwaved liquids don’t always heat evenly. You could burn your baby’s mouth with overheated formula, even if the outside of the bottle feels lukewarm. The best way to warm a bottle of baby formula is to put it in a bowl or pan of warm water and for a few minutes.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Amazon reportedly will introduce an Alexa-enabled microwave, amp, and more
alexa amazon echo header

Amazon's mum on the subject so far, but an internal document shows plans for at least eight new Alexa voice-controlled devices for your home and your car to be announced by the end of 2018 and possibly by the end of the month, CNBC reported.

Look for a combination of existing Alexa devices that you can control via your voice, like the Echo Show or Echo Dot, and others that are new products with Alexa built-in.

Read more
Miele’s meal kit shows you how to microwave dinner in the 21st century
miele dialog oven meals 2018 068 01

Last year, we introduced you to Miele's Dialog Oven, a unique appliance that relies upon electromagnetic waves in order to cook food more precisely than a conventional oven or a microwave. And now, 12 months later, Miele is back with its latest offering -- meals that are meant to be made in the Dialog.

Not quite a meal kit and not quite a microwave dinner, these new recipe options come from a startup called MChef, which with Miele's backing, is hoping to deliver some seriously 21st-century cooking to modern families. You can either order expertly plated dishes or, for your entertaining needs, an entire three-course menu. When they arrive at your door, the ingredients will already be carefully presented on porcelain plates (MChef isn't messing around), and need simply to be placed in a Dialog Oven before dinner time.

Read more
High-tech ‘best before’ label aims to ensure you never get food poisoning
things to do besides watching the super bowl host a inspired buffet

The “best before” date on food is a quick and easy way to know at a glance whether the food is safe to eat or if it needs to be tossed in the trash. Researchers from Canada’s McMaster University may have come up with a superior high-tech update, however -- in the form of a transparent patch, capable of actually sensing contamination in food. Printed using harmless molecules, the smart label could be incorporated directly into food packaging, and would monitor for pathogens including E. coli and salmonella.

“We developed a method to modify the surface of plastic packing material plastic so that it becomes fluorescent when a specific bacteria in the food comes in contact with that surface,” Tohid Didar, one of the researchers on the project, told Digital Trends. “The key to this method was the creation of a smart ink that can be printed onto the internal parts of the packaging for food. The ink is essentially made of DNA, which has a sequence that provides it with the ability to recognize and signal the presence of a specific bacteria. The current application centers on packaged meat, but we can see the same ink being printed in containers containing liquids, such as milk or being printed in surfaces in hospitals to signal the presence of harmful bacteria.”

Read more