The Apple store used to put assorted inspirational quotes up on the monitors in the stores. I remember at one point looking up at the monitor and seei

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2021-06-14 19:00:01

The Apple store used to put assorted inspirational quotes up on the monitors in the stores. I remember at one point looking up at the monitor and seeing

I think about this quote every time I make Trader Joe’s frozen lasagna for my kids for dinner. It has steps in its preparation I’ve not seen anywhere else:

Rather than just popping the lasagna in the microwave and taking it out fifteen minutes later, it has multiple steps of heating the food, then waiting, then heating some more.

Some of this is familiar. A lot of microwave food has the instructions to, halfway through the cooking process, stir the food before finishing it off. This is great advice if you’re cooking fettuccine Alfredo, but lasagna is remarkably resistant to being stirred¹. But by giving the lasagna time to rest before heating it some more. This is apparently a time-honored practice in cooking food that I’ve learned about from watching Chopped where the contestants would let recently-cooked meat rest a few minutes before slicing it to enable the heat to spread internally.

In researching this, I discovered that Randall Monroe of XKCD has (of course) already looked at a similar question about cooking food in the microwave. From this, I learned among other things that when you set the microwave to, say, 50% power, it’s not actually reducing the power of the microwaves but turning the microwave on and off during the cooking process. The Trader Joe’s approach above is effectively a manual version of low-power cooking in the microwave. I suspect though, that the faster cycling of on and off power in heating with 66% power for 24 minutes would not give the heat the same chance to spread through the frozen food.