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Comment by stephen_cagle | Hacker News Reader

I feel like a circular saw is a creator tool, while a microwave is mostly a finishing tool.

I take raw material and make something out of it with a circular saw, largely unrestrained by anything other than cost, skill, and material.

With a microwave, I make things hot so I can eat them.

Aside: Also, I wonder why that is? Why do we regard the microwave as "degenerate" compared to the oven? Why is baking seen as a calling while microwaving is, well, not? Is it the ease of the microwave makes the effort less impressive? Maybe it is that you can't achieve certain effects like browning? Is it because of it's 1970's association with "radiation" and tv dinners? Is it just cultural inertia?

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Tbh, most people actually don't know how to microwave. The typical microwave users just trys to "one-shot" it by punching in a time and using high heat.

Proper microwaving is what gave rise to the entire concept of "fast casual" restaurants, famously AppleBees (or "club B's" in the late night focus iterations!)

Complex entrees that could be partially cooked and frozen. Then rapidly microwaved on a custom program that varies the timing and intensity of cooking. Then finished on a grill or conventional heat source for less than 1 minutes.

Microwaving food generally produces a lower quality finished product. But you can take a similar approach at home. The short cut is to just double the cooking time and cook at 50% power. Then throw whatever the item is in a preheated pan for about 1 minute if it's applicable. Other variations are possible too, I air fry finish most things like chicken nuggets, tater tots etc and the difference is considerable while still offer a significantly reduced cooking time.

I have a collection of vintage microwave cookbooks and they get real fancy, with techniques like wrapping the thin parts of fish with aluminum foil so they don't burn. Volume 5 had a full Thanksgiving dinner. I think the goal was to sell more microwaves to people who weren't sure what they could do. Fascinating stuff.

I have used none of those recipes. The microwave is for making cold pizza 10% more palatable (or 80% more palatable if I've been drinking). In that regard, the LLMs are microwaves really works for me: if I'm using one I either I want something fast and casual, or I'm drunk.

You reheat pizza in the microwave? I hope someone cooks salmon in your microwave!

>I have a collection of vintage microwave cookbooks

Of course you do! Please take the time to upload and share that's an amazingly niche knowledge pocket.

You might both be interested in https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/my-journey-to-the-microwav... regarding the history of microwave cooking (not mine). The microwave oven wasn't known destined to be relegated to lowbrow cookery from the beginning, even if that's how it turned out from our perspective, and some of the more advanced techniques developed for it fell out of use.

Neat article.

I think it is interesting (though I only partially agree) that microwave meals require standardization to scale. Let's say that was true, why couldn't a modern microwave have a small camera and a set of heuristics for how to cook just about anything by turning the gun on and off at particular points when it recognizes a food? Maybe without intelligence, a microwave does need standardization; but we can put intelligence (ideally offline) in just about anything these days?

I wonder if with sufficient control if a microwave could ever brown? I wonder if it could reliably bake?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tg3-93jKvc - Chicken Good!

Most of the problem with browning is the physics: it requires temperatures well above boiling, but the default microwave absorber is water which will tend to saturate around boiling temp. But physical cookware design can be used to make it work: the article I linked prominently describes the use of a browning skillet with a tin oxide coating on the bottom that can safely absorb large amounts of microwave radiation and get hot enough to brown foods.

So partly due to that, I think if you wanted to do full robotic cookery with a microwave beyond the TV-dinner stage you'd still need control over the other objects rather than just switching the magnetron. Stirring for even heat distribution is another thing.

And then it's separately interesting how, in a really skew way, “deliver heat using RF energy” came back from a different angle with the rise of induction stoves!

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