How to Properly Cook Foods in the Microwave

Hi! I’m Jennifer McEntire with the Institute of Food Technologists. So, we’ve been talking about food safety. We just defrosted some foods and now we’re going to heat it up in the microwave.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if a food has been thoroughly cooked in the microwave especially when you’re working with leftovers that don’t have instructions. The best way to tell if your food is done is to use a temperature thermometer.

There are different several kinds. You can have digital, the regular dial that has some temperatures, recommended temperatures listed on it. What happens in the microwave compared to say on the stove top is that the food may not evenly, so you may have portions of the food that are very hot, other parts that are really cold and this is just part of the way that the microwave works.

So, you may want to stop food when you think it’s been heated a little bit and stir it up to try to get some mixing. It’s also recommended that when you think the food is finished in addition to using a thermometer. You wait about two minutes to let the food finish, to let the heat equilibrate.

So let’s stop our food right now. We’ll use a clean utensil or fork and I can feel that the other edge of the spoon is pretty hot. I even see some steam coming off, but I’m going to give it a stir just in case and as a test, we can check and see what the temperature is right now. So, let’s stick the thermometer on in, try to get it sideways, get it to cover a lot of the food and it appears that once I’ve stirred it, the temperature is rising very slowly, it’ s only about 82 degrees. We need for this food to go to about 165 degrees.

Different foods have different recommended temperatures. Foods that you’re reheating should be at least 165 degrees. Other foods like ground beef can be cooked to 160 degrees. We’ll cook a hamburger in the next segment. But I’ll go with 165 degrees in that one also. It’s easy I think to just remember one temperature a 165 degrees that you know will be safe. Stick in the thermometer and there we’ve exceeded a 165, it’s best to still wait about two minutes what the heat equilibrate and then we can enjoy this food.

Next, we’re going to cook a hamburger.


Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services