Why does it take minutes (instead of hours) to cook a potato in a microwave?


Mar 08 2024 5
Microwaves are different from basically every other cooking method because they don’t emit any actual heat; instead, molecules in food convert a microwave’s electromagnetic energy into heat. And it’s this totally different process that’s responsible for so many of the things about microwaves that seem so weird. Like the fact that they work really freaking fast. If you’re, say, baking something, heat has to work its way through the air to the food, and then all the way through the food, which takes a while; somewhere around an hour, in the case of a potato. But in a microwave, that same potato will cook in just minutes, because the electromagnetic waves interact directly with molecules in the food.