Microwave Cooking: How To Ensure That Your Food Is Fully Cooked
How do I make sure my food is fully cooked in the microwave?
To make sure that food is fully-cooked in any kind of cooking depends on what you mean by fully-cooked. I in fact am not going to cook a really good steak to the point at which the experts tell me it is safe to eat. Nor am I going to cook a hamburger to that point because to me it's grey, dreary and not worth bothering with. So these days we all have to make decisions and we need to know that there are risks and we need to compensate for them. If it's a question of cooking the thing through, for instance, fish cooks a lot more safely in the microwave oven than it does in other forms of cooking. The reason for that is that fish stays moist in the microwave oven. So you don't have to say "I want rare fish", it has become very fashionable in restaurants. You don't need to have rare fish. You can have fully-cooked fish and it can be moist. Seafood like clams, oysters and so forth open very quickly in the microwave, but that is not a proof that they are cooked through because they're not and if you wanted to cook them through to safety, they would be rubber balls. You could possibly play ping pong with them, but I don't even think they have that much resilience. Meat thermometers, instant-read thermometers, are a very good way to go. And of course, touch-n-feel, the same way they do with other food, like is your baked potato fully cooked? Well, does it give or doesn't it?
