The Only Cooking Tasks Julia Child Used Her Microwave For
Few people would imagine a microwave in the kitchen of the Grand Dame of French cooking, but Julia Child, author of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," did, indeed, have one. Such an Atomic Age contraption seems out of place in the cooking space of someone who spent her career encouraging people to cook French from scratch. And it was out of place. Her first attempt at using it resulted in puddles of chocolate cake batter oozing out the bottom amid wisps of smoke. It may have been the only time in the famous chef's life that she failed at making a simple chicken and vegetables dinner.
Eventually, Child made peace with the microwave, though she relegated it to less important jobs than making chocolate cake. She admitted in an interview with Cosmopolitan in 1990 she "wouldn't be without one." However, unlike her first attempt at using it, where she put dinner and dessert in the unit, she eventually used the machine only to "heat up cups of tea or melt butter." She also learned that it's a reasonable way to defrost things and that it cuts down the cooking time of baked potatoes. Child wasn't a fan, however, of the funky things a microwave does to the taste and texture of veggies. In the end, she decided that using a microwave deprived her of the sensory response she got from stovetop cooking. "I like to smell and feel and poke the food I'm cooking," she said in the interview.
Don't cook this in the microwave
Julia Child's decision to cook baked potatoes in a microwave — but only for the first couple of minutes — demonstrated the celebrity chef's true cooking prowess. The machine has a tendency to ruin baked potatoes, counting spuds among the things you should think twice about putting in the microwave. Basically, the microwave approaches cooking in a somewhat slipshod way, with its microwaves hitting the baked potato in random spots. This is why some parts of the spud gets piping hot while other spots, even just inches away, remain cucumber cool. Starting it in the microwave speeds up the process, but as Child discovered, it's best to finish cooking a baked potato in the good ol' oven.
But it's not just baked potatoes that end up subpar after a spin in the microwave. Bread, hard-boiled eggs, day-old pizza ... you get the idea. Blame this on how microwave ovens cook food. The microwaves created by the appliance bounce around inside, reflecting off the metal inside the machine. These waves latch onto the water molecules in food or beverages, causing the molecules to vibrate. These vibrations eventually create the heat that cooks your food. It also cooks food from the outside in, which is why some spots in the baked potato (or other food items) remain uncooked. Actually, it isn't usually the microwave that cooks the interior of food. Rather, once some of the exterior portions of the food gets cooked, those heated portions cook the rest.
The power of the microwave
Julia Child's experience with vegetables in the microwave is to be expected, at least, if you understand the mechanics of microwave cooking. Because fresh veggies have such high water content, the microwave heats them up in short order. In fact, in a relatively short amount of time, any fruit or vegetable that you put into the microwave becomes dehydrated, one 30-second interval at a time.
This might seem like a bad thing, but it isn't. It's more a matter of knowing what foods work best in the microwave and what foods cook better using conventional means. For example, by now, most people know that if you want to bake bread 'til the crust gets crispy, the microwave isn't your best option. However, if you need to heat up soup or your afternoon cup of tea or even make a mug omelet, complete with ham, spinach, cheese, and diced peppers, the microwave is your go-to machine. Because those foods have a high water or oil content, which respond well to the vibrating cooking power of the microwaves, they're a natural fit for the Atomic Age oven on your counter. And despite what people think, microwave ovens don't give your food an extra jolt of radiation, nor will it contaminate your dinner. Cooking with a microwave is more a matter of figuring out what cooks best in it, just like Julia Child did.