Aside from thawing meat, preparing frozen meals, and using a glass of water to reheat food for a first-day taste, the microwave doesn't get much use in many homes today.
WTF..
Yeah no use at all.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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"Aside from the things microwave is used for, it isn't used very much"
lol, yeah!
I reheat previous days' food all the time. I must be doing something wrong.
OMG I know. I use a microwave pretty much for every meal. Either as the primary cooking equipment or as part of the prep.
Microwaves are great for preheating small amounts and thawing things if needed.
To melt butter in a bowl, or quick little things like that
Air fryer.
I used to use my microwave for most meals. Now I use it for about 10% with the air fryer getting the other 90.
Depends on your cooking and shopping habits I guess. I rarely thaw meat. I rarely eat frozen meals, and when I do, they are usually the type that can be prepared in the oven. My toaster oven is the device that gets 90% of the use. My microwave can go weeks at a time without being used.
I'm not working right now and find that I'd rather spend the extra 5 minutes to use the oven or stove for most things. When i had an air fryer, it got used way more than the microwave. Microwave will probably see a little more action when i go back to work next month.
Man, the countertop convection oven has been a game changer for us.
Use it pretty much every meal, has really cut down on using the oven so less heat in kitchen in the summer, and I'm sure it's madena dent in the electric bill (or maybe it's a wash because we use it so much more).
Most people never learn how to use the power setting to more evenly heat food when needed. Or to add some moisture to keep things from drying out.
If I have leftover Mexican food it generally goes in the microwave with wet paper towel to steam it back to temp. Wet paper towel while reheating rice gets it back to nearly the same texture! Soups reheat well in the microwave, although generally knocking the power level down slightly has far better results.
Fried food generally reheat better in an air fryer.
I don't find the microwave to be the best option when cooking for the first time, but for a lot of foods it can be the best option to reheat leftovers depending on texture and moisture content.
Most people never learn how to use the power setting to more evenly heat food when needed. Or to add some moisture to keep things from drying out.
Teach me? I need this skill.
The power level is the ratio of time it us sending power, so a power setting of 90 will send waves 90% of the time.at full power. 50 will send it 50% of the time at full power. If the power settings are 1 through 9 then they are really 10% - 90%. By stopping the waves for a bit of time it allows the heat to even out within the food, like stopping and starting it over and over so you don't end up with a mix of hot and cold bits. That is also why defrost uses a lower power setting.
Like all cooking it will vary depending on wattage and what you are cooking. These are for my current microwave, and they are generally within 10% of my previous one.
The easiest example I can think of is melting shredded cheese on chips. At full power it will overcook some parts of the cheese whoch become hard without everything melting in about 30 seconds. If I instead run it at 80% for 40 seconds it melts evenly.
Since the microwaves excite/heat up different chemicals at different rates, anything with a mix of things that heat differently is best done at 70 or 80. Like soup with vegetables and meats. Or a plate with different sides like potatoes and beans, longer at lower power will heat it more evenly.
If I go down to 50 on this one it takes forever to cook, as it is not proportional to the total cook time. It isn't 50 power for twice as long, more like 60 power for five times as long. So I rarely go under 70 power.
If the thing needs moisture I wet a paper towel and put it over, then do it at high for a little longer than I think as the water absorbed the microwaves and steams the food. This is great for reheating rice and enchiladas as long as the dish is tall enough that the paper towel doesn't stick to the food.
All that said, if you want to reheating something crispy like fries or fish sticks do it in an air fryer or the oven or maybe the stove. Microwaves do not make anything crispy again, that requires hot air or a pan.
You can evenly heat pizza in the microwave with power level 80 or 90 if you don't care about the crust being soft, but if you want that crispy the stove or air fryer is the way to go!
I heat 2 slices of already-toasted bread in the microwave often ...with a slice of cheese between them... for 12 to 15 seconds (with 1100 watts), just long enough to start the cheese melting.
Faster than grilled-cheese in a pan if ur in a hurry ... and ZERO cleanup.
Every time I read about microwave cooking, I think back to this article where the author tried recipes from what has been labeled as the world’s saddest cookbook: Microwave Cooking for One.
Oddly, there are some foods than can be done amazingly well in a microwave. Including a cup-cake in your coffee mug, which is my favorite microwave trick.
But none of them are steak. If you're alone with a steak and need to cook it alone, literally any cooking method including "just hold it over a candle for eight hours" or "give up and eat it raw" would be better than steak.
Good read, thanks!
Mmmm... Chocolate sauerkraut cake
I use my microwave every day for my main meal cooking. It does the vegetables. The frying pan does the chicken thighs. And for the Brits, the other main thing I use it for is to heat a mug of water for instant coffee. I have a general-purpose appliance that heats water. I don't also need a single-purpose appliance for heating water. All arguments for water kettles fall flat, IMO, if you have a microwave oven.
Yeah I tend to agree. I adore the Brits but had an argument once over a coffee cup (ik, lol) and why some coffee cups couldn't be microwaved. I said that ALL coffee cups should be microwavable and they vehemently disagreed, specifically because you could use a kettle, and to get over it.
Then I had to 'Amerisplain' haha.
How do you heat water for pasta? Do you just fill a saucepan and wait?
Lol.
I have some cups that can't be microwaved because they have metal foil on them.
Though if you microwave them a couple times, that problem is solved. 😝
For Brits who have tea multiple times a day, and because their appliances are 220v, an electric kettle makes sense. It can boil water in less than half the time the most powerful consumer microwave in the US can, because there's no magic to a microwave - it can only put as much energy into water as it can draw from its electric circuit, about 2000watts, max.
Outside of those conditions, an electric kettle doesn't make sense.
You'll probably find too that most microwaves have a rated power only around 1200W, and I'm betting not all of that is making it into the food either.
With British kettles allowing up to 3000W (230V 13A), I expect we're talking more like a third of the time than a half.
It's still an unnecessary single use appliance if you already have a microwave. It's not like boiling twice as fast is saving you a ton of time since we're talking about a difference of like a minute or two.
I use my microwave for so much more shit.
But I constantly hear some bullshit myths about it, too. Like superheating water so it boils over when you grab the cup. If you've ever seen this happen IRL, you know it doesn't boil so violently it splashes outside of the container. It's also incredibly easy to prevent by just using a toothpick or putting something in the water so it has nucleation points.
I have for sure experienced the explosive boiling over of superheated water, but like a couple times in my life and I'm an old guy. It's crazy when it happens though. The water looks like it didn't get to the boiling point, but when you disturb it, it starts insanely boiling over. Got boiling water on my hand, but not badly burned.
Superheating water can absolutely fuck you up. Steam is like 700 times less dense than water so what happens is a steam bubble forms inside the superheated water at a nucleation point and explodes the water out of the cup since what used to take up 1ml of space now takes 700ml of space.
It might not splash out every time but it happens often enough to make superheating water extremely dangerous.
The first time I heard about superheating in the microwave was in the mid 80's.
We tried (as dumbass kids do) to try to do it. Repeatedly.
It takes a pristine container and a lot of heating.
Distilled water works best, because it lacks minerals (fewer nucleation sites).
The risk is waaaay overblown. I boil water in the microwave almost every day, and haven't superheated it since trying to do it back in the 80's.
Edit: Quote from an article I once found discussing the risk
The prominence of the warning is disproportionate to the documented injury frequency, even though the underlying physics is sound.
Microwaves have been commonplace for 50 years now. How many people boil how many millions of cups of water, per day, in a single US state. If it were a commonplace occurrence, or even not-so-commonplace, we'd have plenty of records of it all the time.
It takes a narrow set of conditions to produce, so it happens even less than "rarely".
The easiest way to get it to happen is using distilled water that you let sit in a cup overnight in the microwave. That gives the cup time to off gas the O2 that is diffused in the water. You don’t even really need distilled water in that case.
The big problem people had was leaving their cup of water for morning tea in the microwave overnight. This led to degassed water in the morning more likely leading to a superheated scalding when you put the teabag in. Once more people were aware of this problem it became less likely to happen.
Whoa, microwaved toothpick tea (soup??) ...
I haven't had a microwave in half a decade. I sure do miss that reheated coffee 🫠