3-D Micro-Baking

Making products that taste, chew and look right after nuking is essential in a society that demands fast and easy meals. But replicating the flavors and textures of food prepared in an oven in a microwave takes some doing, because it cooks in a radically different way.

The microwave sends radio frequency waves inside the food to excite the molecules and create heat. But in a convection oven, for example, heat penetrates from the outside into the food, browning and crisping the exterior. There’s no hot air in a microwave to do that. Product designers who want a pizza crust or burrito shell to brown in the microwave may add a metal foil deflector to the package that heats up and browns what it touches.

“It is very, very difficult to reproduce real cooking in a microwave,” says Pierre van Pottelsberghe, Ph.D., vice president, savory business unit, Ottens Flavors, Philadelphia. “In the oven, the edge of a product will develop a certain amount of flavor, the inside will taste differently and the bottom will be different from the top. That doesn’t happen in a microwave, because you heat it from the inside to the outside.”

However, innovative product design can replicate oven cooking in the microwave. A project to develop a biscuit that could be “baked” in the microwave with comparable flavor, texture and appearance to the oven-made article provides an example to consider, notes van Pottelsberghe. Ordinarily, microwaved biscuit dough has a one-dimensional taste and texture. The solution was to build a biscuit in three layers with different textures and flavors of dough for the top, center and bottom. “The top has a brownish character, a little bit sweet and buttery, the center is mostly a yeasty note and the bottom is more of a crusty note,” he says.

James Scarpa is a Chicago-based writer who specializes in food, beverages and the business of restaurants. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and a veteran of the foodservice industry trade press.