As the energy crisis bites, remember the humble microwave

You’re going to see a lot of helpful advice over the next few months about saving energy and quite a lot of it is going to point towards the microwave, lurking unloved in the corner of your kitchen. The microwave, they say, can cook food using a fraction of the energy of a conventional oven, yet it’s scorned, distrusted and even rebranded by Nigella Lawson, our greatest domestic deity, as a “meecro wah-vey”. We’re going to have to do some work if we’re going to get this gadget taken seriously.

Perhaps we could think about re-appropriating its original name. In 1945, an American scientist called Percy Smith, researching radar stood in front of a “Magnetron” — a giant vacuum tube generating radio waves — and discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted. If my testicles were glowing like a couple of roasting chestnuts, I wouldn’t have noticed my lunchtime Twix had gone soft, but Spencer had admirable scientific detachment and immediately saw culinary potential. Early magnetron cookers, as well as sounding like monsters from the dodgier series of Dr Who, were restricted to commercial use.

I have a soft spot for some of the first American domestic “microwave ovens”. Like the TV remotes of the time, they favoured large clicking plastic push-buttons rather than the later, slicker touch controls. Setting up a cuppa-soup for lunch felt like punching in the launch codes on an intercontinental ballistic missile, which probably explains the command — ubiquitous in English speaking commercial kitchens for a swift and expedient re-heat — “Nuke it!”

Let’s not be coy here, though. It’s not the “radiation” that’s the problem. Like every other damn thing in the UK, we made microwaves into a class issue. Posh people reheated their dinner in the warming oven of the Aga, while drying rugger boots and the Labrador, and bugger the expense. Only the impoverished lower orders pierced the film with a fag-end and waited for the ping. Which explains why I’ve always found unscientific prejudice against the microwave to be factually wrong, mean-minded and just plain nasty.

Those extra-short electromagnetic waves penetrate foods with a high water content, transferring their energy to agitate water molecules. They target the energy and steam food from within. Microwaves don’t brown food, but then neither does delicate, classical poaching, fashionable wok-steaming or hi-tech sous-videing. It is safe, rational and blindingly efficient.

Sure, there are some things that are ruined by microwaving. It can murder fish, poultry and meat. Microwaved scrambled eggs are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, and microwaving a meat pie can get you rushed to the Greed Ward with blue flashing lights and third degree lip burns. But then, in my business, I see people screw up great ingredients daily with some steadfastly traditional kit. All the ways to completely ruin a £30 steak can be achieved with a polished copper pan and a gas flame.

But nothing tempers chocolate better than a microwave, and you will eat your kid’s first ‘cake’ cooked in a mug in the ‘mike’ and declare it the finest you’ve ever eaten. If you tell me you’ve never reheated your coffee in it when you’re on deadline, I’ll call you a liar to your face.

Now let me tell you a thing that will change your life forever. Take a whole head of cauliflower and wrap it tight in a double layer of cling film. Microwave it on high for 6 minutes, then let it stand, still wrapped, for another 4. That’s it. You can pour cheese sauce on it if you like, but you should really just eat it. Pure, healthy, cauliflower, steamed in its own juices, not an atom of its goodness wasted, the purity of its flavour fully expressed.

And if that does your culinary nut in, wait until I tell you the miracles you can work with a pressure cooker.

tim.hayward@ft.com