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I have been carrying out som experiments comparing my kitchen microwave oven with the microwave oven in my camper.
Some time ago I bought this rather handy chicken to boil eggs in the microwave.
Unfortunately more recently I dropped it and a leg broke off which meant it couldn't hold water any more and was thus rendered useless.
Joy of joys, I was able to get a couple more on Ebay all the way from China.
Anyway back to the point - they only need a tablespoon of water to make the perfect egg.
I was curious to see how long it took to boil 20ml of water in each microwave - one is 950 watts the - other is 700 watts.
Curiously they both boiled the water in almost exactly the same time of 30 seconds (give or take a second).
I have read that the effectiveness of a microwave oven depends not only on its klystron's power but its cooking chamber volume. The camper microwave is the smallest I could buy where as the one in the kitchen is not the biggest I could get but it is a larger one with both a microwave, convection oven and a grill.
Well, there you go, I thought it was an interesting experiment.
BTW these are my new egg cookers
See! No legs. The one on the left holds up to 4 eggs the one on the right 1 egg and this is where I got them from:
So 30 seconds to boil the water but how long to cook the egg ?
Same time as boiling an egg in a pot of water, the difference is the time it takes to boil the pot of water. Heating only 20ml of water to boiling point instead of 500+ml is a big saving in time and energy.
It takes the same time whether cooking one egg or four obviously.
In practice I set the timer on the microwave to 6 minutes to give me the perfect egg ie white hard, yolk soft.
Talking cooking eggs, I recently bought a George Foreman Steamer, I should have bought it years ago. I can poach an egg in 90seconds, once the steamer water has reached boiling.
If you don't like it too runny a further 60 seconds is plenty. The trick is to take the egg out of the fridge and let it warm up before adding to the steamer.
Talking cooking eggs, I recently bought a George Foreman Steamer, I should have bought it years ago. I can poach an egg in 90seconds, once the steamer water has reached boiling.
If you don't like it too runny a further 60 seconds is plenty. The trick is to take the egg out of the fridge and let it warm up before adding to the steamer.
That's an interesting point, there is no reason why I couldn't poach an egg in the larger 'egg' using a small stainless steel bowl from the $2 shop. Might take a touch longer than 90secs (plus the 30secs to boil the water) because of the mass of the stainless steel bowl but should be doable, I will have to experiment.
I have a couple of old 'poachers', one that takes 4 eggs and a very old aluminium one that does one. To be fair steaming an egg is not really poaching it but it's good enough.
The equipment prepared... The stainless steel bowl was covered in butter and 20ml of water added to the base of the container (below the aluminium which is not only the base for the boiled eggs but also forms part of the Faraday cage which stops the eggs exploding).
The egg added and peppered.
Initially microwaved for 2 min 30 secs, the white was not completely cooked so it was nuked for another 1 min 30 secs...
...which produced this:
An extra 30 secs might have been better to completely firm up the white but it was very edible as it was.
A thinner, lighter container would reduce cooking time because that one weighs 51 gms which is quite a mass to heat up and stainless steel is not a good conductor of heat.
There you go 4 minutes in the microwave produced an acceptable poached egg.
The equipment prepared... The stainless steel bowl was covered in butter and 20ml of water added to the base of the container (below the aluminium which is not only the base for the boiled eggs but also forms part of the Faraday cage which stops the eggs exploding).
The egg added and peppered.
Initially microwaved for 2 min 30 secs, the white was not completely cooked so it was nuked for another 1 min 30 secs...
...which produced this:
An extra 30 secs might have been better to completely firm up the white but it was very edible as it was.
A thinner, lighter container would reduce cooking time because that one weighs 51 gms which is quite a mass to heat up and stainless steel is not a good conductor of heat.
There you go 4 minutes in the microwave produced an acceptable poached egg.
QED
oh my giddy aunts, I want to eat that egg!! Looks like perfection to me!