Microwaving or Boiling Enviromental Spuds
Writes simon on May 6th, 2008
Read More: Cooking, Science & Technology
.So everyone is trying to be all enviromental now. So the question is which is better to microwave or boil spuds? The natural lovers out there will say boiling because it is natural. Well those people also dislike E-numbers so lets not talk about them.
Water is a great substance for heating because it has a high Specific Heat Capacity meaning that it can store alot of heat. Great for when you are heating your house. However it also means that it takes a lot of heat to heat up. Also to get water to boil more energy has to be used to get over the Specific Latent Heat. The energy to transform from liquid to a gas. Also if you think about it when your spuds are cooked the water is still warm. This is energy you have wasted as it is not used to cook the food.
Microwave ovens work on a different principle. Dielectric heating.Basically imagine that the water molecules or fat molecules in food are little bar magnets. The microwaves are rotating in polarization. So imagine that the little magnets see the opposite pole in the waves. So like magnets they align to these poles. Then the waves pole changes and the little magnets don’t like this so they are forced to repeal from this pole rotating. So as the waves change at about 2 GHz the magnets are spinning at this frequency and this causing friction and the food to cook.
Once the microwave turns off the little magnets stop moving and no more cooking is done and no more energy wasted. As the microwave just heat the food and not the surrounding medium little energy is wasted.
Surveys have been done on this question. One of them was comparing Microwave cooked new potatoes and hob cooked. The result. 70-75% more efficient to Microwave. So basically people who boil their spuds are the SUV drivers of the potatoes cooking world.
On change.ie they have a climate change counter which myself and CK will post about in the next few days when we get to check our bills and find out how many KWhrs we use.
0 laura May 7th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
What is the enviromental effect if you heat your water in the more efficient microwave and then use a saucepan to boil your potatoes? What if you use a pressure cooker? What if you are sensible enough to put a lid on the saucepan while the potatoes are boiling? What if you boil your potatoes in a kettle? Lots of silly questions because this is just silly - microwaving bakes potatoes. So they end up with a different texture to plain old boiled potatoes.
0 simon May 8th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Perhaps the headline should have been Microwaving or Boiling, Enviromental Spuds.
Not sure about the pressure cooking thing but lid on sauce pan would not make boiling close to mircowaving indeed the survey could be for lided saucepan. Although I would imagine pressure cooking would be still worse.