People have been using their microwaves all wrong, according to science

Of all the kitchen appliances, there’s one that’s easily the most simple. The easiest to use. A holy grail when you just can’t be bothered.

And no, I’m actually not talking about air fryers. Because there’s one piece of kit that makes sorting out tea even easier.

Microwaves, obviously. However, as trusty as they are, it turns out a lot of people have been using the things completely wrong. Apparently.

Prepare to have your mind blown:

Racking up plenty of views on TikTok, users shared the ‘microwave hack’ for how to evenly heat up your meals.

Content creator ‘onlyjayus’ previously shared a video saying: “You know when you reheat food in the microwave and some parts of it are hot enough to burn your mouth and the other part of it is frozen?”

OK, so that might be a bit of a dramatic way of putting it but it is common that we pull out our supermarket korma after the ping to face the heartbreak that it’s not all the same temperature throughout.

Basak Gurbuz Derman/Getty Images

The TikToker explains: “Well that happens because you shouldn’t actually have your food in the middle of the plate here.”

They then move the bowl to the side of the microwave plate as they continue: “It should be on the edge so it can actually rotate around and cook evenly.”

And food scientist Makenzie Bryson Jackson agrees. She told Well + Good that ‘runaway heating’ leads to this uneven cooking where spots that are warm ‘will heat up even more quickly once they begin to heat up’.

Emma Farrer/Getty Images

Jackson says that most modern microwaves design the plate to rotate so the waves bounce more uniformly off it and then if you pop your food on the edge, it will ensure it is heated as evenly as possibly.

I mean, she does point out that it won’t be massively different, but will ‘slightly’ help to even out the heat.

She also shared a trick for identifying individual hot spots in your microwave: layering marshmallows on a plate and cooking for 50 seconds.

“The ones that puff show where your microwaves hot spots are so you can place food in those areas for faster heating,” she said.

Naturally people wish they'd known about this witchcraft sooner.

One TikTok user wrote: "I feel like you should have told us this about 20 years ago!"

Another said: "Spent so much of my life carefully aligning it exactly in the centre."

Bad luck guys, at least you know now.

Topics: Food And Drink, Technology, Science

Jess Battison

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

@jessbattison_