Microwaves

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of , the efficiency with which they are concentrated in a narrow beam, is one reason why they can be used in cooking. You can produce a high-powered microwave beam in a small oven, but you can't do the same with radio waves, which are simply too long.
and their Use
The idea of cooking with radiation may seem like a fairly new one, but in fact it reaches back thousands of years. Ever since mastering fire, man has cooked with infrared radiation, a close kin of the microwave.
Infrared rays are what give you that warm glow when you put your hand near a room radiator or a hotplate or a campfire. Infrared rays, flowing from the sun and striking the atmosphere, make the Earth warm and habitable. In a conventional gas or electric oven, infrared waves pour off the hot elements or burners and are converted to heat when they strike air inside and the food.
and infrared rays are related in that both are forms of electromagnetic energy. Both consist of electric and magnetic fields that rise ...

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into the chicken. They reach right inside the food. Ordinary ovens, by contrast, fail to have the same penetrating power because their infrared waves agitate all molecules. Most of the infarred radiation is spent heating the air inside the oven, and any remaining rays are absorbed by the outer layer of the chicken. Food cooks in an ordinary oven as the heat from the air and the outer layer of the food slowly seeps down to the inner layers. In short, oven microwaves cook the outside of the chicken at the same time as they cook the inside. Infrared energy cook from the outside in - a slower process.
This explains why preheating is necessary in a conventional oven. The air inside must be ...

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