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By Root 1198 0

like real food. So you can expect to spend much of your time figuring out how to adapt your favorite recipes. Salt in the microwave leaves brown spots on vegetables and leaches out water, withering them. Flour or cornstarch must be used to thicken sauces because shorter cooking times make for less evaporation, and intensity of flavor never develops. Quantities of garlic, ginger, scallions, fresh herbs, alcohol and wine, and spices like coriander and cardamom should be increased because their essential flavors are volatile. Pepper, dry herbs, nutmeg, and cinnamon should be reduced because their flavor has less time to mellow. Pieces of food should be cut into regular shapes (ideally three-inch cubes) and cooked with pieces of the same density, or you can mix smaller high-density pieces with larger low-density ones. Pieces should be arranged in a ring and separated from one another with thicker parts to the outside. By the way, did I warn you not to put recycled paper plates and towels in the oven? They may contain metal particles and cause a nasty fire.

Cooking times are very tricky. A recipe will need more or less time in the oven if your baking dish differs in size, shape, or composition from the one the recipe writer used or if the dispersion pattern of energy in your oven differs or if your line voltage varies (common in urban areas) or if you cook more than 3,500 feet above sea level or if your fishmonger has a two-pound sea bass today instead of the one-and-a-half-pounder the recipe calls for. A thirty-second error can ruin your masterpiece.

Cooking time can pose a problem with conventional methods, but then at least we are in closer contact with the food. We feel the heat, watch the surface of the food change in texture, color, and moisture, touch it, smell the changes. One or two microwave cookbooks suggest that you watch the food carefully, but the interior bulb is dim, the door is sealed, the window is small and shielded, and the food is covered with paper towels or waxed paper or steamy plastic wrap that seems to melt into the glass of the sizzling dish.

Undaunted, however, I pursued three favorite fish dishes that should do quite nicely in the microwave.

I sometimes steam flounder with a sweet and spicy sauce for fifteen minutes in a sixteen-inch bamboo steamer set over a large wok filled with boiling water, heat the thick dark red sauce of hoisin, bean paste, soy, garlic, and ginger on a burner, pour it over the fish, and decorate it with slivered scallions. This time I microwaved the fish for seven minutes on a tightly wrapped plate with no liquid other than the shao-hsing wine rubbed into the flounder and let it stand while microwaving the sauce. It took three flounders to get it right. The results were more than merely edible, but no matter how I varied the microwave time, the flesh of the flounder never achieved that firm but tender consistency it does in a real steamer. Almost every microwave cookbook writer marvels at the pool of delicious stock that miraculously forms around a piece of fish cooked without liquid. Some consider this yet another free bonus from the microwave, but any child can tell you that when flavor leaves the fish, the fish loses flavor. Recipes that have you microwave a fillet or whole fish loosely covered with paper towels or waxed paper produce a drier, firmer, but less evenly cooked result than when you seal the dish tightly with plastic wrap. Odd as it sounds, how you cover the fish may be the key to how it comes out.

I can still remember the loup en papillote at a restaurant near Antibes. Steam-baked instead of steamed, the whole fish—a type of sea bass—was stuffed with aromatic herbs and vegetables, wrapped in parchment paper, and baked until the paper had browned and puffed and the fish was infused with the perfumes of Provence. In my microwave version the paper remained a ghostly white, but the fish was good. I unsuccessfully tried to concoct a browning liquid from soy and sugar just for the parchment, with the excuse that it would never touch the food. Moral purity disintegrates