Eggs are delicious. Just short of making instant noodles or preparing a sandwich, egg dishes are among the easiest and fastest food items in your kitchen around. You can boil them, fry them, poach them, and so forth. You can even go for cooking them Sunny-Side Up or as Eggs Benedict.
Eggs are particularly delicious when scrambled and fried or cooked with rice and fried. This poultry item is indeed quite nutritious to boot. So can you microwave an egg safely? Wouldn’t that cause an explosion (or eggplosion, as the case may be)? Keep on reading to find out.
Is Cooking Eggs in Your Microwave Safe?
You can safely cook eggs inside your microwave oven. In fact, there are several different ways to go about them. You can poach, boil, scramble, or “fry” them. It’s not really frying when done in the microwave though.
Related: The Best Microwave Egg Cooker
The nature of microwave rays or micro-sized radiowaves involves exciting the water molecules of the food instead of traditional convection heating with oil on a pan. With that said, there are ways for you to get stovetop quality boiled or cooked eggs using a microwave.
Additionally, microwaved eggs taste even better than eggs on the stovetop in certain aspects or circumstances. For instance, you can make perfectly poached eggs on the microwave using an egg poacher and without needing to form a whirlpool.
Regardless, there are several precautions or warnings you need to heed in order to cook an egg without making it explode or a mess inside your microwave oven. This should ensure you have an overall positive microwave cooking experience when push comes to shove.
The Precautions Needed when Microwaving Eggs
Many microwave-safe plastic egg poachers can double as egg boilers by adjusting cooking times, but those tend to explode as well. Therefore, when it comes to microwaving eggs, you should do the following.
Microwave-Safe Containers
Using microwave-safe containers doesn’t only apply to cooking eggs. Anything you reheat or cook inside this device requires microwave-safe containers. This could include ceramic, glass, and paper (no plastic or foil coating) plates.
Don’t use aluminum foil, metal containers, or any container containing plastic that’s not marked as microwave-safe. You should also avoid using damaged containers or temporary one-use microwave-safe containers that have been used before.
Piercing the Eggshell
Don’t cook eggs with an un-pierced shell. That’s like cooking with a pressure cooker without the pressure release. The nature of microwave ovens is that their microwave radiation cooks food by exciting the water molecules inside of them.
You can make a poached, soft-boiled, or hard-boiled egg in your microwave if you pierce the shell from the bottom first. This releases the pressure built up inside it from the hot water turned to steam. However, it might be best to boil eggs on the stovetop.
It’s for the sake of erring on the side of caution, thus sparing you cleanup from the resulting eggsplosion.
Avoid Superheating
Piercing the yolk and white a few times with a needle or breaking the egg and whisking it for a scrambled delight can assist in preventing an egg splatter when push comes to shove. However, the main culprit of these eggsplosions is definitely superheating.
A liquid is superheated when it’s heated beyond the boiling point without boiling. A superheated liquid or food whose liquid molecules are superheated has a tendency to explode. The slighted movement will cause it to erupt out of its container or build enough pressure to turn an egg into an egg bomb.
How to Cook Eggs in the Microwave
The main thing you need to avoid is an exploding lunch or dinner. This is why pressure holes are important. With that said, here are the ways you can cook eggs inside your microwave oven.
Beat the Eggs or Cook with a Poacher
Avoid overheating the liquid and causing burns or scalding by not cooking the eggs in the shell as much as possible. Use microwave-safe egg poachers instead. They help avoid superheating and when the eggs do explode, at least they’re contained within the container.
You can beat or scramble the eggs, consider their size when buying an egg poacher container, read about minimum cooking times, and attempt to cook evenly because eggs tend to explode when one part of them is hotter than the other parts.
Cooking the Traditional Way
Some items are better off not cooked with a microwave. Portions are smaller because of the limits of microwave interior capacity. If you wish to make a top layer of golden-brown cheese on your breakfast casserole, use a standard oven instead of a microwave oven.
You can cook larger meals with bigger pots via stovetop versus the mug-sized cookies and quiche from a microwave recipe as well. However, if you wish to prepare cheesy eggs for your kids before they go to school, the quickness of a microwave cannot be beat.
Beating the Eggs the Right Way
Egg yolks cook after than egg whites. This is because of the yolk’s higher fat content. Therefore, it’s easier to cook omelets, scrambled eggs, and the like with your microwave than an explosive attempt to make poached or boiled eggs.
An egg that’s beaten tends to cook more evenly in a microwave than an egg with the yolk and white still separate.
Egg Size and Minimum Times
A normal egg requires less time to microwave than a jumbo egg. Adjust recipes accordingly. Some online recipes even give you outright calculations for adjustment, like how to cook a duck egg versus a chicken egg or quail egg.
Finally, use the minimum amount of time to cook to prevent overcooking. The shortest amount of time is your rule of thumb. Afterwards, incrementally increase the cooking time by 10 to 15 seconds until you have it cooked for real.
Additional Tips
Cooking your eggs traditionally with a skillet and cooking them in the microwave for an easy breakfast is quite different from each other. You should know the lowdown on cooking eggs via microwave oven. You should be aware with the nature of microwaves, for one thing.
You should definitely take precautions when microwaving an egg with its shell still intact, for another thing. You might have to poke holes on y our delicious and fresh eggs for you and your family to enjoy them without exploding inside the microwave oven.
There’s also the third option of using a microwave-safe plastic egg poacher or boiler in order to cook one or several eggs together in your microwave oven in a streamlined manner.
References:
- “Is Cooking Eggs in the Microwave Safe?” SauderEggs.com, September 18, 2018
- Image Credit by Andrea
