Preliminary googling says it turns water to steam, and the steam moves, but that still doesn’t explain in my head why the food gets moister.
Like, if the water is already in the food, why isn’t it moist in the first place? Where is all that water “hiding” in the fairly dry Muffin I am about to microwave, and after I microwave it the whole thing is very moist?
In: Chemistry
It’s not so much that it turns the food moist, it was already moist. It turns it leaky.
Microwaving primarily works by heating water. The water becomes steam, the steam ruptures the cells and gets outside the fat/water/protein structures where it was trapped. As the water loses heat (by heating the other parts of the food) it then condenses back into water. So what used to be water inside the food is now water outside food that’s now a lot drier.
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