This is not an update; it is a random thought.

[brooksmoses]

Fact 1: Microwave ovens work because they produce microwaves tuned to a vibratory frequency of liquid water.

Fact 2: Microwave ovens are rather poor at defrosting chicken; the parts that get defrosted first become partly cooked by the time the remainder of the chicken is defrosted.

Question Arising From These Facts: Would it be possible to build a microwave oven that was tuned to a vibratory frequency of solid water that would defrost chicken properly?

Comments

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it would help you that much, if it would be possible, which I don't know. Microwaves cook from the outside in just like every other kind of radiation I'm familiar with, so with a large enough piece of chicken you'd probably still wind up with the outside cooked, though possibly not as much.

You could try putting the chicken in a plastic bag and putting the plastic bag in a container of water, then heating the whole shebang on medium (in your current, existing microwave). It'd take much longer, but it might also cook the chicken less -- I'm guessing; it just came to me.

[brooksmoses]

Actually, microwaves, like all other forms of radiation, don't cook "from the outside in" -- they cook inward and outward from a distribution of photon absorbtion sites that extends into the volume of the material. For infrared, the penetration depth is negligible, and so it might as well be from the outside in -- but for microwaves, the average penetration depth is intended to be somewhat deeper than the thickness of what's being cooked, so a lot of the photons go through and get reflected back, and the rest land in a fairly even distribution throughout the interior of the stuff. And, if the microwaves are focused so they're more intense in the middle, you do get more cooking on the inside than the outside.

(Yeah, ok, so you said large enough, and it would be true for sufficiently large things, though "large enough" is probably a half-meter-diameter chunk from some giant mutant killer chicken.)

Anyhow, my chicken tends to get defrosted and cooked in bits on the middle of the sides, and stays frozen at the tips. What's going on is that when a bit of chicken gets defrosted, it suddenly has liquid water in it, and so that's a very opaque bit in the middle of this large mass of mostly-transparent chicken, and so all the photons stop there, and it gets hotter and cooked while the frozen parts aren't getting many photons to defrost them.

I will have to try the chicken-in-water idea, though; that does sound like it might work.