• krolden
    link
    22 years ago

    When you microwave water you also get all that grease and whatever is in the microwave. It all vaporizes a little bit and settles on the top of your water. Unless you have a perfectly clean microwave.

    Yuck

    • @Stoned_Ape
      link
      32 years ago

      A normally cleaned microwave is significantly more hygienic than the normally cleaned kitchen. There’s all kinds of stuff flying around everywhere, and almost none of it is bad for you.

      • @guojing
        link
        32 years ago

        If there is vaporized oil in your kitchen, you have a serious problem

        • @Stoned_Ape
          link
          12 years ago

          Have you ever cooked for yourself? Doesn’t sound like it to be honest.

      • krolden
        link
        12 years ago

        I didn’t say it was bad for you I said it tastes bad.

    • @Slatlun
      link
      22 years ago

      I suppose that could be true. I don’t clean my microwave much and have never noticed a problem. If it is a problem for water it would be a problem for anything you put in there.

      • Arthur BesseA
        link
        32 years ago

        try this: microwave some water, then let it cool to room temperature, and then drink it. does it not taste different than room-temperature water that hasn’t been in your microwave?

        • @Slatlun
          link
          6
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          In addition to plain room temp tap water I will compare it to a different heating method. For me that will be stove top. I will edit this with results when the water cools.

          Background: I decided to take this up because things are easier to taste at room temperature than if they’re hot or cold. My previous comparison was done with hot tea and this seems like a better straight up control even if it doesn’t directly reflect the real world use.

          Method: I used unfiltered city water that is pretty average - not hard or anything like that. I brought it to just a boil with each method then left to come to room temperature. I tasted and so did my roommate. I marked the glasses and they mixed them up so neither of us knew which was which.

          Results: There was a definite difference between boiled and not. Both boiled had a slight drying feel compared to straight from the tap and left to come up to room temp. There was an extremely slight difference between stove and microwave. The stove tasted a tiny bit flatter/blander and the microwave tasted a little more minerally. We could only find the differences by tasting very, very closely and I thought the flatter tasting one was going to be the microwave. Both of us would rather drink the straight tap water than boiled and cooled water.

          Conclusions: For my use case the taste difference is so insignificant that it doesn’t matter. It is also only a difference and not a better/worse judgement. I could probably do more to help the taste of my water by adding a filter than by adding a kettle.

          Further research: I would be curious to see how the trial plays out in areas with hard water. The mineral taste from the microwave might be stronger in an area with a higher mineral content in the water to begin with.