The philosophy of the microwave dinner
Posted by marshall Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:44:00 GMT
There are two key elements to a successful microwave dinner: quality and convenience. Quality is of course obvious: you want the food to taste good. I avoid Freezer Queen and Banquet dinners for this reason; I simply don't like the way they taste. But the convenience aspect seems to be sadly misunderstood by several of the microwave dinner manufacturers.
The ideal microwave dinner is a set-it-and-forget-it experience: you remove the dinner from the box, place it in the microwave, press some buttons, and return in several minutes to a perfectly done meal. Any deviations from this process reduce the level of convenience. Usually these deviations take the form of cutting holes in the plastic cover, placing a pizza on a cooking sheet, stirring one or more elements mid-way through the cooking process, and so on.
Further detracting from the convenience level of a dinner is ambiguity over cooking times. Different microwaves have different levels of power, so it's important to know what level of power the instructions were written for. Most dinners don't provide this key information, but simply put a range of times, sometimes varying as widely as 5 minutes. Some have ridiculous instructions like "heat until food is 160 degrees", as though the consumer has some way of measuring that while standing next to the office microwave.
And this leads to the one unforgivable sin of the microwave dinner world: requiring extra cooking utensils. The most common example of this is the requirement that something be removed from the dinner mid-way through cooking and placed elsewhere, requiring that a plate or bowl or something be handy to temporarily hold the displaced item. Considering that these meals are frequently used to bring to work or school for lunch, it's a bit ridiculous to assume that additional dishes are available for a few minutes' use.
A disturbing number of companies have adopted this requirement. The Swanson boneless pork rib dinner I had today required that the brownie be "carefully removed" after 3 minutes, and the rest of the food be cooked for an additional 2 minutes. This requires that I have someplace to put the brownie, and it's something that I'll need to wash or throw away afterward, since the brownie is fudgy and will get the item dirty. It's totally against the philosophy of the self-contained meal. I won't be buying that one again.
To make matters worse, the Swanson meal requires that the plastic covering over the brownie section -- and only the brownie section -- be removed. But the brownie section is right in the middle of the top half of the plate:
The area isn't perforated, so it really needs a knife or something to cut it properly. If it were on an edge, it could be torn without too much trouble, but putting it right in the middle there just makes things difficult.
The absolute worst offender that I have encountered up to this point is Marie Callender's country-fried chicken meal. This one breaks pretty much every rule one could have about a microwave meal. Here are the instructions:
- Puncture FILM COVER and POUCH to vent; set pouch aside.
- Pull back film cover and remove chicken.
- Microwave plate on HIGH 2 min.
- Pull back film cover, stir potatoes and return chicken to plate; re-cover.
- Stand pouch in microwave-safe bowl; place beside plate.
- Continue microwaving 4-8 min. until 160° F; let stand 2 min.
- CAREFULLY remove pouch, plate and film cover as PRODUCT WILL BE HOT; stir potatoes.
First, it requires the removal of the chicken from the plate for two minutes, requiring someplace clean to put the chicken. Next, it assumes that you will have a microwave-safe bowl handy at work or in your backpack or whatever that serves no purpose other than to stand the pouch of gravy in it. The instructions tell you to puncture the film cover, right before they tell you to pull back the film cover, thereby negating the need for puncturing. The cooking time is ridiculously vague (4-8 minutes), with no indication of what microwave wattage these instructions might be written for. It is assumed that you have a means of testing temperatures, although which item you're supposed to measure is not specified. Finally, it fails to explain just what to do with the pouch once it's heated. The picture on the package shows gravy on the chicken, so one can assume that that's what should be done, but there ought to be an instruction there.
The really unfortunate part about this is that the biggest grievances -- requiring extra materials and lots of steps -- could all be fixed by simply rearranging the items and perforating the dish. The corn and potatoes could go into one half, and the gravy and chicken could go into the other. The two halves could be separated, and one would go into the microwave 2 minutes before the other. Tweak the instructions (adding some info on what microwaves would be the 4 minute variety and what would require 8 minutes) and it would be a great experience.
So far, the microwave dinners that rank highest on my list are Lean Gourmet (especially the swedish meatballs, now being sold under the Michelina's brand name) and Lean Cuisine. Both offer food that I find tasty, and neither requires much effort beyond a bit of stirring.
