Why Microwave Pies Are As Good As Cancer™

Deflated fruit haggis bomb of complacency.

I'm shamelessly setting a dour mood by putting cancer in the title, and making it commercial.  Sorry about that, and no offense to cancer victims everywhere, I can't compare anything in my life to what you experience.  Also, learn to take a joke.  But the issue I want to discuss is very serious in its own way:

Microwave pies are such a bad idea.  Period.  Cancer end of sentence.

I'm not even going to use nostalgia to explain why people like frozen pot pies.  They are a thing we were made to eat as kids even though they were terrible and in a culture that makes kids feed themselves a lot more often because parents are also terrible, every food product that must be served hot is now primarily intended for the microwave instead of the conventional oven.  Why is this a bad thing?  Because an oven makes food taste better than a microwave ever could.  There is also an important feature of an oven that a microwave was never designed to do: an oven browns food using science instead of chemistry.  Anything that says it will brown in a microwave is artificially constructed to produce a browned effect, but it's far, far from the normal browning process that occurs when food is put into a very hot and dry heating device and naturally carmelizes (which just sounds delicious).

I have this true theory that processed frozen foods are designed to give parents and other lazy people a break from creating fresh meals now and again, and the sheer volume of frozen or otherwise pre-processed convenience foods exists because people get more and more careless about cooking (maybe because we live with toxic levels of additives from processed foods) and just go with the easiest option.  That rule about only shopping around the outer sections of a grocery store to stay healthy?  That cuts out 70% of the store's contents.  We are all terrible.

But reality is reality, parents take short cuts or simply train their kids to heat up their own food when work or other adult nightmare activities get in the way.  So why do parents trust their kids with the microwave more often than the oven?  On paper, a microwave seems like the safer cooking device for a child to operate.  There is less chance of burning either the child or the house to the ground with a microwave because it doesn't conduct heat in a mechanical way that must be later cooled down.  It transmits energy waves inside a closed container through the food but leaves all surfaces of the appliance relatively unaffected by the heat that is produced in the food.

But is that really safer?  Kids and boiling hot foods don't mix too well, and there's always a chance the kid will put a metal utensil in the microwave with the food which tends to piss off the microwave and cause a fire just as easily as a misused oven.  An oven is hot and dangerous, to be sure, but so is a cell phone at times.  The heat is contained in a contraption designed to contain heat, and as long as the kid is taught how to insert and remove the food safely, there's not much risk.  Leaving an oven turned on is only going to hurt your electric bill (unless you have a gas oven, then forget what I just wrote).

By the way - don't let a child operate a stove top ever in a million years of ever.  Kids are the most terrible at that.

So let's return to the idea of food quality.  Aside from cooking that involves boiling food from the inside out, which an oven is no good at, a microwave does not cook anything better than an oven can.  There is no meat that prefers to be cooked in a microwave.  And there is also no other food that browns in a dry heating environment that will naturally brown in a microwave.  Pot pies, and a couple of food brands have frozen fruit pies as well (as pictured at the top) taste pretty good when baked in an oven.  This doesn't mean they are good, just that the food science is successful at getting you to like it.  They still don't taste homemade and are full of chemicals and unnatural thickeners and preservatives that make them look more enticing at the end of cooking.

But there is a range of pot pie quality that peaks at "just about worth the $4".  I won't bother to mention the brands because it is easy to tell which ones are better by how much they cost.  The cheap ones have very cheap filling that is just above wet cat food, and the higher priced ones have irregularly cut, identifiable meats and veggies to make them seem like homemade.  The crust is never above average on any of them because it is like a frozen sheet of oil held together by a few molecules of flour.  You won't find butter in a frozen dinner crust.  Nor will you find that incredible flaky texture that comes from the proper use of shortening or margarine, both oil products that are also popular with the best pie chefs.  So to me, the crust of a frozen dinner pie always tastes more oily than doughy, and the darkness of the crust does not improve the flavor.  Now take this oil drenched crust and retrofit it into the quick-fix microwave food market and you end up with a Frankenstein's monster version of something nature wouldn't recognize (like modern TV comedies).

Most frozen pie containers are designed to simulate an oven, sort of.  The food is usually cooked in the opened box and there is a sheet of some kind of magical browning paper stuck to the top that acts as the amplifier of the heat energy caused by the boiling of the inside of the pie and directs it at the top side of the pie to burn a brown-like effect into the crust. It's very likely that you could lay this pie crust on a smoking hot sidewalk in July and get a similar effect, but would you want to eat it?  It smells more like science fiction than food; similar to oily, burned plastic.  The crust color is uneven because the design of the box to cook it in is not perfect and the paper is some flimsy, single use crap that should probably be filed away by history like asbestos.  The paper pie tray is also made with that shiny conductive surface and also works only half as well as intended.  See the above picture again.  You are guaranteed to have some dark burned areas and some totally uncooked soft areas on your pie.  If you mash it all together and close your eyes, it still tastes the same, right?  Right.

Also consider that the main cooking technique is boiling the inside of the pie until it is hot enough to kill all the manufacturing bacteria inside, and there are holes on the top of the pie and always a damaged open part from the pie's handling by careless grocery store stockers.  Both things mean that the boiling contents inside will inevitably find a way to escape to the outside, where they will pool up inside the cooking box and/or run out and make a mess of the microwave.  This filling is wasted because it boils dry and gums up everything it touches, so you don't want to eat that part.  What's left is a half deflated pie with at least one side of unbrowned wet crust.  The Pie Gods are not smile (I usually like the congealed, runaway drips on a fresh pie.  They add a new level of dark sugar flavor to the sweet insides and salty crust.  Gotta have salty crust and lots of it with a real pie.  To me a pie is a fancy oven sandwich with some gravy innards.  The wet stuff is just there to make the delicious crust go down easier.  Also why pie is always better than cake, but I'll save that for another entry).

 So what do we do about this pie crisis?  For one thing, if you can't get real pie cooked in an oven, don't eat pie.  Nobody wants steak cooked on a car engine just to have convenient steak, right?  Some things are special because they aren't universally available.  Kids will appreciate the specialness of home baked pie, savory or sweet, and come to ignore pie when the microwave is the only source of their daily food. I'm sure kids are hard to parent when it comes to food, but one thing a kid won't do is develop a craving for something he/she has never tried.  So make pie important and rare like food diamonds.  Second, if you simply have to introduce frozen pies to your kids, spread them out with lots of real pie in between or save them for cold winter months when the whole family is home to enjoy them baked in the oven.  I won't rant about the use of processed frozen foods because reality trumps logic at times, and there are those lazy, pajama days we all enjoy when worrying about made-from-scratch dinner is not more important than a soft chair and a blanket and a TV show or two.  Eating right takes effort, and nobody is that disciplined all the time.

To sum up: pie is more than that geometry number nobody can remember.  So much more.  Cancer more.

A beautiful pie I did not make.  Sorry, I've been lazy.