The magnetron is a vacuum-tube oscillator whose frequency is set by machined metal, not a tuned circuit, and almost everything people believe about why it cooks is wrong. Why 2.45GHz has nothing to do with water resonance, why food cooks from the outside in, the standing-wave cold spots the turntable exists to fix, why pointed metal arcs and flat metal does not, and inverter vs transformer power.
Cooking
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How a Microwave Oven Actually Works -
Cast Iron Seasoning Is Polymer Chemistry Seasoning a cast iron pan is not "baking grease into the metal." It is radical-chain polymerization of an unsaturated triglyceride, catalyzed by hot iron, producing a cross-linked thermoset film bonded to a magnetite substrate. Treat it like the chemistry it is and the lore stops mattering.
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Cast Iron Seasoning Is Polymer Chemistry Seasoning is not grease baked onto a pan — it is a hard, cross-linked polymer film grown by the same radical chemistry that hardens linseed-oil paint. The drying-oil triglyceride, the autoxidation that cross-links it, why iodine value predicts the result, why you bake above the smoke point, why thin coats win, the flaxseed brittleness paradox, and how to strip and rescue a pan.
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How an Induction Cooktop Actually Works An induction cooktop has no hot element — the pan is the heating element, and the glass underneath stays cool until the pan warms it back. How a kilowatt of magnetic field becomes heat in the steel via eddy currents and hysteresis, why only ferrous cookware couples, the resonant inverter that drives the coil, the honest efficiency numbers against gas and radiant electric, and why it buzzes.
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Candy Making and the Temperature of Sugar Every candy is the same two ingredients — sugar and water — taken to a different temperature. Why the thermometer reading is really a moisture gauge, why fudge and lollipops start identically and diverge on one decision, how crystallization is the thing you either fight or farm, and why chocolate tempering is a completely different temperature game played on fat.
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The Thermodynamics of Cooking Meat Cooking meat is a heat-transfer problem wrapped around a protein phase diagram. Why a steak and a brisket want opposite treatments, why overcooked meat is dry even though no water boiled away, why chicken has a hard safety floor that beef does not, and how every cooking method is really just a strategy for managing one temperature gradient.