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I prepare my herbal teas in a microwave oven.

As an example, I use a glass teapot with 1 liter of water. I preheat the water 4 minutes (@ 1000 W), I add the tea bags, then I heat again for 2 minutes 10 seconds.

Obviously the precise times will be different for other microwave ovens and teapots, but the point is that with a microwave oven you can experiment with fine adjustments of the time until you get what you deem to be the best taste.

Once optimal times are found, the process will be perfectly reproducible, so you will obtain the best taste every time.

I have transitioned a couple of years ago from making the tea on a traditional gas stove to using the microwave oven and the result was much better tea tastes that are always the same.

Controlling the time in this case controls the temperature, but it is more convenient than attempting to control directly the temperature when using other cooking devices.




Smart, reproducible technique! I do hope you are being careful with that: heating liquids past their boiling point can potentially create a superheated state. Very clean containers in a microwave are said to be especially good at causing this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheating#Occurrence_via_mi...

I've personally never encountered this with water, but have seen it happen with diethyl ether and dichloromethane (at ~40 deg C, so much less scary)


If the starting temperature is 20C then to get to boiling you need to add 80 kelvin * 1000 gram * 4.2 joule/gram = 336 kJ to get to 100C. At 1000 W that takes 336 seconds, or 5 minutes 36 seconds. In practice my 850 W microwave takes nine minutes to raise a litre of milk to 85C from fridge temperature so I don't think there is too much risk of boiling.




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