Hello.
It is still november.
With that out of the way, does your microwave oven have a popcorn button?
Yeah, mine too.
Lots of microwave ovens come with a dedicated button for popping microwave popcorn,
yet on nearly every bag of microwave popcorn sold in a store
you’ll find a rather stern warning making it clear in no uncertain terms
that that button is forbidden.
Do NOT use the popcorn button.
This might make you question
“why do we even have that button?”
and you know what? That’s a great question.
But I’m gonna tell you something wild and devious:
you should try it and see what happens.
Try it.
You know you want to.
See, I got this question from a patron of the channel recently.
Jolly Orville Secret Redenbacher Time II has a great incentive to tell you not to use the popcorn button.
The popcorn producers of the world don’t know anything about your microwave,
and some microwave oven manufacturers are dirty little liars
and put a popcorn button on microwaves that have no business having one.
Oftentimes that button doesn't do anything but set a pre-programmed cooking time
and if you use it your popcorn will be either burnt to a crisp or hardly popped at all
with an approximately zero percent chance of proper popping performance.
Since nobody likes wasting popcorn,
the popcorn people put a purportedly proper popcorn preparation primer on every package of popcorn which usually involves
listening for a gap of two seconds between pops to signal it’s done
and don’t you EVER use the popcorn button.
Not in this family!
[voiceover] Pardon the interruption but I need to make a correction:
Of the brands shown here, Jolly Time stands out by not warning against using the popcorn button.
As you’re about to learn, this is actually a nice gesture
because it means they trust you to use your brain and experiment.
And that’s the kind of hard-hitting investigative journalism you can expect from Technology Connections.
As far as the rest of those brands, though -
here’s the secret they don’t want you to know:
Some microwaves are smarter than others and have sensors to determine when things are done cooking.
Like popcorn.
And how do you know whether your microwave is among those better ones?
Try the popcorn button.
If you press the popcorn button and your microwave asks you the size of the bag,
Danger, Will Robinson!
That is probably a bad popcorn button which is sure to disappoint you.
But if you press it and the microwave just starts…
you might have a good popcorn button.
Perhaps you still need to press the start button to make it go,
and it might even give a message saying that it’s designed for bags of a certain size,
but so long as it doesn’t ask you to enter or choose between values in ounces or grams,
your microwave likely has some sort of sensor with which it can determine when the popcorn is done and thus it will stop automatically.
What sort of sensor, you ask?
Broadly, a microwave with proper popcorn popping prowess will have one or possibly two sensors onboard:
a moisture sensor and if it’s very fancy a microphone.
Microphones in microwaves are, I think, not super common
so you are more likely to just have a moisture sensor.
But don’t underestimate the power of moistness!
With a bit of logic, that sensor can be used for all sorts of useful things,
including automatic reheating of a meal or,
if you go back in time to when appliances were actually trying to be smart and not just connected to the internet,
following specific parameters to enable automatic cooking of specific kinds of foods.
Sadly, the days of the Sharp Carousel Multiple Choice have been over for like 20 years
(at least outside of Japan).
But lots of microwaves still have a moisture sensor.
One way to tell whether you have that sensor is if your microwave offers functions like “Sensor Reheat” -
which, if it does, you should give that a try next time you’re reheating leftovers.
It has worked surprisingly well in my experience.
What a microwave oven is doing when using that feature is analyzing the rise in detected moisture over time.
More moisture indicates food is beginning to let off steam,
and depending on how quickly that steam is detected, it can roughly determine how much food you put in
(and how cold it was) and thus how long it needs to heat it for.
If you’re lucky enough to have a moisture sensor in your microwave,
you may very well have a decent popcorn button.
See, unless you’re getting it from Uncle Joe’s Discount Cornhole,
a bag of microwave popcorn will stay sealed when it begins to pop.
Since it’s sealed, the moisture sensor can't detect anything at first.
But once the pressure in the bag builds past a certain point,
the bag will either go “boof” or possibly
“pfffft”
and let out a big ol’ cloud of steam.
The microwave will easily detect that,
and by comparing the time it took between the start and the sudden moisture spike with a lookup table built into its programming,
it will pretty accurately guess the size of the bag it’s popping and how long it should keep cooking until it’s done.
If you’ve got a microwave like this, that popcorn button might work perfectly for most kinds and sizes of popcorn.
Notice, though, that I said “might” and “most” -
this Samsung microwave oven has a pretty decent popcorn button but the location of its moisture sensor isn’t the best.
When you use its popcorn function,
it fires up the fans for a few seconds to clear the air around the moisture sensor before switching on the magnetron.
After a short delay it begins cooking.
And you can clearly see that the display doesn’t say anything other than “Popcorn” until shortly after the bag bursts open.
Then it picks a time remaining value and stops cooking at the end.
This works pretty well…
if the opening of the bag is pointing to the right when it bursts open.
The sensor is clearly somewhere up in here,
and if the steam gets shot right into this area,
the microwave only takes a few seconds to pick a remaining cook time.
And once it does, it’s usually pretty bang-on.
But if the popcorn bag was pointing away from this region,
it tends to take just a little too long to detect the moisture spike,
so it thinks the bag is bigger than it is,
and it cooks just a little bit too long.
Generally it just singes a few kernels, but it’s enough to be disappointing.
A faster-spinning turntable would be one potential solution here,
or perhaps the microwave just isn’t churning up the air inside of it well enough.
But here’s the thing - despite not being perfect,
I would still happily press that button.
Because I’ve dared to use this microwave’s popcorn button and observed its quirks,
I learned that it beeps when it determines the remaining time,
which is usually somewhere around 20 or 30 seconds.
[beep]
That gets my attention so I get ready to stop the microwave.
Sometimes I don’t need to stop it early at all, other times I’ll stop it with 5 or 10 seconds remaining.
And if I’m popping one of those small snack bags?
I stop it when it beeps.
So while its popcorn button isn’t perfect enough to just hit and walk away,
it does eliminate enough of the guesswork when buying a different brand, type, flavor, or size of popcorn that I find it extremely useful.
And I have indeed used microwaves with a perfect popcorn button.
Like the Sharp Carousel sitting in front of me.
I made a whole video about this which you can check out if you like,
and if you’re extremely bored you can also look at the video on my second channel where I audited its popcorn popping performance.
A different microwave from my childhood also had a perfect popcorn button.
Sadly that one didn’t last long at all but it was great while it lasted.
And, wouldn't ya know it,
my new microwave oven at home has perhaps the best popcorn button I’ve ever used -
but it’s got a twist.
Actually, two.
I suspect that this fella has a microphone listening for popping sounds.
That might sound pretty expensive to implement in a consumer device,
but remember the video I just made on the Clapper?
Yeah it’s not exactly groundbreaking technology.
Every time I have used the popcorn button on this microwave,
it has run the magnetron until just after there’s about a two second gap between pops and then it decides
“ok it’s done!”
It throws a time remaining on the screen but you can tell that the magnetron has shut off and it doesn’t restart.
It has done this and worked perfectly with different sizes and types of popcorn,
even a cheesy popcorn which I absolutely regret purchasing.
But I don’t think I’ve tried a snack-size bag yet.
How’d that work, future me?
[munch]
Went just fine, past me.
Coulda gone a little longer but it’s not burned.
Not too many kernels, actually.
Good job!
Unfortunately I couldn’t determine concretely whether this model actually has an acoustic popcorn popping strategy.
The manual doesn’t mention it and neither does its marketing copy.
It may be that its steam sensor is just… really good,
but I mean it’s been way too consistent with the whole “wait for a two-second pause between pops” thing
for me to call that a coincidence.
What’s that?
There’s a button that says “feature sheet” under “additional documents?”
Did I write all that before clicking that button?
Because it says it features a “Sound-based popcorn function.” right there.
So it is real.
Good to know.
The other twist with this microwave, though, is that it doesn’t appear to cook popcorn at full power.
It takes noticeably longer than the Samsung machine does,
and indeed most microwaves I’ve ever used.
But - it doesn’t have an inverter magnetron and I don’t hear it cycling
so unless it’s got some sort of half-wave rectified 50% power mode I don’t know what the heck it’s doing.
You don’t need to know what any of that means.
This microwave is also weirdly slow at melting butter for some reason, but not at heating things in general.
That’s actually been something of a minor mystery that I’m still puzzled by so
I’m honestly not sure if the slow popcorn popping is intentional
but by golly it nails it every time so it’s definitely worth the small added wait.
So.
I’ve technically shown you three microwaves in this video:
this Sharp from the late ‘90s.
The Samsung from around 2010.
And the KitchenAid from just last year.
All of them have perfectly functional popcorn buttons that work great, well-enough-to-be-useful if not perfect, and fantastic respectively.
And the only way I found that out
was by daring to use the popcorn button.
Uncle Orville may not want us to press the button
but that’s only out of fear of the unknown.
Orville can’t tell what microwave you’ve got and he’s just giving advice for the lowest common denominator.
But you know what kind of microwave you have!
Or, if you don’t yet, you can surely find out.
All it takes is a press of a button!
At most you’ll waste a bag of popcorn, but even then -
if you just watch it as it does its thing, you can stop it yourself if it’s going on too long
or start it again if it stopped too soon.
You’re smart enough to figure that out, and you should!
Honestly you should check out all the features your microwave has.
Sure, many of them are clunky to access
(a high-res dot matrix display and actual user interface could really help with that but that ship has sailed apparently).
And while they’re often of dubious usefulness, at least one or two of them might be great!
I use the sensor reheat function all the time to take the guesswork out of leftovers.
I just wish Samsung wouldn’t make me pick between Casserole, Dinner Plate, and Pasta
- what does that even mean?
And who knows, if you didn’t buy the microwave oven you have at home yourself,
it might have some tricks up its sleeve you didn’t know about.
This over-the-range microwave can actually be a convection oven!
It’s got resistive heating elements in addition to the magnetron
and will get its insides up to 450 degrees if you like.
Apparently the new model even does air frying.
Of course it does.
Am I ever going to get around to talking about air fryers?
♫ steamingly smooth jazz ♫
Whaddya suppose the difference is between buttery kettle corn and regular kettle corn?
I dunno but I bought this cause I wanna find out.
One way to tell whether you have that sensor is if your microwave offersh [annoyed flub fliby sounds]
The moisture sensor doesn’t detect anything at first.
Ahh…
what?
See, unless you’re getting it from Uncle…
why?
Hmm.
It can pretty accurately guess the size of the bag it’s popking.
Popking?
Oh boy!
Popcorn button might work perfekly for most kinds and sizes of popcorn.
Why did perfectly get…
PAHPCORN
Which is usually somewhere around 20 or 30 secods.
Why did I say seconds like that?
I dunno, but I’m starting over.
PAHPCORN