Thursday, March 18, 2010

frozen food directions

So I'd noticed recently that the El Monterey burritos I've been eating have a horrible cooking time:eating time ratio.  I attributed this to the directions specifying that a single burrito should be cooked at 375 for 20 minutes.  A single burrito.  For 20 minutes.  Kind of ridiculous, don't you think?

So I did some experimentation with cooking them at 450.  Turns out it doesn't decrease the cooking time enough to be a viable difference.  It was about 16 minutes.  Part of the 4-minute difference goes to the difference in preheat time, so that 4 minutes it looks like I'm saving isn't really 4 minutes.

They do have microwave directions, which I did try.  Once.  The burrito ended up like all other frozen burritos I've ever microwaved: soggy and with cold spots.  Microwaves suck for heating frozen foods, end of story.  Oven >>>>> Microwave.

A few days ago I saw Red Baron By The Slice in the freezer section.  I said "hey, the best frozen pizza in existence has a way for me to enjoy it without having to buy an entire pizza?  Neat!"  Today I got a box.  A box has two slices, both packaged in their own cardboard microwave heating tray.  The microwave directions clearly indicate what wattage they were formulated on.  So I followed them.  They worked really well, and in a couple of minutes I had a slice of pizza.

It still suffered from the same issue heating anything frozen in the microwave suffers from: it was soggy.  The cardboard tray crisped the crust a little bit, but not nearly as much as if I'd heated it up in the oven.  So I looked for the oven directions.  And I looked.  And I looked some more.  Guess what?  There are no oven directions.  Fail.

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