I know what you mean. About a decade ago I caught our nice old toaster oven on fire and we had to find a new one. We got a nice little basic one that’s fine, and luckily just in time.
A few years later, a friend was looking for a new one, wanted something simple and small. We sent her our model info and they didn’t have it anymore. All she could find were these horrible bloated versions with bulging back ends.
I designed parts of our pantry around our nice, small, simple appliances. If they ever conk out I’ll probably just need to build DIY versions!
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Our family also had one of those mechanical timer and a release button microwaves, which lasted until Mom decided she could no longer stand the archaic brown box design aesthetic and bought one that she could never figure out how to quite get to work right. One day Dad mentioned the project he was working on, a fast-setting cement, needed a quick way to dry out the pre-clinker mix before it could be kilned, and at a precocious 9 or so I pointed at the microwave and said, “Why not use microwaves?”
Somewhere, deep in the bowels of whoever now owns the patents and processes of that company, there’s a R&D white paper and process document with my name on it as co-author for pointing out what was, to me at least, the most obvious thing in the world. Too bad the final product ended up being fast-cracking cement as well as fast setting.
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Obligatory:
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My godfather was some sort of sales rep for a large distributor of some sort. We had a huge microwave in the late 70s thanks to him. Big dial, cook or defrost push buttons with that door release lever.
We also had a convection oven long before they got popular.
We currently have a fancy convection/microwave over our stove. Tons of custom settings including micro bake but we just set the time and power level for the microwave and temp and time for the convection oven.
All that fancy stuff is lost on us.
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I had an Emerson AR 502, bought in '84 and lasted till 2012. It had a timer and a ding bell, and a cook/defrost switch, nary a button. It was golden.
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RE: Toasters- I got one that uses quartz lamps for the heating elements, and after some tuning in, it produces acceptable results. The only down side is that it’s a single slot, albeit a big one.
I have a combination convection/toaster oven that sits, unloved and unused, because it’s usually faster for us to slap something in the oven than to try and figure out the UI for the damned thing, even after reading the instructions multiple times, which is a damned shame because it actually does work pretty decently.
the microwave in our house is also one of those combination range hood units, and we rarely use any of the fancy features on it- I put my plate of food in, punch in the time I want, and hit start. I can’t complain, though, it was free, and all I had to do was install it. (which was more complicated than it seems, as I had to modify the cabinetry above it to make it fit properly. My kitchen is weird.)
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I love it how everyone has a microwave story. No one talks about their favourite spoons! My current MW is a $20 secondhand special. I pretty much only use it to make coffee/tea as it is faster and cheaper than boiling a kettle on my gas stove. This one has quite straightforward logic but some I find are pretty perplexing.
Once, in a work kitchen I watched as a guy put an egg in the MW. I said you should prick it first and he said nah this is the way I always do it. Time’s up and he takes out the egg holding it one his fingertips like a wonderful gemstone. Then it explodes sending yoke goo onto his face. I burst out laughing. I was later sorry for that as molten egg must have burnt. But the thought that immediately struck me was he had “egg on his face” - if you’re familiar with that expression.
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I guess I’m the minority here. I think microwaves have continuously gotten better. My last one had a broiler element in it that did amazing things with baked potatoes and reheating. My current one has a built-in convention oven that can microwave and brown at the same time, does baking and warming jobs, and has a steam sensor system for automatic cooking that works perfectly. You push Popcorn or Baked Potato and it detects when done based on the steam being emitted, which works shockingly well. Perfect popcorn and potatoes every time. My last two microwaves are head and shoulders better in every way than anything I had in the '90s or '80s.
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Our latest microwave, even after years of ownership, continually pisses me off, pardon my French. I still stupidly press the 4 button thinking I’m going to enter 45 seconds but because the microwave knows better than I do what I want, it automatically starts for 4:00 minutes. So what should be three button presses turns into 5 (4, cancel, cook time, 4 then 5). It has automatic times for 30 seconds, 1,2,3,4 minutes, but 40 or 50 seconds (which is usually the perfect time considering its power), what are you, some kind of weirdo? It’s one of those things that is very trivial but becomes aggravating when multiplied by several times a day.
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This is the microwave I inherited from my grandmother, built in the '70s according to build plate on the back. I really only use the time dial, not the power setting. Because it’s a mechanical timer, you have to turn it past 2 minutes or so, otherwise the chime won’t work. And the chime rings a couple of seconds before the oven turns off.
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Jeffery Combs doesn’t get nearly the credit he deserves…
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Hey, that looks familiar.
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Are you sure it’s not a TV set?
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It sounds like you use it in a way that benefits from those improvements. We use ours mainly to reheat stuff and occasionally thaw stuff like frozen stock, so simple and mechanical is better.
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He did one on the superiority of an old sunbeam toaster and a small modification that makes it even better .
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Well, go on and fill a dish with artichokes and butter and see if it comes out optimal.
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So you’re shopping at Kitchen Supply places instead of retailers or department stores, right? Or like, in Herzegovina?
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Thats not a microwave. Its a time machine.
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Not sure what you’re trying to say. We don’t eat artichokes but if we did we’d cook them in way that was appealing to us.
The microwave is a tool, not a complete replacement for all cooking methods.
