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Only the front of the oven closest to the door, and about an inch from each side wall, cooks cooler — about 20 degrees cooler. This is still an impressive result, especially when compared to turntable models that don’t even let you use most of the space in your microwave.
Just note that with the cooking sensor, you can’t cover your food and get the same results. It will interfere with how the microwave senses temperature; For example, resist the temptation to cover your food unless you’re using timed cooking functions, which there are also. I’ve actually been able to shell an egg this way without it exploding all over the oven, but caution may still be needed to cover the egg and cook it in manageable increments of time.
Another Achilles’ heel of oven temperature sensors is a multilayer pan of food. When I reheated a Korean rice bowl layering short ribs over cabbage and rice, the cabbage didn’t cook as hot as the meat or rice, and I had to blend it a bit and reheat it. This is of course what I would expect to happen in almost every other microwave. But it is worth noting that this oven looks magical only on flat dishes.
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Simplicity is the key to this microwave, and that’s why I love it: no need to watch or worry about it. With few exceptions, the oven’s main sensor reheat function reliably and evenly heats my food to 180 degrees F (or less if I set the heat to any of the five lower settings). I’m willing to concede this as genius.
But other key functions also work mostly well. The beverage button heats a cup of any liquid to about 170 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the temperature I want my coffee or tea at. Defrost was able to defrost frozen chicken breasts in 10 minutes, while barely warming any part of the meat beyond room temperature. (I also needed to rest the chicken breast for five minutes, according to the instructions, for the heat to escape.)
Setting the popcorn is essentially temporary, since the infrared sensors can’t see through the popcorn bag: Adjust the weight of the popcorn bag in the microwave, then let it sit. With a bag of Kroger, my results were perfectly acceptable: no burnt popcorn, and a few dozen unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag. Trying to follow the popcorn maker’s instructions, and waiting until there were several seconds between pops in a high-powered microwave, was a fire risk. I’ll take the popcorn button.
Classic microwave cooking tools are available at the right time, as well as manually increasing or decreasing microwave power. Somewhat specifically for the US market, Panasonic has also added a range of pre-programmed microwave cooking recipes, whether it’s one-pot chicken noodle soup or spaghetti Bolognese with meat cooked from raw. Scratch microwave cooking is more popular in Japan, where kitchens are small – and obviously these functions also showcase the microwave’s ability to adjust its power settings for precise cooking. But microwave recipes still feel like a time capsule from the 1980s.
