My wife bought a countertop convection oven that has nearly 100 pre-defined cooking programs and 10 different "quick set" buttons. How do we actually use it? Set a temperature and time. With a dial. Could have be so much simpler.
It has an inverter and a humidity sensor and 20 or so different preset buttons that use them, with sub permutations.
None of them work well at the job of warming up two shitty frozen burritos.
What does work well is this: One minute at power 10, and 3 minutes at power 3.
When others see me programming this in they think I'm a madman, and sometimes they even audibly question my sanity.
And I'm not sure that they're wrong.
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The microwave I grew up with had a mechanical timer knob (with a simple mechanical bell), a second knob to set duty cycle (probably borrowed from an electric range), and a start button.
It worked fine. I like being able to program things, but I'm usually standing right there anyway so I'm perfectly capable of turning the duty cycle knob down after about a minute passes and getting the same results that I do today.
(And that method did in fact work fine back then, too, even though people also thought I was crazy when they'd see me doing that)
And for bonus nachos: The timer also worked perfectly as a simple mechanical kitchen timer. Just give it a twist, avoid the start button, and it spins down until it goes "Ding!".
There was some experimentation early on--I even have a microwave cookbook--but, outside of some vegetables, very few people actually try to cook using one. And, yeah, I don't know the last time I did anything other than set time. I rarely even do anything other than full power. I do use the popcorn setting from time to time but even that is pretty much unnecessary if you listen to the popping.
I have to replace my microwave because it caught on fire in the middle of the night and I'll probably get a 4-in-1 Panasonic which will also replace my second oven which I basically never used.
It worked OK-ish.
It's hard to actually get the Maillard process going in a microwave with a couple of pounds of ground cow, so proper browning wasn't a thing.
They'd just put the moo into a glass mixing bowl, turn the machine on, and give it rigorous toss with a wooden spoon every couple of minutes. Ground beef crumbles were the result.
For bacon, we had a special angled plastic tray with drainage slots for the grease. They'd layer up bacon separated by paper towels, and start the machine.
This worked better than the taco meat did, in my opinion, but it still sucked because picking little bits of greasy, stuck paper towels off of hot bacon is annoying.
I've never done either of these methods myself, because I naturally want to do things better than they did. In my adult life, ground taco meat goes in a skillet on the stove (and uses a cheap wire potato masher to break it up), and bacon goes in the oven on a sheet pan.
re: ground beef or meat in general, slow cookers have sort of the same problem with respect to Maillard reactions. You're generally better off using a dutch oven, browning, and then cooking in the dutch oven--unless you want to do prep and then toss in a pot and forget for the day. I have a slow cooker but wouldn't buy one today.
