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How to buy the best microwave oven for your cooking needs
Want to buy a new microwave for your kitchen? In this video guide to buying the best microwave oven, Which? experts show you what to look for.
Video guide to buying the best microwave oven
Not sure whether to buy a microwave-only, grill or combination microwave? Want to find out what features you really need? Watch the Which? video buying guide to hear our experts top tips for buying the best microwave for you.
Choosing the right microwave for your cooking needs
What's the best type of microwave oven for me?
Your first choice will be to decide what type of microwave you want: solo, grill or combination microwave. Your choice will depend on the type of cooking that you want to do.
For example, microwave-only (sometimes known as solo) models are great for simple tasks such as heating soup, cooking jacket potatoes, heating ready meals or defrosting food. But a microwave with a grill or one with an oven will let you cook more ‘proper’ meals – even a roast dinner.
The best microwave features
The best microwave ovens may well offer a whole host of features that let you do everything from steaming fish and vegetables to cooking pizza.
What you can cook in your microwave and the quality of the food you produce will depend upon the type of microwave oven you use and its features. It's also important to use the right dishes and containers.
Some microwave ovens don’t heat food thoroughly or quickly enough
Which? has reviews of 80 microwaves and, of these, there are three that we strongly recommend you don’t buy.
Some Which? Don’t Buy microwaves fail to cook food quickly or evenly enough, or don’t reach the minimum cooking temperature we think is required. Don’t be fooled into thinking that more powerful microwaves will always cook better or faster – this isn’t so.
Get more from your microwave
You can cook Sunday lunch in an hour with a convection microwave – less than half the time it takes in a conventional oven.
Watch our video guide to find out how to use a microwave to cook a roast chicken with lemon, onion and rosemary with roast potatoes, carrots, green beans and broccoli.
What you can make in a microwave
You might not think of using your microwave for baking, but baking cakes in your microwave is an easy alternative to using a conventional oven.
A microwave-only (also known as solo) microwave is all you need to make simple cakes. And combination microwaves are well set up for baking tasks. Chocolate cakes, sponge cakes and Madeira cakes can all be baked excellently in a microwave.
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Which? tests more thoroughly than any other organisation
When testing microwave ovens, we mimic the tasks you'll perform in your own kitchen, but with the help of some unusual testing equipment.
We check how well microwaves roast chickens
Which? does test real food in its microwave ovens – our microwave chicken test involves roasting an entire chicken and using temperature probes to check if it's cooked properly – but to analyse how evenly they cook, we use a special substance, similar in texture to lasagne, called TX-151 to ensure comparable results across the microwaves we test.
