I’m not sure if there are other fruits that you can heat up in the microwave, but grapes shouldn’t be one of them, unless you want to set those grapes on fire. Heating grapes in a microwave will spark and create plasma. That’s not how you impress your guests! Not at the expense of an appliance! A research article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explained the process of how it happens, as BroBible details:
I think we’re going to need a translation. Take it away, Wired:
The appliance pushes microwaves into the two grape halves, where the waves bounce around and add constructively to focus the energy to a spot on the skin. Both grape halves happen to focus the energy to the same tiny point. That intense energy jostles the atoms and molecules at that spot, heating them up so much that they can no longer hold onto their electrons, which turns them into a plasma — and boom, fireball.
They also discovered that the grapes don’t have to be cut in half to get the same results and in fact they don’t even have to be grapes, they can be gooseberries, large blackberries, or even quail eggs. “Anything grape-sized will work, if it’s watery enough,” said physicist Hamza Khattak.
The next thing the researchers said they would be tackling with regard to this phenomenon is finding out why the two grapes placed side by side repeatedly bump back and forth into each other when heated up in a microwave.
Image via Wired