 Yeah, we've got a bunch of questions coming in the questions while this is going on. Is that too loud in the background? Not really. I think we're good. Great. So two questions that are quite as similar. One is from Anirban. He's asking why do microwaves defrost function are they just melting the ice. A very similar question from. Let me read it out. Where is the chat? Again, why do Where are the Yeah, why is there a top button? What what is happening there? Yeah, so to go back to the defrost function, you know, why do you have a defrost function that's, you know, some microwaves have a way to slightly change the power. The Panasonic has a patent on that, but mostly it's to just again do this cycling thing. So it essentially puts it at low power and then does it for a longer time. Right. And then some of them are programmable or program that, you know, after the initial things where there's a longer time between the on and off cycles, then it, you know, the time between those cycles are less. Yeah. What was the other question. Yeah, the same thing. What is the thought. Another question from Gopal Chandrasekram, who says, I've noticed these hotspots, but putting fire problems in a circle they always start repeating up at the same spot. That's essentially because, you know, the where the nodes are in the microwave and it's not, you know, distributing the microwaves evenly throughout. And so, so that's why it's actually good to sort of map the hotspots in your microwave. So how do you so one way to do is, you know, not have it just straight at the bottom, have it slightly higher up. So let me take this out. It should be ready. And so this here. And so here's the chocolate cake. It may not look very pretty. Sometimes you can just have it in your in the mug itself, but just give it a little bit of time, because it's still steaming. But in here, as you see, you know, right here in a few minutes, you can, you can make yourself good chocolate cake, you can make it pretty by putting some chocolate mousse or whatever flavor you want on it. Any other questions? Yeah, we've got a question from Kunal Aidyan. Sure. Kunal is asking, is cocoa like chocolate bar without listening? Oh, yeah. So that good question. So why do you have, you know, you know, all of these things, you know, so a good bar of chocolate, right, should have cocoa. Actually, you know what, let me, let me do this. I don't know if you can see this now. Maybe not upside down. So good bar of chocolate. Actually, you know what, sorry, let me just go back to my slide over here. A good bar of cocoa has cocoa solids, sugar, cocoa butter, right? And so the amount of cocoa solids, it has, you know, 55% or 75%. That's what that comes from, right? The other thing it and that is actually extremely bitter, right? So the more you have, that's why that's bitter chocolate. It has more percentage of cocoa solids. And then you have cocoa butter. So when you have chocolate, actually it's cocoa butter and cocoa mixed back together, right? That way you can control how much of those cocoa solids you have. Now, the separation of cocoa butter from cocoa solids is actually very energy intensive, which is why it's, you know, expensive, you know, besides the sourcing, it's very energy intensive. And that's why cocoa butter is also very expensive, which is why some, you know, cheaper chocolates are not such great quality chocolates use other fats, you know. But cocoa butter is fantastic because of its properties, its melting properties, it melts at, you know, about 37, at least one of the forms of cocoa fat melts at 37 degrees, which is your body temperature, right? The real, you know, when you say melt in the mouth, deliciousness, that's where, you know, cocoa butter is really good at, right? And so that's what cocoa solids are compared to cocoa butter. So, and then you have less than there to keep all of these things mixed together. So a good bar of chocolate should have nothing else except these, you know, cocoa solids, cocoa butter and sugar and then whatever, maybe some vanilla or something. So if you're having white chocolate, for example, that's mostly just fat. It's mostly cocoa butter and sugar and maybe vanilla, right? It doesn't have the cocoa solids. Of course, you'll have some faint traces of cocoa, but otherwise it's, you know, it's just the cocoa butter or the cocoa fat. Does that answer your question? And any other questions I'll be happy to take? Yeah, we've got a couple of questions. Sure. Actually, so Gokul Tandasekharan asks, how much to change the weight of other solids if I remove the egg? And while you're answering that, you can probably also answer. Bebas who's asking, when we make eggless mug cakes, it gets stuck on the mug wall, why didn't yours? It came out just like that. Does the egg play any role or is it the amount of oil? No. So I mean, if you want to prevent it sticking to the mug you're using, and it also depends on the kind of mug, how porous or not it is. You can just put a little bit of oil, you know, in the mug before that. You can make eggless. You just have to, you know, play around with, you know, you can add more milk or whatever it is to have some protein content which kind of binds and keeps things together. Otherwise, you know, these are sort of, this one I kind of optimized for an egg, but there are a lot of eggless mug cakes as well. And in terms of sticking, it's just, you know, again, depends on the material of the container, how porous it is or not, which is why I like this glass one, because it doesn't stick so much compared to some of the porcelain ones. Fantastic. Sachiko, I hope I got the pronunciation right. Sachiko asked, what is the right amount compared to the cup so that it's not overflow? Is that the right answer for this? Yeah, so I mean, again, that depends on the cup. So in fact, my daughter likes to make mug cakes. I didn't put that picture a few days ago. She just made it. And she likes to use this cup. And even this one you can see then. So the other advantage of this cup, as you can see, it's flared this way, which is nice because then it doesn't kind of overflow that it has some space to expand as it goes up. And frankly, I'll tell you, you know, if you make too much of the batter, don't put all of it in the cup, right? So yeah, I hope that answered your question. Yeah. So you've got another question. Nikhil Pereira asks, how does popcorn work in the microwave? What's happening there? Oh, I see. Yeah, so popcorn is actually interesting because it's, you know, it's dried corn kernel. And so, you know, there are some, you know, polar molecules in there and that gets heated in a small bit of motion. That basically, that's essentially what leads to that whole thing just puffing and expanding, right? I mean, if you think about why doesn't, you know, Aplum expand, right? So those, you know, whatever those spaces, again, so the one thing is water, but the other is also air spaces, right? The air spaces also will expand, right? Just with heat, right? And so that's basically what the expansion and then puffing is, right? So, you know, whatever small amounts of, you know, trap moisture or other polar molecules heat up, that will then lead to that, you know, explosion or, you know, puffing up. Super. Madhavi Sate asks, there are just too many buttons on the microwave, which I don't understand, ultimately use it only for eating food. Do you have an answer for this? No, that's actually a great question. So yeah, you're right, a microwave does have, you know, too many buttons. So all you need to know is, you know, it heats water very efficiently, then the microwave is actually very, it's fantastic for reheating food, right? And that's because it heats up water. So all you need to know is, you know, how long you want to heat it, right? And you either heat it at full power. If you want to heat it at a lower power, that's when you have things that are sort of non-homogeneous. If you have things, you know, stuff with different fats, you know, different fat content and different parts of it. Or, you know, if you have things that are very dense, then, because remember, there's also what's known. I didn't go into too much detail of that is penetration depth of the microwaves inside food. So once the microwave hits the surface of whatever it is, the food, then it's going to start, it'll get refracted and going towards the center of that, right? But it can only penetrate to a certain amount. And as I said, microwave, the wavelength is about, you know, 12 centimeters. So if you have thin pieces of food, those will heat up much faster, right? So actually, the buttons itself won't make that much of a difference. The only use, the other button that you want to use is the power button. So if you have things which have water, but also other kinds of things you just want to, or if you're, for example, rice and you're heating up other things and you splash some water around, you want to heat it at a slightly lower power, because otherwise the water parts will start boiling or overheating, while the rest of the food won't be that hot. So with these, I guess, three buttons, right? Power level button, and then time button, and then of course the on button. That's really all you need. Hopefully that helps. Lovely. So we've got the question from Dave. Dave Dixit asks, many bakers and baking enthusiasts prefer the OTG, they want us to build a conventional oven or conventional oven compared to the microwave. But there are things that the OTGs can't do. It's always OTG versus microwave. Is there any technology that involves both? Well, I think there are some hybrid ones you get in which, you know, it has a microwave function as well as, you know, it has other elements in there. So these are just two different technologies. If you think about a convection oven, essentially that circulates air also inside. It's like an air fryer, which is basically convection oven. But essentially, so if you have a standard oven where you just have a heating element, then that just is essentially also radiation except it's thermal, you know, infrared radiation. And then that heats up. So the heat distribution is not that great. And so by adding a fan or something, you have some circulation in there. And that's basically what a convection oven does, right? It has better circulation of the heat inside. The microwave works very differently in that sense. It's more efficient in directly getting the radiation to the food. But the only difference or thing you have to be careful there is it's very efficient in heating up water molecules or polar molecules, right? So depending on the kind of food. So it's hard to say this is better than that. Certainly the microwave is more energy efficient when it comes to heating up water and polar molecules. Otherwise, you know, depending on what you're heating up and how you're heating it's different. But a microwave oven, it's difficult to get brown things, right? You difficult to get browning and there's a lot of flavor in sort of the brown foods. And so for those purposes, sometimes some of those hybrids are useful. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah, I'll actually add to that because at home we have this microwave, not right now in Bangalore, but back in Chennai. It's a combined conventional oven with a microwave and also a mode called a steam microwave. Basically, when it's running, if you fill it with a bit of water on the top, it just sort of pushes steam into the oven area. So I've used it to sort of reheat rice without losing dryness, without losing the texture. Are you okay, Naz? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I think I might cut out. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think having the hybrid is great, right? So you get both. Go ahead. Yeah. So we've got another question from actually two questions are coming back to back from Konal Waidya. Why can't all con kernels work for making popcorn? Or to put it conversely, why do they have special different popcorn making packets for microwave and other traditional cooking methods, I suppose? Also asking why aren't all porcelain months plates considered microwave safe? Oh, I see. Yeah, so a lot of questions. So yeah. Whereas the popcorn goes, you know, what different kinds of popcorn, why are they different, right? So one is, again, it depends on the variety of corn. So you can have different varieties of corn and depending on the content, both the starch and the protein and other moisture content within the kernel, they pop differently. And, you know, some are even bred for specifically for popping. So that's one aspect. The other question, which is very interesting was regarding the different bags you get for, you know, popping in the microwave and so on. Yeah. So ideally, you know, I've taken, you can just take a brown paper bag, a small paper bag, put, you know, corn in it or, you know, you take the corn kernels, coat them with oil, and then put them in the bag. You just close the top. You can put a, you know, just staple it. It's fine. As long as it's not too sharp, you shouldn't get any sparks or arcing. And then just put that in the microwave, right? That works. The other thing to, though, is there are actually a lot of containers for heating food designed specifically for the microwave, right? So even the packaging, the way the food is cut and the packaging itself, sometimes there are slight metallic or coatings or inserts within the packaging, maybe not just for popcorn, but other microwave packaging or microwave food packaging are designed in such a way as to reflect the microwave so that the food inside heats evenly. In fact, some of those are packaged, you know, the ones that are manufactured for, you know, in a microwave dinners and so on. They are packaged in such a way that the packaging itself leads to the food being heated much more evenly than if you say put it in. Also, remember, depending on the kind of container you're using, whether it's glass or porcelain or so on, that has its own thickness and sort of thermal conductivity and the way it, you know, works that will affect the food inside getting heated, right? Hopefully that answers that part of the question. The third part of the question or the third question was why do different containers have, you know, why are the microwaves safe or not? And that has to do, again, with the dimensions. So if you think about, you know, this is sort of a round dish, but if you have like a rectangular dish with corners, you'll always have more of the heat stresses in the corners and so on. That has to do with, again, the, you know, one is the material, but it's also how it's made. If it's porous, if there's something in there, then over time that will develop stresses, right? And so then that can, you know, over time, you know, the heat stress, you know, heating, cooling, heating, cooling, that over time can lead to, if there's any small defects, depending on how it's manufactured, leading to cracking and shattering. Some materials you cannot use in the microwave. For example, melamine, right? Melamine or melamine is actually a molecule which is similar to proteins that has nitrogen in it. It's a, it's polar and that's why you can't use it in the microwave, it'll start burning. It gets heated up. So there's different materials which react to the microwave radiation, whether they can absorb it or not. And that makes a difference in terms of what you can put in a microwave or not. Hopefully that answers that part of the question. Yeah. So Dave has a clarification. I think I understood Dave's question wrong. Me saying, Dave's actually saying I actually meant the standard oven and not the conventional oven. But is there a difference between convection and OTG? So can you just quickly clarify what's the OTG? Oven toaster grill. It's one of those little things that used to be very similar. I see. So yeah, so the standard oven is essentially just has a heating element, right? And it just depends on the thermal, the thermal, the radiation going and hitting the food and then that food slowly warming up, right? From the outside. A microwave is more efficient because it actually hits the, in terms of the transfer, the, the microwaves heat up the food. The convection oven basically has a circulation of the molecule, of the air inside. So it's a little bit more even heat distribution. So it's not just from one side and it's a little bit better. What did I miss? Yeah. So the OTG, you know, you combine multiple things. So if you have, so when you have an oven, the way you typically have an oven, it goes back to sort of the, again, the coal and other things or other heat. So ways to heat up your oven is you just have a heating element or whatever it is at the bottom of the oven, right? And then that heats up when you have a, what's a broiler that has a heating element on top. And so, you know, when you, when you're toasting, then you can, you know, toast on both sides. And these are just different ways of putting the heat, heating elements into whatever that cavity or space, you know, in that sense, then the microwave is different. But otherwise those OTG and other things, it's just different ways of applying heat, you know, to, to, to whatever it is in there. In fact, if you take a saucepan or a pan, you can essentially simulate an oven by, by keeping it covered, right? If it's dry. And which is what a Dutch oven sort of does. It's a large thing with a heavy lid on top. This question from John was asking, there is a question in some quarters saying that using microwaves could be dangerous for health. Is there any truth in this? Are there any safeguards required? Right, so, so in terms of the, the, the, the, there are some, you know, nutritional concerns and so on, you know, which I've heard of other things, you know, it destroys the food and all that. Frankly, any kind of heating method, you're going to, you know, affect the molecules, right? So in that sense, frankly, because you heat foods for less time or you're exposing it to that much less. In fact, you in, it's more energy efficient, but also, you know, there are nutritional benefits to the microwave. Now, I don't want to go too deep into that because, you know, you know, how much of a difference does that make or not, you know, it's not going to be make that much of a difference. But in terms of, you know, you know, damaging your food and so on, it's not really any different from other modes of heating and cooking, right, in terms of how it affects the food molecules. Hopefully that answers your question. Yeah, I think that sort of does cover, you know, the question. We have a sort of fun question, I think you should be able to answer this from Nandita was asking, do chemistry professors drink coffee in a Pyrex beaker all the time. No, this is my morning coffee. It's the morning. These are, these are, these are actually more useful for a cake. I drink in whatever I have available. Do we have more questions people you go on for another 10 minutes and then we'll wrap up if you've got something. Actually, I wanted to ask you when you talked to me with the hydrogen bonds, if you can explain a little more, because you know, just a little bit more because I some of it went a little bit over my head also. So I didn't want to go too much in the chemistry, but since you asked, let me see if I can line this up. Let me do one thing. Let me just take this off. So this was a slide I didn't show earlier. I thought maybe there's, oops, sorry. So this was a slide I didn't show earlier. And this is sort of a periodic table and you don't have to know too much about this and you know, there's like, you know, actually, all you need to know is that this is just an arrangement of the elements. And all it is is all the molecules, all the atoms want to be like the noble gases at the end, right? Oops, like the noble gases at the end. And so that's why carbon has four bonds and oxygen has two bonds. And that's why, you know, you have one carbon and two oxygen. So the other thing to know from the periodic table is everything to the right, except for the noble gas, everything to the right. And when you go up, those are more electronegative, right? So let me just put this on. So hydrogen bonding is the interaction between hydrogen when it's connected to a more electronegative atom. So electronegative atoms are the ones that are up and to the right, right? So the fluorine is probably the most electronegative. Where's the one before that? Oh, I don't have that slide here, sorry. So you have oxygen or a halogen will have hydrogen bonding. So you know that oxygen also has other electrons. So there's an interaction between the oxygen and the hydrogen on another molecule, right? Which is kind of attracting them together. Does that answer your question? So when you have lots of these hydrogen bonds, those weak interactions. So we say hydrogen bonds, but they're not bonds like covalent bonds in which which are sort of, you know, electrons shared between two atoms like hydrogen and oxygen in water. So the hydrogen bond is the small, it's not depicted in this, but it's between the hydrogen here, which is the white one and the red ball of another molecule. So when you put them all together, there's these very, very weak interactions, but you have so many of them that you need to overcome that when you want to boil, for example. Because when you boil, then the molecules, what's the difference between, you know, vapor and liquid? The molecules are much further apart than liquid water when the molecules are closer together. So to go from liquid to gas, you need to, you know, overcome all the interactions. And so you need to supply energy, which is, you know, by heat or whatever. And so water as a high boiling point, you have to supply much more energy because of all of those hydrogen bonding interactions that need to be overcome. Does that make sense? Yeah. That makes perfect sense. And that also explains why the microwave is a lot more efficient than, you know, the heating it with a stove or something else, right? Right, because then you're depending on conduction. Yeah. Fantastic. So I think maybe it's similar question Anirban asked earlier. Yeah, he says, can explain how an induction, I don't know, I know there's not exactly microwave, but do you want to explain how an induction works versus a microwave? Is there a major difference in this? Yeah, I know induction is different based on sort of a magnetic field and so on. So that's kind of different. To be honest, I'm not, I haven't really kept up with exactly how induction technology works. But it's a different way of heat transfer. It's completely different from microwaves in that sense. Okay, fantastic. CJ says, I have a teacher once who said using metal vessels in a microwave was okay as long as you don't touch the door. Is that true? So as you saw, you know, you can put metal in a microwave, you can put foil in a microwave. Frankly, you can boil an egg in a microwave. If you just put the egg inside the microwave, it's going to explode. But you know, using, so if you put an egg in water, so that the microwaves, you know, go into the water, heat up the water, it'll be okay. But you still might have some rupturing and explosion. So to counter that, you can just cover it with foil and then put it in the water and you can, you know, heat up the egg. It's much more practical to heat up, to boil water anyway and heat up the egg that way. Or, you know, if you want to really use your microwave because it's more efficient heating water, you can boil water in the microwave and then, you know, put the egg inside. If you can, you can cover the egg, raw egg in the shell with foil and then put it inside that hot water and then continue to heat it. And then that will, you know, you can boil the egg. You can use metal. So the problem with metal comes in is if there are any sharp edges and then that's where then essentially a metal is a very good conductor of electrons, right? So there's a lot of sort of, let's call them free, somewhat free electrons or loose electrons, just because those metals tend to have lots of them. And so when the energy is incident on the metal, those electrons can get excited and they can, they conduct and metal is a good conductor. So if it comes to a sharp point and you have a lot of accumulation, then you can get arcing, right? And so then that's when you have sparks. But it doesn't have to be metal. So for example, if you take, you know, a grape and cut it in half, that's sometimes fun to do. Again, I'm suggesting these because I can show you these, but what's the fun in that? You know, you should go do it yourself. But if you take a grape and cut it in half, just make sure you're careful. If you cut it in half, you can keep it together. You can see a little bit of plasma, the arc between the grape halves. So yeah, so metal in general is okay. You just have to be careful. I had some other bulbs, but I didn't put them in there because I saw in the bulb, some of them had kind of sharp parts. So I didn't think that that would be okay. Then you'll start getting arcing. But otherwise, you know, it's okay. Meaning you don't want to do it for a long time, right? And it's not normal in the sense that in terms of what's its intended use, the intended use is to heat up mostly water and other food, food like molecules. But in chemistry labs, actually, we do use microwave reactors because it's essentially, it's an energy source. That's all it is, right? So you just have to make sure you use it appropriately. Yeah. In fact, we have a question. It's not a question. I think this person missed the early part of your asking before you put the egg back in the microwave. You said something about removing the bulb, which bulb you were referring to. So just to answer that, Dr. Das was demonstrating how electrons worked inside a microwave and he did an experiment where he showed the bulb that was inside a microwave to sort of stimulate how these things move inside the oven. See, that's the bulb in the microwave. You know, there's all jokes about how do you get a pop into a fridge and things like that. I think it's a fun setup to a nice joke there. We have a connoisseur saying in induction stuff, we still have the dependency on conduction of temperature from bottom of the pan to the food and to the food. I can process heat from one part of the other. But in microwave, the food itself gets heated up directly. I think it is. Yes, yes, yes, of course. In the microwave again, you know, depending on the food, also the thickness of the food, the radiation hits the, the microwaves heated directly and heats up heats of the food. Whereas in induction, again, it's only what's at the bottom of the pan, you know, starts getting heated in that sense, it works similar to a stove top, right, except it's just a different way of delivering the heat. It's not a flame or an electric burner. It's an induction, you know, of that energy into the, into the bottom of the pan. Yes, that's correct. Thank you. So I think we've covered most of, actually we've covered all the questions that we've asked, and these people have more last minute questions. In which case we can take a couple more and then we can wrap up. Is Amal going to ask us a question? So I think we can sort of wrap here. Do you have any last advice or helpful tips for people? Oh, advice, helpful tips, you know, keep experimenting. It's always fun to play with your food in the sense that as long as you learn something from that. And of course, you know, make sure you do it in a safe way. Fantastic. Okay, so I think we'll wrap here. Thank you so much, Dr. Das. Thank you for coming on and doing this sort of multi-modal presentation, multi-media presentation. Yes, I'm sorry. My daughter's very excited to ask a question. Sure, go ahead. Yeah, you go ask your question. There is some other way of doing popcorn. Not only one way. No, there's lots of ways to make popcorn, right? You can make it in the microwave, you can do it on a stove, like in a pot. What way do you like to make popcorn? I'm mute. Am I mute? I can hear you, Dr. Das. Okay, yeah, so I was actually just asking Amal what way she likes. So there's lots of different ways. She's correct. Thank you for coming on and doing this. Amal, what are the ways do you like to make popcorn? I hear some typing on the chat. That's me and this. Okay, what way do you like to make your popcorn? I like to make it on the gas. Oh, that's excellent, because then you heat it up from the bottom, right? And do you get good popcorn that way? That's fantastic. So the other important thing in terms of whether you use microwave or not, ultimately you want to use something that you're comfortable with and that helps you get through your day. Okay. Do we have any more questions, people? Okay, great. All right, thank you everyone for tuning in and stay safe, stay healthy and have a good rest of the weekend or coming week.