11 Foods You Should Never Reheat In The Microwave

This one should require very little explanation if you've ever tried it (and who hasn't?), but anything fried and crispy becomes sad and floppy when you reheat it in the microwave. It's a real Cinderella's coach turning back into a pumpkin situation: What was once crunchy and delicious transforms into a soggy mess, sodden with grease. Instead of re-crisping, the microwave just steams fried food. This always sucks, but it's particularly heartbreaking for things like french fries that don't really have a lot of flavors and thus rely on that freshly-fried crunchy texture to make them appealing. Something like fried chicken at least has more going on in the taste department to make up for the disappointing texture (although, as we'll get to soon, microwaving chicken has its own pitfalls).

In order to revive fries from the dead, you need to use a reheating method that brings some browning to the party. Tossing them around in a dry skillet works pretty well, as does the oven (though the oven has a tendency to dehydrate fried food, so use it with caution). The best tool is probably an air fryer if you're lucky enough to have one. It will restore crunchiness to the outside of fried food, and its high heat and convection cooking allows it to do so quickly enough to avoid drying out the interior.

Hard-boiled eggs are a great portable snack or lunch to bring to work, but we'd recommend either eating them cold or reheating them in a bowl of warm water rather than trying to microwave them. That's because nuking a hard-boiled egg in its shell is a recipe for an explosive situation. There's a lot of water inside a hard-boiled egg, and the shell is an impervious barrier that doesn't let anything escape. As the water turns into steam, pressure builds up, and then — boom — you have an egg bomb flinging food all over the inside of your (or even worse, your communal office's) microwave.

While you may find people recommending the microwave as a good way to reheat scrambled or fried eggs, we wouldn't recommend it for the same reason we stay away from microwaving steak: The microwave is a blunt instrument. Unless you like your eggs very well done, you may be unhappy with what happens when you microwave eggs that are already cooked. Also, egg yolks heat up faster than egg whites in the microwave, leading to uneven and unsatisfactory results.

So far, we've covered foods that taste worse when microwaved and ones that stink up the kitchen, but tomato sauce doesn't fall into either of these categories. Instead, it will actually ruin your microwave (or at least leave you with a huge mess that will be a pain to clean up). Thick tomato sauces (especially ones that have been cooked in oil) have a tendency to literally go ballistic when nuked — they splatter, spit, and explode, coating the inside of your appliance with tomato-y goo.

This is because of the composition of tomato sauce and how that interacts with the way microwaves heat food. Pasta sauce is not uniform; instead, it's filled with pockets of solid tomato matter, water, and oil. The watery bits heat up faster than everything else, and since tomato sauce is relatively thick, the pressure of the hot steam builds until it reaches explosive potential. It's much like what happens when you try microwaving hard-boiled eggs in their shells, but perhaps even messier. The bright-red tomato splatters are annoying to clean up, and if left for too long, they can even stain the inside of the microwave. I think we've all seen communal microwaves with orange-dyed interiors that always kind of smell like pizza because they've been the victims of too many spaghetti sauce explosions.

This might be a hot take, but you could argue that leftover pizza is actually best eaten cold. There's something great about the chew of cold cheese, and the texture of cold pizza crust is quite compelling. It's not the same as fresh, hot pizza, but evaluated on its merits, it's pretty awesome. However, we know that cold pizza is a love-it-or-hate-it thing, and many people are looking for the best way to heat up their leftover Domino's. Whatever you do, don't stick your slices in the microwave.

Microwaving pizza can go one of two ways, and both are bad. You can zap the pizza just enough to be warm, which gives you melted cheese on top of a mushy crust that's also disconcertingly wet. The other option is that you leave the pizza in the microwave a little too long, in which case you're rewarded with leathery, nigh-inedible crust and cheese that's hot enough to remove the entire roof of your mouth. The convenience of the microwave is not worth destroying the quality of a good pizza.

The good news is that there's a convenient and fast way to reheat pizza that gives you a crisp crust and cheese that's just the right temperature: Just do it in a covered skillet on the stove at moderate heat. In a few minutes, you'll have hot pizza that could almost pass for freshly baked.

There's something really special about foods that mix hot components with cold, fresh garnishes. A fried shrimp po' boy just wouldn't be the same without crispy lettuce and sliced tomatoes. We love what raw diced onion and cilantro do on top of a street taco. Pico de gallo and guacamole make any burrito sing. Sadly, this hot and cold contrast is best enjoyed when the food is freshly prepared; the deliciousness quickly diminishes as the garnishes heat up and the meat cools down. You're never going to recapture the magic by microwaving these types of foods, no matter how hard you try.

Microwaving a sandwich that still has the cold garnishes on it is an obviously bad move. Lettuce turns into slimy green soup in the microwave. The same goes for burritos and tacos: Microwaving guacamole is a crime, and most cold or raw vegetable garnishes lose their crisp texture and zippy flavor after they've been nuked. The only possible way to save this is to painstakingly disassemble your sandwich/taco/burrito and remove all the garnishes before microwaving the meat and bread parts and then reassembling, but this is more trouble than it's worth. The point of using a microwave is that it's quick and easy, and that goes by the wayside when you have to do burrito origami, not to mention that you'll definitely miss a few strands of lettuce and microwave them by accident. Also, there's a good chance the garnishes are already past their prime by the time you want to reheat your food anyway.

We should note that there's some debate about this subject. Per the USDA, you can, in theory, reheat leftovers as many times as you want as long as the food reaches 165 degrees Fahrenheit and you put it back in the fridge in under two hours after heating it. Each time you do this, the food should be safe to eat for three to four days. Every new reheating resets the clock. Of course, the quality and flavor of the food will get worse during each successive cycle of reheating, but it's apparently not dangerous.

However, other sources, including this very website, say that you should never reheat leftovers more than once. This is because each time you reheat and refrigerate food, you're introducing the possibility of bacterial contamination, especially if the food takes too long to heat up or cool down (via BBC GoodFood). Are you absolutely positive that you're following proper food handling procedures every time you reheat and chill your food and that your leftovers aren't spending too much time in the temperature danger zone? If not, it's best not to tempt fate by nuking the same food over and over again. It's better to throw out old leftovers than to ruin a whole day with a nasty bout of food poisoning.