Oven Vs Microwave: Which Is Best For Cooking Marie Callender's Pot Pie?

Pot pies are a staple of American frozen food aisles, and Marie Callender's may be the most ubiquitous name on the market, but as with other frozen pot pie brands it faces the vexing choice of oven versus microwave. This is a classic pick between convenience and quality that is going to come down to what you prioritize. Plenty of people are grabbing frozen food for the easy preparation, not just the cost, and that turns us towards the microwave. The pinging appliance will cook your pot pie in about six minutes, compared to a brutal 50-minute eternity in the oven. But what if you just want the best version of your pot pie? Is cooking Marie Callender's in the oven really that much better than the microwave? Well we're sorry to everyone in a hurry out there, but the answer is a resounding yes.

This isn't stew we're talking about. Pot pie is all about the crust, it's literally what makes it special and microwaves just do a poor job crisping them up. While spending almost an hour in the oven will leave your pot pie with a nicely browned and crispy crust, microwaves produce dull, pale mush when it comes to pastry. People will like what they like, but there isn't a very broad appeal for gummy, undercooked pot-pie crust. Marie Callender's knows as much, too: It tells you that a conventional oven is recommended right on the instructions, saying it's the way to achieve a "flaky crust." And this time the label is 100% telling the truth.

It's not Marie Callender's fault its pot pies are soggy after being microwaved, it's just the nature of the machine. Microwaves cook using radio waves, which create energy that gets absorbed by water and other molecules inside your food, heating them from within. In order for the exteriors of food to get crispy, they need to be heated to a higher temperature than the interior, which drives out water and causes the texture to get more crunchy. But because the air in microwaves is room temperature, the exterior doesn't cook as much while insides heat more quickly. And time won't help either, as the longer the food cooks in a microwave the more the energy gets focused on the interior, where there is more water to absorb it.

Driving out water doesn't just make a pot pie crust more flavorful via the Maillard reaction's browning effect, it also makes it more flaky. Pot pie crust gets its flaky texture from the butter in the dough. When the butter melts the water in it starts to evaporate, and as that happens it creates steam, which forms pockets that give pie dough its flaky crispy texture. So less browning on the exterior in the microwave also means less flaking. You may not be getting a homemade pie crust with Marie Callender's pot pies, but cooking them in the oven gets them as close to that appeal as possible.