Despite its energetic interest, the use of microwaves for the thawing or temperage of food products presents a major drawback called thermal runaway. This is mainly due to the important gap between the dielectric properties of water in solid and liquid phases. A monitoring approach of the temperatures inside a foodstuff during microwave defrosting is therefore proposed to, in a first step, detect the critical phenomena of thermal runaway, and, in further work, to control it. An observer allowing to estimate the internal temperatures from the temperature of the surface has been developed. An Extended Kalman Filter, because of its simplicity of design, has been chosen, but this choice is not exclusive. The heat transfer with phase change and microwave effects is represented by a nonlinear distributed parameters system, and the observer is based on a standard finite volume scheme. The approach is experimentally carried out and validated during the defrosting of a block of tylose. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.