A preliminary study of the application of simulated annealing (SA) to complex permittivity reconstruction in microwave tomography is presented. Reconstructions of a simplified model of a human arm obtained with simulated noise-free data are presented for three different methods: SA, quenching, and a Newton-Kantorovich method. These results show that SA can converge to an accurate solution in cases where the two deterministic methods fail. For this reason SA can be used to get closer to the final solution before applying a faster deterministic method.