I recently solved two tiny problems in my kitchen. You probably never had either of these problems or if you did, you figured out how to solve them in a lot less time than it took me. But just in case anyone reading this can benefit from my silly little discovery, here goes…
I love baked potatoes, especially when they taste like baked potatoes. It is sometimes a struggle in restaurants to stop service people from drowning mine in sour cream, salsa, black beans, chili, buffalo sauce and all sorts of other toppings including eleven different kinds of cheese. I just want butter and a little salt on mine…or sometimes, in lieu of the butter, ketchup but not a lot of it.
Well, even I could figure out the solution to that: Bake your own potatoes at home, which I tried doing. But that gave me the two tiny problems I've solved…
First tiny problem: I don't want to turn on the oven for one potato, especially given how long it takes to bake one that way. So what's the alternative? The microwave, of course…
…but for some reason, neither my current microwave oven nor the one I had before it could do a decent job of baking a potato. The spuds came out flat and overcooked on the bottom even when I dutifully rotated them in mid-bake. Then I tried a few commercial products, like one where you insert the tater into a little cloth bag before microwaving. That time, the potato was overdone in places, underdone in others and the bag was charred like it had caught fire for part of the cooking time.
Solution to this tiny problem: I tried one of these and while it is overpriced considering how cheap one must be to make, it did work. In fact, it worked as advertised, even though it's advertised on television. I'm not suggesting it will work for you but it worked for me and I also use it to heat up corn-on-the-cob.
Second tiny problem: I don't like potato skins, especially Russet potato skins, and my stomach doesn't like them. But it's annoying to scoop the filling out of a baked potato, especially when that temperature of that potato is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius). Also, you wind up not getting a large percentage of the inside of the baked potato.
Solution to this tiny problem: I bought a potato ricer. Again, I'm not suggesting this one's better than any other model because this was the only one I've tried…but it works pretty well for my purposes.
So I scrub the potato, put it in the Yummy Can Potatoes Microwave Potato Cooker and put the whole thing in my microwave and run it on full power for six minutes. Then I let it sit for 5-10 more to finish baking and to cool down enough for handling. (One problem with the Yummy Can: It doesn't accommodate the really large Russets.)
When the potato is touchable but still warm, I cut it in half and then put one half, cut side down, into the potato ricer and squeeze the bejeesus out of it. It extrudes all the delicious white interior but leaves the skin inside. You lose very little of the interior. Then I remove the skin from the chamber and process the other half of the potato. You will need a knife to scrape off the extruded innards.
The result? A dish of lovely, skinless baked potato…and you'll be surprised how much more you get out of one that way. I add salt and butter, mix it all up and it's exactly what I want. The ricer is handy for other things like making mashed potatoes or juicing lemons. What a neat tool to have in a kitchen.
Yes, I know that getting cooking advice from me is a lot like getting medical advice from a raccoon but occasionally, I stumble across something that works. And during The Pandemic, it feels like a lot of people have gotten their medical advice from raccoons.