A baking potato pre-washed and packaged in plastic wrap, designed as a convenience food to be cooked in the microwave.

I like potatoes just about any way you can make them. Baked potatoes take forever to bake in an oven, and cooking them in a microwave could result in a messy explosion if the potato is not pierced enough. Back home, my mom used to cut down the baking time by placing the potatoes first in the oven and then nuking them to completion. I'm a helpless bachelor who can't cook to save his life, so I thought that I would be potato-less until I could figure out the exact method necessary to bake-nuke a potato.

Enter the PotatOH!.

The PotatOH! is sold individually in supermarkets for about $1, much more than the cost of a regular potato. You get a russet potato, covered in plastic wrap and pierced with a precise grid of holes. It also comes with a little instruction booklet attached to the front, which tells you the instructions: place PotatOH! in microwave, cook for 7-9 minutes on HIGH temperature, and remove plastic wrap. The instruction manual warns that the PotatOH! may whistle while in the microwave, and mine sure did. Trusting the quality assurance procedures of the PotatOH!'s creators, I left it to cook and whistle, steaming up my microwave.

Eight minutes later, I had a mushy, soft, slightly burnt potato. The mushiness was unsurprising, given the way microwaves cook food; my mom bake-nuked potatoes to cook them quickly and retain a little crispiness in the shell. The PotatOH! tasted pretty good with butter and salt.

As Bachelor Chow-grade foods go, I would rate the PotatOH! highly just because it contains little to no artificial food-like substance. Also in my friendly neighborhood grocer, I have seen potatoes pre-coated in tin foil for use in the oven. Maybe I'll just buy a bag of taters and bake one myself some day.

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