I always prick some holes in my potatoes before I microwave them.
Here’s what happened when I forgot.
First the microwave started shaking…then there was a bang.
There was a cloud of smoke and when I opened the door the potato was a shrunken crispy mess.
The microwaveable plate had some black ooze on it (from the potato.)
I opened the door and got a draught going to remove the smoke.
However when I ran some water on the plate it cracked!
I used to poke holes in my potatoes every time before nuking them, religiously. Then when I started seeing the now Mrs. Solost, she noticed and asked me why I bother. She said she never did that and never had a potato blowout. So I stopped, and have never had a potato incident in 20+ years of going poke-free.
(I do sort of keep my face away from the microwave opening when removing the plate of potatoes just in case there’s a delayed potato blowout)
Eh, I consider myself a pretty good cook, and yeah, an actual baked potato with some oil and salt rubbed on the skin to crisp it up is delicious, but nuking ‘em is just so quick and easy. It’s also a good way to get the potato started and finish them on the grill when I’m grilling.
A good oven-baked potato takes 70 minutes. Plus 15-20 more to preheat the oven. A tolerably-fleshed but soggy-skinned microwave potato takes about 12 minutes for 2, or 16 minutes for 4. Total. And doesn’t tie up what may be your only oven the whole time.
Microwaved potato explosions are rare. But they’re memorable. A couple of pricks reduces the likelihood from annually to maybe-once-in-a-lifetime for someone who microwaves potatoes often. Seems cheap insurance to me. I hate cleaning up explosions.
Pricking egg yolks is similar; absent that they don’t all explode but the few that do are a memorable PITA.
I wonder if there was something in the potato which caused the middle to burn. Perhaps too much iron? I know sometimes I’ll see burned spots on veggies when I microwave them. I’ve assumed it’s because of iron or some mineral that heats up too much with the microwaves. Broccoli does this commonly. Maybe there was something like that on your potato which caused a spot to get very hot.
It only takes one potato explosion to make you a believer in pricking the skin. Of course, if you’ve cut any eyes out, you’ve already essentially done that.
If I’m making something else in the oven (meatloaf or a roast, say) or it’s a really cold day, I’ll bake the potatoes in there as well. But I’m not heating a whole big oven to bake a couple of potatoes. Our compromise position is to start then in the microwave, wrap them in foil for a bit, then finish them for 10 minutes in the oven while we’re baking crescent rolls.
I forgot to poke holes in one that I had in the oven. It didn’t make too big of a mess but it sounded like a grenade went off.
It’s not a mistake I intend to repeat.
Does your tray rotate properly? Microwave ovens do not heat food evenly due to the shape / nature of the microwaves. That’s why rotating trays were added, to try to reduce hotspots. I saw a YouTube video experiment where you can lay out squares of American cheese on a non-rotating platform and microwave for 30 seconds or so, and be able to see the waveform shapes where they melted the cheese.
Side note: I thought that on seeing the title, the OP was going to be ranting about the conditions of what led @glee to speak on “Assh**le Taters that I delivered multi-GHz comeuppance to.” I thought, “*What did they do . . . tauntglee?”
But then I read the OP, Post #9, and a couple of others, and realized the 'taters are in fact posthumous a-holes for “rapidly disassembling” in your appliances.
A boiled potato takes about the same. That’s how i usually cook potatoes. (I buy Maine potatoes, not Idaho potatoes. Or, i guess, white potatoes rather than russets.
