Tater Tot Tutorial

    My hubby Tom went to the Sunday breakfast at his church. 
    He gave kudos to the sausage, omelettes, and blueberry pancakes served up to the congregation, but lamented that the tater tots  were hard and unenticing.
    I can't say that Tom's critique on the state of those tots surprised me.  Because it's hard to make a really good tater tot.  Generally pre-frozen tater tots come out of the oven either mushy or, as in the case of Tom's church breakfast, hard.

Do you remember the scene in "Napoleon Dynamite" when Napoleon pulls from his pocket a tot left over from lunch and when he bites into it we hear this  tantalizing "crunch" sound?

    That crunch, the sound of a crispy outer layer giving way to a soft interior is the gold standard for the tater tot  - and not often achieved*. 
    Unless you know the secret of how it's done.  Which I do.  And which I'm going to share with you here and now.
 
    Gold Standard Tater Tots

Ingredients:
1 bag of frozen tater tots
Olive oil spray
Salt

It doesn't matter which brand or size of tots you buy  (I used a 32-ounce bag of Meijer's Tater Bites).  Just don't follow the instructions on the bag.  Follow mine.

Method:
1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

2. Cover a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and spray with olive oil.                                                         

3. Spread the tater tots on the sprayed foil-covered pan and spray the tots with olive oil and season with salt.

4. Place the tots in the pre-heated oven and bake for 18 minutes. (If your oven is cool, maybe for 20 minutes).

5.  Turn the oven to broil and place the tots on the the broiler rack.  Broil for 1 minute. 

6.  After 1 minute check, and if the tots aren't a perfect golden brown, put them back under the broiler for another 15 seconds then check again.  Keep checking every 15 seconds until the tots look like this:

    Then you'll know you've got the perfect tater tot.
    However, after I pulled my tray of tots from the oven and they'd cooled for a few minutes I had my nephew Randy taste-test them just to be sure:

    As he bit into the tot there was that distinctive "crunch" sound, perfectly audible from where I stood several feet away.
    It was the gold standard.

*For that scene in the movie a "crunch" sound-effect was used to achieve the illusion of the perfect tater tot.