I don't understand why it's so hard for me to make a decent baked potato. In the past few weeks, as the weather has turned colder, we've been eating more baked potatoes and sweet potatoes. Sometimes as a side dish, or sometimes smothered in chili and cheese. I love baked potatoes! When you want a meal that warms you to your toes, but you're looking for something more substantial than soup: a baked potato hits home.Except, of course, that I CANNOT properly bake a potato in our new house. I don't understand it. We've tried the microwave and the oven. On multiple occasions. Every time, we end up doubling the cooking time or even more, and even so the potatoes are still hard as rock and uncooked in the middle. What's going on? Is it really that hard to bake a potato? Other dishes cook just fine, so I don't think our oven or microwave is at fault .... Is it possible that the potatoes sold in Northeastern Ohio are of a particularly dense breed, impervious to the typical cooking techniques?
Of course, now it's become a THING. I refuse to be defeated by a mere carb-loaded vegetable. I WILL figure out how to cook a baked potato in a decent amount of time (that is, less than 2 hours. That's not too much to ask, is it?). If there's one thing I learned growing up about cooking, it's that if a dish is meant to be cooked at X temperature for 20 minutes, then just turn up the heat and you can be done in 10 minutes! Oftentimes this "tweaking" of the recipe results in blackened, unrecognizable messes and a quick call to the local pizza delivery place. (Which may have been my intent all along?) But I think that, in the case of the stubbornly uncooked potatoes, it might be an ideal situation to put this theory to work. We'll see how it goes!
6 comments:
I take one of two routes when I have a hankerin' for a straight-from-Idaho side dish:
(1) Get those individually plastic-wrapped potatoes that you zap for six or seven minutes.
(2) Hit the drive-thru at Wendy's.
I realize that these are relatively expensive and wasteful options, but rationalize it thusly: I am a one-person household, and I don't eat potatoes all day every day, so by the time I eat my way through the standard multi-pound bag of spuds from the grocery store, half of them have sprouted or otherwise become inedible.
How bout tin foil? Back in the earliest stretches of my child hood memories (early 80's) when men used to wear short shorts and toweling hats, my dad used to do BBQ'd spuds (Yes us Aussies and Kiwis are the kings of the barbecue). He just used to dump them into the hot embers of the old coal BBQ and leave them there for aaaaaages. They were always cooked to perfection. I've heard of other things being done like that in the oven - fish parcels for one, so wouldn't it be possible to do spuds like that? It's all about heat transfer of something. (Not much of a scientist I'm afraid!)
I've NEVER microwaved a potato. The way I learned, when working in a steakhouse, is to wash it, wrap it in foil while it's wet, and put it in the oven. Never a bad potato that way. You have to plan ahead an hour or so, but it's worth it. We also grill our potatoes in the summer.
Mmmmm, Wendy's drive-thru. Even as a two-person household we waste too many potatoes trying to be good and then never making them.
I do wrap the potatoes in foil when I put them in the oven, but it doesn't seem to help. Maybe it matters where in the oven they go? I put them on the top shelf, figuring that heat rises, but the coils are at the bottom.
Maybe next time I'll try getting the potatoes wet before wrapping them in the foil. So they're almost steaming and baking at the same time.
Great ideas!:)
Just as easy as bakin' em, I find cutting potatoes up into chunks and smothering them with olive oil or grapeseed oil then coating them liberally with rosemary and rock salt works nicely. Slightly longer prep, much short cooking time. Awful good grilled post-baking with a bit of cheese atop and some sour cream (if yer into that!!)
Mmmmm can you tell it's near dinner time here?
Bren, I do love potatoes (especially red ones) with olive oil and rosemary. And it's worth the longer prep time if you know they'll actually be cooked in the given amount of time.
Another great idea!
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