Air Fryer Baked Potatoes Are The New Standard In My Kitchen
You know, I jumped on the air fryer bandwagon when they first became popular a couple of years ago. I figured I'd find something to do with it. Probably frozen French fries. That's what everybody else was using it for. But in the ensuing months I have found so many other uses for this versatile little appliance that I dismissed at first as just another fad gadget. My latest “discovery” is baked potatoes.
Baked potatoes are an often overlooked and a sometimes vilified side item. And that's too bad because when done right they can be a great highlight to a meal or even a meal unto themselves. Yes, yes, I can hear all the carbo-phobics hyperventilating already, but when you consider the vitamin C, potassium, B6, and fiber baked potatoes offer, they're actually fairly healthy, unless, of course, you load them down with a kitchen sink-load of toppings. Then all bets are off. Moderation, remember?
What constitutes the perfect baked potato? Most people would say a crispy skin on the outside and tender, flaky flesh on the inside. But achieving that perfection isn't always that easy. Aside from “outdoorsy” techniques like wrapping them in foil and tossing them in the coals on a grill or roasting them over an open campfire, there are two traditional ways to bake a “baked” potato. The obvious one is in the oven and the other, the one that a lot of fast food places employ, is the microwave. Both have their shortcomings. Admit it; you've had gummy spuds at a restaurant or you've pulled a potato out of the oven at home only to find it half-baked, right? Me, too.
But then I read somewhere about baking potatoes in an air fryer. “Why not?” I thought, and decided to give it a try next time I made baked potatoes. I did and I'm here to tell you I'm never going back to the “traditional” methods. Air fryer baked potatoes are the new standard in my home kitchen.
Now, I'm not really all that surprised by the success of this “new” technique. After all, the sobriquet “air fryer” is just a marketing ploy; the devices don't actually “fry” anything. All an air fryer is is a countertop convection oven and we've been using convection ovens to bake potatoes in restaurants for decades. But full-size convection ovens are still fairly uncommon in home kitchens and the advent of the air fryer brings the power of convection cooking to a convenient countertop appliance. You just have to remember you're not “frying” in an air fryer; you're cooking with superheated circulating air. Once you grasp that concept, your imagination is pretty much the limit to what you can do with an air fryer.
So here's what I did: I prepped two Russet potatoes in the usual way, i.e. I washed and scrubbed them clean, dried them thoroughly, rubbed them down with a light coating of oil, salted them lightly, and poked a few holes in them with the tip of a paring knife. Then, making sure they weren't touching, I placed them in the basket of my air fryer, set the temperature to 400°, and cranked the timer to thirty minutes. Then I moved on to prep other dinner elements. When the air fryer timer went off, I looked in on the spuds. Lookin' good. Nice crispy skin developing. I poked a fork in 'em to see how they were progressing, shook the basket to wiggle them around a little, and gave them another twenty minutes to cook while I finished the pork chops and other stuff. Twenty minutes later, I used tongs to pluck the potatoes out of the basket, plated them, and then cut in to the most perfectly cooked baked potatoes I can ever remember cooking. Wow!
That's not to say I've ever made “bad” baked potatoes in a conventional oven. Sometimes variances in time and temperature and potato size can make them turn out a little uneven. I've never been a big fan of mushy microwaved “baked” potatoes, but I have resorted to finishing a slightly underdone oven-baked potato in the microwave from time to time. The results are almost always less then stellar. No more. No more conventional oven and no more microwave. The air fryer produced absolutely textbook baked potatoes. The skin was crackling crisp and the interior was pillow soft and flaky. My wife was an instant convert to the improved method and I'll be happily baking potatoes in the air fryer from now on.
Of course, there are limits. For instance, you can only fit so many potatoes in an air fryer basket. For a crowd, it's back to the old conventional oven, I guess. Unless you shell out five-hundred bucks for a big honkin' air fryer like the Breville Smart Oven Air. You could probably get a couple more in there, but even that top of the culinary food chain device doesn't have the capacity of a standard thirty-inch oven, which, theoretically, can turn out a crop of forty-eight to fifty average-sized potatoes or thirty-four to thirty-eight Russet bakers if you're baking spudzillas. But if dinner on the fly for two or three or four is your objective, a regular fifty-to-a-hundred-dollar air fryer is all you'll need.
And the usual basics apply. Choose uniform shaped and sized potatoes; if you try to cook one big one and two little ones, somebody's gonna be under or overcooked. Dry your potatoes after you wash them – and DO wash them under cold running water – or you'll get soggy skins. Another way to get soggy skins is to use that old “wrap 'em in foil” trick. Not only will you get soggy skins, but because the foil holds in moisture and steam, you'll wind up with more of a boiled “baked” potato. I don't care how your mama did it, no foil. Poke holes to vent moisture and steam. I've never actually seen a potato pop, but they can do it and you don't want to be on the cleanup end. When it's done, don't let your potato “rest” before you cut into it. It's not a steak. The longer you let it sit the gummier and stickier it's gonna get inside.
Try air fryer baked potatoes tonight. Or tomorrow if you don't have any potatoes or if you don't have an air fryer yet. That'll give you time to stock up. Once you do, you'll never bake potatoes any other way.
