Ditch The Oven And Use This Appliance For Perfect Baked Potatoes

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Baked potatoes might just be the ultimate side dish to enjoy with a good cut of meat. They're easy to make and can be super simple and delicious with a little butter and salt or fully decked out, like the loaded baked potatoes at your favorite steakhouses. One issue, however, is that, while they're technically very easy and pretty hands-off to make in the oven, they can take up to an hour to cook. So, they're not ideal for a quick weeknight meal. But, when you cook them in a special appliance — a pressure cooker, or even better, an Instant Pot — they'll be done in as little as 20 minutes.

When baking a potato — or more correctly, steaming it — an Instant Pot is probably the safest and easiest way to go because they come with automatic safeguards that will shut the machine off if pressure has built too high and you can merely set them to the time of the cook. Traditional, old-school, stovetop pressure cookers, on the other hand, are pressurized pots with a tight fitting lid that can be a little dangerous if not monitored when cooking on the stove. That said, both will work for this baked potato trick.

To make an Instant Pot baked potato, if you're only using one layer of potatoes in the cooking basket, you'll need about a cup of water, and you can simply set it on "pressure cook" for 20 minutes, then quick release the pressure and they'll be ready to serve. If you're using a traditional, stovetop pressure cooker, you'll add a cup or a cup and a half of water, and once the device has come to full pressure, you can cook for just about five minutes to get your potatoes nice and tender. But you'll need to use the natural release, meaning the steam and pressure will slowly drop, so it could take 15 minutes or more until you can safely open the pot. Whichever method you use, you should pierce the potatoes with a fork before they go into the cooker to avoid pressure build-up in the potato and a possible internal explosion.

While traditional stovetop pressure cookers are great for baked potatoes, and any number of quick-cooking recipes, Instant Pots, like the super simple Instant Pot 6QT RIO 7-in-1 Multi-Cooker or the more advanced Instant Pot PRO Max Wi-Fi Smart 10-in-1 have more capabilities. And you don't have to worry about the danger of an unattended pressure bomb on the stove. The potatoes will come out perfectly cooked through, nice and fluffy, and ready to be garnished with whatever toppings you have to throw at them. Once you've mastered the simple baked potato in your pressurized Instant Pot, you can move onto some Instant Pot twice-baked potatoes to expand the potato repertoire, which is still quick and easy compared to an oven bake.