We’ve Been Cooking Baked Potatoes All Wrong — Chef Says It Can Be Done Quicker With One Item

Potato, this tuberous brown thing, is much more than just a vegetable. It’s a workhorse of nutrients trapped inside a soil-smudged peel. This round tuber is often the target of criticism and humiliation, for it adds another layer of fat to the human body. But for those who are willing to do another set of weight-lifting in the gym, this fat is just an added supply of fresh calorific fuel that will soon transform into muscle mass. Especially when it is baked, not fried, this potato bursts with an amalgam of taste that is unmatchable.

The taste of a baked potato begins with crisped golden flesh that paves the way to a soft, fluffy interior, often made tantalizing with sprinklings of butter, herbs, condiments, and spices. But cooking them doesn’t come easy, or does it? In fact, one might even lose patience waiting for the perfectly baked potatoes. Well, ITV's This Morning (@ThisMorning) chef, Phil Vickery, revealed a trick to reduce the cooking time of baked potatoes by almost half.

“If you are going to do jacket spuds, this sort of size, and you are not careful, then in a hot oven, they can explode,” the chef said during an episode of the daytime show. Hearing his statement, a co-presenter gasped and said, “What?” Vickery responded by saying that he had watched these potatoes explode two to three times before. He said the moment he would pull out the potatoes from the oven, they would crack. “You pick them out of the oven and it breaks down and it goes everywhere,” he described, following it with a quick tip to resolve this challenge. The trick requires a sharp knife.

“With a sharp knife, I just ran the knife around through the skin horizontally, and that stops them from exploding in the oven,” he explained while sliding the knife through the potato’s body and rotating it horizontally. Continuing the episode, he shared how a teaspoon can be used to cut the cooking time of a baked potato in half. “If you put one [at] either end, that cooks in half the amount of time.” Vickery elaborated on the trick by saying that a teaspoon acts like a heat element. He slipped a skewer through a potato, making an incision and pulling it out from the other side. This, he said, transfers the heat, thereby reducing the cooking to “half the time.” Phillip Schofield, another co-presenter of the show, raised his hands, exclaiming, “Oh, wait a second, mind blown!”

Commenting on Vickery’s video, a Facebook user named Gavin Redhead said, “Just tried the spoon in the baked potato trick. Spectacular results. I’m going to have to buy a new microwave now, though.” Sarah Watt said the trick inspired her to cook her own serving of baked potatoes. "This inspired me today, and I made a slimming world-friendly version. Scooped out the potato and mashed with fat-free yoghurt, cheese, chopped onion and salt, and pepper, and put back in the skin. Amazing," she said. Charlotte Bethel shared, “I always pierce baked potatoes of any size with a fork; otherwise, the starch and steam can heat up and expand, and that's what makes them explode.”