The Easiest Way to Bake Potatoes in a Toaster Oven

A toaster oven is one of the convenient appliances that you cannot miss to have in your kitchen. You can use it to do a lot of things, including warming plates before serving, toasting nuts, making small batches of cookies, baking potatoes, cooking side dishes, re-heating leftovers and so on. You should invest in the best toaster oven if you want to get the most out of it. Try to find out which brand on the market is the best before you part with your money to buy it. A toaster oven buying guide can help you a great deal when you are looking for the best toaster oven to buy. You can read and compare as many buying guides as possible before making up your mind about which toaster oven to buy.

How to Bake Potatoes in a Toaster Oven

If you have a toaster oven, you can use it to bake potatoes and free up the conventional oven for other dishes. You may have used the conventional oven to bake a lot of potatoes for dinner but if you just need to bake about two or three potatoes as a side dish, the toaster oven would do. There is no need of heating up your giant oven just to cook two or three potatoes. You will just heat up the entire kitchen for nothing. You will save yourself a lot of time and effort if you use the toaster oven for cooking the potatoes.

Things You Will Need: 

• Toaster oven
• Medium sized potatoes
• Olive oil
• Tin foil
• Butter
• Ground pepper

Procedure:

1. Use a soft brush to clean the potatoes before baking them in the toaster oven. Make sure that all dirt is removed, but do not scrub the potatoes too much to the point of removing the skin. Most of the nutrients in potatoes are found in the skin. After cleaning the potatoes, wipe them using a soft, clean rag and then put them on a rack to dry.
2. Note: Choose potatoes that are firm and do not have blemishes or green spots.
3. As the potatoes continue to dry, heat your toaster oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celsius.
4. After making sure that the potatoes are dry properly, take a fork and use it to poke several holes on the different sides of the potatoes. You may be wondering why you should poke holes into the potatoes instead of just putting them the way they are in the oven. Well, the holes will allow the steam to evaporate. They will also prevent the potatoes from exploding while they are cooking.
5. Take some olive oil and rub it around the skin of the potatoes for flavor. Once you have done that, wrap the potatoes into an aluminum foil and then put them on the toaster oven baking tray after making sure that the toaster oven is ready.
6. Allow the potatoes to cook for about 45 to 60 minutes. You will need to check on them every 5 to 10 minutes just to see their progress. You can use a fork to add more holes to the potatoes if you notice that they are not cooking evenly.
7. After 45 to 60 minutes, the potatoes should be tender throughout. If they are not, give them some more minutes. To find out if the potatoes are ready is easy. You simply need to insert a fork into the center of the potatoes.
8. At this point, you can serve the potatoes or proceed to the next step. If you are fine with serving the potatoes at this point, you simply need to get them out of the toaster oven and then allow them to sit for about five minutes before serving. For a great taste, serve the potatoes while they are warm. 
9. If you do not prefer eating the potatoes as they are in the previous step, this is what you will need to do: After getting them from the oven, remove the entire section of the skin on the potatoes and then apply a heaping amount of butter on them. After that, add a drizzle of ground pepper on the potatoes.
10. Put the potatoes back into the toaster oven and allow them to cook some more. After about 20 to 30 minutes, remove the potatoes from the toaster oven and then allow them to cool on a plate. You can apply some more butter on the potatoes and any other spice you wish and then serve warm.

Note: In case the potatoes that you have are so big, cut them into halves or quarters for them to bake evenly and faster. If you want baked potatoes with their skin intact, you can create a large opening on the skin of the potatoes by creating a letter X on top of them instead of poking small holes. By doing so, you will open up the potato and allow the insides to cook much faster. Since a toaster oven is not that big, limit the amount of potatoes that you can bake at once to only two or three depending on the size.

Conclusion 

Baked potatoes can be a delicious side dish if you know how to cook them properly. What makes them more delicious are the toppings that you will add on them once they are cooked. You can try different condiments you have in your kitchen, for instance butter, yogurt cheese slices, cottage cheese and sour cream and so on. Vegetables can also be great to go with the potatoes. If you are baking only two potatoes, you could save time and effort by cooking the vegetables in the toaster oven to go with them. Examples of the vegetables you could use include string beans, asparagus, beets, red peppers and carrots. Try to avoid mixing flavors together if you want them to taste great. Note that this is a side meal, so you cannot expect to eat it alone and be full or satisfied. If you baked the potatoes at dinner time for example, you need to make cook dinner as usual and then eat it alongside the potatoes.