A jacket potato is a British favourite; whether for lunch or dinner, a jacket potato is a timeless classic. It’s versatility is it’s best feature: you can halve it, fill it with cheese and butter, and eat it like a cracker (strange, we know); top it with beans, chilli con carne, bolognese, or tuna mayo; or just whack whatever leftovers you’ve got in the fridge on top.
When you’re shopping on a budget, a bag of potatoes is cheap and can be prepped to suit a vast variety of meals. Here, we take a look at the baked option. Pick the biggest spud in the bag, turn your oven on, wait till the potato is soft in the middle, crispy on the outside, then get topping.
But how should you prepare the potato for the crispiest skin? How long should you cook it for and at what temperature? We get testing.
Timings for a oven jacket potato with a fluffy middle
As we said in our Ninja Crispi jacket potato cooking trial, we usually bake our jackets at 180C for two hours. However, unlike the Crispi air fryer test, I lightly oiled and salted the skin before scoring the top with a skin-deep cross (this stops the spud from exploding in the oven). Again, like the Crispi test, I used a medium size potato.
Again, unlike cooking in an air fryer, there’s no specific instruction to flip the potato mid-cook.
At the 30 minute mark, I tested its progress by stabbing it with a knife. It was immediately clear that this spud was nowhere near done: the knife hit resistance 0.5cm in.
At 55 minutes, the knife slid through to just under halfway.
At one hour 15 minutes, the potato was soft all the way through. Sole purpose of the remaining 15 minutes would be to crisp up the skin. An extra 15 minutes at 180C didn’t do much in the way of creating a crispy skin.
So, to get a fluffy medium-sized jacket potato you’ll need to cook it for an hour and a half. The skin, while not crispy, was cooked, and held up well when the spud was smothered with butter and grated cheese.
Timings for oven jacket potato with a crispy skin
For a crispy skin, you’ll need to up the temperature. A 180C bake is the low and slow version. Turn the oven up to 200C instead and cook for an hour. Follow the same steps to prepare your potato as above: a light coating of oil, a shake of salt, and slice a cross on the top. (You can also just prick the skin a few times, like you would a microwave ready meal.)
For a medium size potato, bake for around an hour then test its progress. Once the middle is soft and fluffy, you can leave the jacket in the oven until the skin hits your desired level of crisp.
Things to note when cooking a jacket potato in the oven
- You don’t have to coat the skin in oil or salt beforehand. If you’re trying to reduce your calorie intake, or have a few health issues, such as high cholesterol or blood pressure, or heart disease, then adding extra fat and salt to your dinner isn’t advised. Your jacket potato will be just as fluffy and crispy without salt and oil as it will with.
- Prick or slice the skin before cooking to prevent the spud from making a potato-ey mess in your oven.
- The larger the potato, the longer it’ll take to cook. The opposite applies to smaller potatoes; the less spud, the shorter the cooking time.
- If you have a lot of time on your hands and are feeling fancy, then you can always transform your jacket potato by scooping the middle out (once it’s cooled), mixing with your favourite fillings and topping with grated cheese, refilling the skins with the mixture, and baking until the tops are crispy.
- Cheese fans can take the take the same approach I do: double cheese. Butter your potato and top with grated cheese, then put it back in the oven while you finish off the rest of your dinner. Once melted, take it out and add an extra layer of grated cheese.
- If you’re pressed for time and own an air fryer, use that instead. I found a jacket potato took 50 minutes in the Ninja Crispi, shaving 40 minutes off the total cooking time for a soft jacket and 10 minutes less than the time for a crispy skin.
- To save on washing up, you can cook the jacket potato on a sheet of tin foil. And if you’re concerned about the environment, aluminium is completely recyclable (and chances are, the aluminium you’ll be using is already in its second, third, or fourth life).
