Potatoes are an excellent side dish for both fish and meat dishes. What they just don’t do with it is boiled, fried, baked. In a baked form, by the way, it preserves its valuable nutritional properties to the maximum, but if you bake potatoes in foil in the oven, you can save them almost completely - starch will not be destroyed in this case, most vitamins and minerals will also be preserved. How to cook such a delicious dish?
Pick your recipe
You will need
- - young potatoes with thin skin,
- - vegetable oil,
- - salt, ground black pepper, additional seasonings to taste,
- - foil.
- For the sauce:
- 100 grams of sour cream or salad yogurt,
- 2-3 cloves of garlic,
- 25 grams of spicy greens,
- 2 small pickles or pickles.
- For 8 medium filling potatoes:
- 150 grams of brisket, bacon, bacon (optional).
Instruction manual
1
Preparing potatoes for baking
For baking in foil, it is best to choose young potatoes with a thin skin. Ideally, if all the potatoes are about the same size, then you can not be afraid that individual tubers will not bake properly and remain moist inside. Rinse the potatoes thoroughly under running water with a sponge or brush. If the peel is thick - you can remove the top layer with a metal sponge. Carefully inspect the tubers, cut off any damaged areas, remove the "eyes". Dry it.
2
Baked Potato Basic Recipe
Rub the prepared tubers with butter. It can be anything - often they use sunflower or olive oil (both refined and not), but you can take linseed, sesame, and cedar. The taste of baked potatoes is quite neutral, and aromatic oils usually perfectly enrich it. In addition, a thin, evenly applied layer of oil will allow the potato to bake better on all sides. You can process the tubers with your hands or with a silicone cooking brush.
3
Sprinkle the tubers with salt and freshly ground black pepper. It is not necessary to be limited to just such a set of seasonings - you can add other spices and herbs to your taste. Different types of aromatic peppers, turmeric, paprika, curry, garlic, savory, thyme, marjoram, rosemary, dill, parsley, basil and so on go well with potatoes. If you use fresh herbs - you can not rub tubers with them, but wrap a twig or two of greenery along with potatoes in foil.
4
Pound the tubers with a fork in several places or make several fairly deep cuts from different sides. This item is often overlooked - and in the meantime, this is what will allow the potatoes to bake evenly.
5
Overlap tightly, wrap each potato in a sheet of foil. It is better if the shiny side is turned inward - in this case, the heat will be less reflected from the surface of the metal. Thin foil, the sheet width of which is 8-9 microns, is best folded in two layers - this will avoid accidental tears.
6
Place the potatoes in foil on a wire rack or baking sheet. Do not stack them tightly - there should be gaps between the tubers that allow hot air to circulate freely between them, allowing them to bake evenly from all sides.
7
Bake in the oven, preheated to a temperature of 200-220 degrees. If you use a gas oven with lower heating - turn over the potatoes at intervals of 15-20 minutes. If you have an electric oven that is evenly heated from above and below, there is no particular need for this procedure. Potatoes in foil reach readiness in about an hour, however, if the tubers are large in size, the baking time must be increased. You can check the readiness by taking out and unfolding one potato and checking it for a puncture with a fork or a toothpick.
8
Baked potatoes in this way are good as a side dish for meat, fish or poultry dishes. It goes well with a variety of salads of fresh vegetables, and can act as a "solo" as a full-fledged second course. Large potatoes can be served directly in the foil, previously deployed to the middle and bent the foil "sides". You can cut the potato in half or cut into slices, add a piece of butter on top and sprinkle with finely chopped greens. Small tubers can be freed from foil and served whole.
9
Baked Potato Sauce Recipe
A good addition to baked potatoes, served as an independent dish, is a sauce prepared on the basis of sour cream or unsweetened salad yogurt. To prepare it, squeeze 2-3 cloves of garlic into the base and add finely chopped fresh herbs of parsley, dill, basil or cilantro. You can use the feathers of green onions. Mix well, add a couple of finely chopped pickled or pickled cucumbers. Deeply cut the baked potato, not finishing the cut to the end, slightly spread the halves and pour the resulting sauce abundantly.
10
Stuffed Baked Potatoes
Baked potatoes are tasty in and of themselves, but if you bake it with additives, fillings, this can enrich the dish with additional flavoring notes and give the potato a flavor. Thin slices of pork fat, bacon, smoked brisket and other fatty meat products are often used as fillings. Smoked meats can be supplemented with feta cheese and fresh herbs. You can use chicken, duck or mutton fat for flavoring potatoes - this will significantly increase the calorie content of the dish, but the taste and smell of the finished baked potatoes will be simply delightful.
eleven
In this case, the tubers prepared for baking are cut lengthwise in the center. The depth of the cut should be approximately 3/4 of the potatoes - the root crop should “open”, but not fall into two. After that, a slice of the product selected for the filling is inserted into the incision. Now the halves of the tuber need to be compressed and wrapped as tightly as possible in the filled potato in foil and put on the lattice with a slit up. After that, bake in the same way as in the basic recipe, but without turning it over - otherwise the melted fat will not soak the tuber pulp, but will flow into the foil.
12
Large potatoes are sometimes stuffed with "accordion" - by making not one longitudinal section, but several transverse parallel to each other, and putting the filling in each of them. In this case, by the way, large tubers will also bake somewhat faster.
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