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Fast baked potatoes
I really love baked potatoes. They are a wonderful comfort food that can have different toppings for each member of the family with little effort. The one drawback for fast cooking is the time they take to bake–at least an hour.
The obvious option to fast “baked” potatoes is the microwave. Yes, in 12 or so minutes you can have a cooked potato. The downside is too much for me, though. The skin gets tough, the inside is either mushy or pasty–depending on if the flesh is near the skin or center. All around it is a miserable experience that does not leave me comforted. I’ve had a little success using the microwave and a medium power setting and cooking the potato for longer, but still nothing like baked.
I have come up with a more-than-passable workaround. I found if you microwave the potato for about 4-8 minutes (depending on size) and then bake the potato it is done in about 30 minutes and has a consistency very similar to the purely baked potato.
From there top it as you prefer and enjoy.
Here is a quick table I use to guide how long to microwave and cook the potatoes. This assumes using full power on the microwave and a 375F (190C) oven.
| Size | Microwave time | Oven time |
| Large | 8 minutes | 25 minutes |
| Medium | 6 minutes | 22 minutes |
| Small | 4 minutes | 18 minutes |
