How to make the perfect baked potato every time

A baked potato is one of the simplest - and cheapest - lunches you can make at home.

But a blogger has revealed a clever new way of cooking them that shows we may have been making them wrong our whole lives, according to the Daily Mail.

And the trick is to cut your potato in a very specific way.

Instead of just wrapping your potato in foil and bunging it in the oven for an hour, blogger Tonia Larson of The Gunny Sack, from Minnesota, reveals there's some lengthy - but crucial - preparation work to do before you put the spud in the oven.

She calls her recipe The Bloomin' Baked Potato after the way she cuts the potato to look like a blooming flower before she puts it the oven.

Cutting it in this way turns the skin crispy while leaving the potato inside creamy and soft, she says.

Tonia uses Yukon Gold potatoes, but BBC Good Food says Vivaldi, Sante and Melody potatoes also bake well.

The whole process takes about one hour and 20 minutes, with one hour and five minutes of cooking time and 15 minutes of preparation.

After baking, you can then customise your potato in any way you want, by topping with sour cream, chilli, tuna, or just having plain and simple.

It comes just a few days after Food Network chef Tyler Florence revealed that most people are cooking their mashed spuds incorrectly.

The expert cook told Popsugar that the age old method of boiling, draining the water and then mashing is incorrect, as you're throwing all the flavour away with the cooking liquid.

Instead, he recommends cooking the potatoes in cream and butter and then collecting the resulting liquid to use to mash the potatoes with. 

Recipe: The ultimate baked potato

1. First, preheat the oven to 220C.

2. Cut the bottom off the potato so one surface is flat and use a small knife to make rings around the inside of the potato.

3. Then flip the potato over so it's resting on the flat surface and make vertical cuts around the side of the potato. Leave a space at the top that is uncut. The cuts should go all the way into the centre of the potato.

4. Brush the potato with olive oil and sea salt. Put the potato on a sheet of foil and bake for 30 minutes.

5. Take out of the oven and brush with more olive oil and sprinkle again with sea salt. Return it to the oven for another 30 minutes. 

6. If you like, add grated cheese to the top and bake for another five minutes until the cheese is toasted and melted.

7. Remove from the oven, top with crispy bacon pieces and serve. 

This article was first published on Daily Mail and is republished here with permission.