Give Your Baked Potatoes Next-Level Flavor With One Simple Step

Baked potatoes are a classic side dish that can be served plain or loaded with toppings. But ultimately, how you bake that potato is what's going to give this dish all of its flavor. Using the right potatoes and cooking them for the proper amount of time are two of the main steps, but the seasoning — how and when — is so important, too.

Seasoning the baked potatoes is necessary because these spuds will turn out quite bland if they have nothing to bring out their flavor. You don't need to get too wild here; salt and pepper is a perfect combo, but if you're seasoning the potatoes at the start of their cook time, then you're doing it all wrong. Try seasoning them toward the end of baking instead. If you do it at the start, the oil might not stick well enough to the potato skins to make them crispy, and the salt can detach and fall off the skin as the potato skin dries up.

With about 10 minutes left of baking time, remove the potatoes from the oven, and coat them in olive oil. Then, add a generous sprinkle of sea salt or kosher salt; the salt will stick to the potatoes because of the oil, leaving you with perfectly savory flavor. Plus, when you put the potatoes back in the oven, the oil will help those skins crisp up over the last 10 minutes.

While oil is fine to use if that's what you have, other types of fat might be even better. Bacon grease, for example, will add a ton of rich flavor, so if you prepare bacon at any point, don't throw away the grease; store it in the fridge for uses like this one. If properly sealed, bacon grease will last up to three months when refrigerated in an airtight container.

Finally, make sure you slice those potatoes open the moment you take them out of the oven. Be careful because they'll be very hot, but letting that steam escape is important for keeping the potatoes light and fluffy. Otherwise, they retain too much water.