Jacket potatoes often require a low, slow bake to ensure the skin dehydrates and crisps up while the inside turns fluffy.
There are many ways to speed up the process, like microwave cooking raw spuds before oven-baking, but this often leads to uneven results.
Rapid cooking doesn’t allow enough time for the skin’s moisture to evaporate properly, preventing that sought-after crunch. But Jamie Oliver’s expert approach dodges this issue.
The British chef claimed that perfectly crispy jacket potato skins are “super easy” to achieve by swapping the microwave for an air fryer.
This recipe has a clever twist for added flavour; scooping out the inside and loading up the crunchy skin with fillings, but the spuds can be served as whole baked potatoes if you prefer.
Jamie Oliver’s air fryer jacket potatoes
Ingredients
Two baking potatoes (250g each)
Olive oil
Salt
One long red pepper
160g frozen leaf spinach
60g crumbly goat’s cheese
Two heaped tsp pesto
Parmesan for grating (optional)
Method
If making Jamie’s loaded air fryer baked potato skins, first remove the spinach from the freezer and put it on a plate to start defrosting.
Now for the potatoes, use a sharp knife to pierce them a few times then rub each one with one teaspoon of olive oil. Follow with a sprinkling of sea salt for extra flavour and crunch.
To cook the spuds, put them in the air fryer at 180C for 40 minutes, or until soft. Turn the potatoes over halfway through cooking and place the pepper alongside them in the fryer for 10 minutes.
Transfer the cooked potatoes and pepper to a chopping board and allow time for them to cool slightly. Carefully peel off and discard the pepper skin, then halve the flesh lengthways and scrape out and discard the seeds.
Chop the pepper up and place in a clean bowl. Squeeze out the excess water from the defrosted spinach then roughly chop it up and add to the pepper mix.
Crumble in the goat’s cheese and stir in the pesto. Now halve the baked potatoes horizontally, then use a spoon to scoop out the fluffy insides into the bowl – leave around ½cm of potato around the edges so the baked potato keeps its shape.
Mix everything, gently mashing the potato at the same time, then season the filling to perfection. Spoon the mixture into the potato skins, then grate over a little Parmesan, if using.
Return the stuffed potato skins to the air fryer basket and cook at 180C for a final 10 minutes, or until crispy and hot through.
