Slow Cooker Jacket Potatoes

On this week’s meal plan I had included that we were going to try slow cooker jacket potatoes. It had never dawned on me to use the slow cooker to do jacket potatoes but after posting on my Facebook page that I had placed an order for a new slow cooker someone commented to say that jacket potatoes were good in a slow cooker.

So, today we gave it a try. The slow cooker we have is a large 6 litre one so holds plenty of potatoes. I literally just placed the potatoes into the slow cooker, turned it on and left it. I did put in on high for the first hour (as I forgot and didn’t put them in until around midday) and then turned it down to low.

The potatoes smelt really nice and I checked them at around 3:30pm to see how they were doing, they were soft so i turned them over to prevent the skins sticking to the bottom of the slow cooker. I did notice they’d shrunk a little, something I’d not noticed when I have oven cooked them in the past.

The children and I ate ours at around 5pm and then Damian ate a little later when he came home from work. I was really impressed with how nice the tasted and how evenly and well they had cooked. Sometimes in the oven they don’t cook as evenly – particularly if there are a couple of potatoes that are a little larger in size, but all six that I had put in were evenly cooked. The skin wasn’t particularly crispy but it was nice and even the children ate the skin (which they can be a bit hit and miss about sometimes)

We just had ours with cheese and beans but some of our other favourite toppings include:

1. Served with coleslaw and salad – always a favourite in the summer time
2. Bolognese sauce
3. Chilli

I was pretty pleased with how they turned out and will definitely be using the slow cooker in the future to do our backed potatoes.