So I may or may not work at a restaurant chain that may or may not rhyme with Shmoutback Shmeakhouse. I was prepping baked potatoes and the way I was shown to prep them was to get a large plastic bin, put half the case in, put some oil on them, roll em around to get the oil on all of them, pour a bunch of salt on the surface, roll some more, pour potatoes on to a huge baking sheet, salt more.
Now, I spent a couple months figuring that we use so much salt because, ya know, salt tastes good and we’re a chain restaurant. Apparently, though, it was explained to me that we that quantity of salt because the more you use, the “fluffier” the potatoes get. My inner Alton Brown gave a weird look but I just let it go and didn’t think about it much more. But the fact still remains with me, does the salt really make the potato “fluffier”? How would it even do this? I don’t understand…
You mentioned Alton Brown: according to his backed potatoes recipe, you’re supposed to oil them, salt them and poke a whole bunch of holes in each potato with a fork to let the steam out. I’ve made them dozens of time and they’re fluffy as all hell.
Salting them more than once seems redundant, though.
Not Alton Brown, but America’s Test Kitchen did an episode on this. They found that baking the potatoes in salt did give them noticeably better results. Here is a distilled version of their final technique.
Also, it should be noted that this came up when I wasn’t putting a ridiculous amount of salt on these potatoes and it was pretty much implied that the more salt you put on them, the fluffier and nicer they are. Again, I have no clue about spud sciences.
I followed the ATK method, and I wasn’t crazy about the resulting texture of the potatoes. They were not too salty even though I baked them covered in salt. But I prefer the denser, smoother texture of regular baking. Actually, what I do is nuke them for about 10 minutes to give them a head start while I’m preheating the oven to about 450. Then I oil them all over (tricky, because they’re hot from the microwave), and set them right on the oven rack to finish baking and for the skin to get crispy. Takes another 10-15 minutes. Yum!
I suppose I can defer to ATK (I didn’t click the link and I don’t watch the show), but it’s always been my understanding that anything you do to the outside of the potato (salt, oil etc) is meant to make eating the skin taste better.
Personally, I just poke some holes in it and toss them in the oven. In fact, I didn’t even buy into the whole poke them with a fork until just recently when I had one blow up in my oven. Hundreds of potatoes cooked in my oven and it was the first time it happened. I’d rather not repeat that.