Bacon Potato Skins
Bacon Potato Skins - crispy baked potato skins topped with bacon, chives, cheese, and sour cream. These are the perfect appetizer for game day!
Bacon Potato Skins
Jump to RecipeBefore you even read this post, do me a favor. If you are on a Windows computer, go ahead and hit CTRL + D. If you’re on a mac, that would be command+D.
That will bookmark this post so you will have it close by for the fall.
Any time you have any sort of sporting event or celebration, you can open up your browser, find your bookmarks, and be reminded of these wonderful little snacks.
Ok… you don’t actually have to bookmark this post, but these Bacon Potato Skins are good enough to bookmark. Trust me.
Bacon Potato Skins
- Serves:
- Serves 6
- Prep Time:
- Total Time:
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Crispy baked potato skins topped with bacon, chives, cheese, and sour cream. These are the perfect appetizer for game day!
Ingredients
Instructions
1) Wash potatoes well. Lay potatoes out on a baking sheet and drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with kosher salt. Bake potatoes at 350 degrees for 60-75 minutes until they are fork tender.
2) Let potatoes cool until you can handle them. Then slice them in half. Use a spoon to scoop out potato flesh. Try to keep a thin layer of flesh with the skins. You don’t want the skins too thin.
3) Once all the potatoes are scooped out, quarter the skins.
4) While the potatoes are baking, cook bacon in a skillet over medium heat until it is crispy, about 15 minutes. Drain bacon on a few paper towels. Reserve bacon grease.
5) Lay out all the potato skins on a few baking sheets. Brush the skins very lightly with bacon grease or melted butter.
6) Bake skins a second time at 400 degrees for 10 minutes.
7) Remove skins from oven. Top with grated cheese and crumbled bacon. Return to oven for 5-7 minutes.
8) Remove skins from oven and garnish with chopped chives. Serve with sour cream!
Bacon Potato Skins
Prepping the Potatoes
Potato skins are one of my favorite appetizers but I never order them at restaurants because I feel ripped off. I mean, after all, it’s just the literal potato skins that the restaurant is then making mashed potatoes out of.
They top them with some cheap cheese and sour cream, bake them, and charge you $8 for four.
Potatoes are pretty much the cheapest thing in the produce section so you can feed a group of people homemade potato skins for the same price as one order would cost you at your local sports bar.
The downside of making them at home though is that they do take some time. It’s mostly inactive time, but you’ll need to start these a good two hours before kick off.
To start them, get about five pounds of medium sized Russet potatoes and scrub them really well. Since we are going to be eating the actual skins, make sure those skins are clean!
Then drizzle the potatoes with some olive oil and sprinkle them with some kosher salt. Then bake them at 350 degrees for 60-75 minutes until they are fork tender.
When the taters come out of the oven, let them cool for a few minutes before trying to work with them. They will be way too hot to handle initially.
When they have cooled slightly, just slice each potato in half and scoop out most of the flesh. Be sure to save the potato insides to make mashed potatoes or something later.
Also, when scooping out the flesh, leave a thin layer of it on the skin. You don’t want the skin to be too thin or too thick.
A Bacon Idea
Bacon is a pretty common potato skin topping and I figured if it isn’t broke, I wouldn’t try to fix it.
I just fried up a few strips of bacon in a skillet until they were mostly crispy. This took about about 15 minutes over medium heat.
Genius Level Cooking
Most potato skin recipes recommend a double baking strategy meaning that you bake the skins once so they get crispy, then you top them and bake them a second time to melt the cheese or whatever.
For the first baking, it’s good to rub the skins with a small amount of oil or melted butter.
I just used bacon grease though because that’s how I roll.
The key thing to remember here is to use a very light coating of grease on each potato skin. It shouldn’t be thick or pooling at all on the skins. A little goes a long way.
Baking the Skins
Once you have brushed the skins with a small amount of bacon grease, bake them at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. They will start to get pretty crispy at that point.
Then take them out of the oven. When you are ready to serve the skins, top them with some grated cheese and crumbled bacon.
Back in the oven for another five minutes or so just to melt the cheese and you are in business!
I like to serve my skins with lots of chopped chives and sour cream on the side.
Not everybody likes sour cream, but I sure do.
These Bacon Potato Skins are some of the best potato skins I’ve had.
I had some friends over for game night and we completely housed about forty of these skins in just a few minutes. They will go quick!
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Hello! My name is Nick Evans and I write and manage Macheesmo. I started Macheesmo 11 years ago when I was just learning my way around the kitchen. I love to cook and love everything food-related, but I have no formal training. These days I focus on fast, accessible recipes with the occasional “reach” recipe!
I’ve posted almost 2,000 recipes on Macheesmo. For each one, I do my best to give full explanations of what I did and tips on what I’d do differently next time. I’ll bring up the tricky parts and the easy parts.
I hope you can find something and cook something!
Brush with bacon fat! Total genius!
This looks like my weekend snack….
Yum! These will definitely be on deck for fall football season! Do you think you could bake the potatoes ahead? That would make the entire process much easier.
Oh definitely. Wouldn’t be an issue at all. In fact, I think you could prepare them all the way up to the final topping/baking step in advance.
You had me at bacon grease!
Between this and your grilled guacamole recipe, I’m willing to bet you throw a hell of a party.
Nick nick nick!
Holy bacon.
Using this for friday links. Duh!
(ok to steal a photo?)
This is a truly disgusting recipe.
I hate the title “Who doesn’t love bacon?” because who loves that pigs are caged in cramped and filthy conditions for their entire lives, that they never breath a drop of fresh air until they are transported to the slaughterhouse, and then cruelly tortured in the slaughterhouse until they are dead.
So who really loves bacon you ask? Well, I’m sure if you asked the pig, she would say you are a sociopath if you do.
Please don’t write anymore disgusting recipes like this anymore. Factory farms are killing the planet. If you care about the planet, sentient beings, and humanity, please don’t eat food that once had a face!
April, thanks for commenting, but maybe you should just read another website.
The title of this post isn’t “Who doesn’t love bacon?” I never even say that in the entire post. I know lots of vegetarians that don’t like bacon. I respect their choice and they respect mine. I have lots of vegetarian readers…
I also don’t like factory farms and try to not support them. When I do buy meat, I try to buy farm-raised from local places.
This website is vile Nick. The title “Who doesn’t Love Bacon?” was in the website title. If you think that there is something called humane slaughter just because you buy your meat from farm-raised local places, and you think you are one of the good guy, think again.
All animals raised for meat go to slaughter and they do not live out their entire lives. Their lives are cut short, way too short, so you can feast yourself. It’s disgusting and sociopathic. Here’s an example of one cow who knows she is going to die and doesn’t want to.
April, thanks again for the comment. Trust me… as a philosophy major I’ve
thought long and hard about eating meat.
I’m not going to get into a philosophical debate in the comments section of one post.
if you feel that I am a “vile” person and a “sociopath” (I’m not sure that’s the word you are looking for by the way, but I understand your insult.), then you are welcome to that opinion.
My suggestion is that you simply not read my website. I can guarantee you that you aren’t going to change my position on the subject as every argument and video you have posted I’ve already considered.
I love that you are standing by your convictions! Way to go, Nick!
April, I sincerely hope you are just some wacky girl with a sense of humor attempting to troll Nick, because otherwise….Google food blog. I’m willing to bet you are going to get results back in the millions. Now remove the vegetarian/vegan ones (unless you are going to get on them for not being organic?) Still millions. Willing to bet yet again that most of these feature bacon or pork in some regards. Are you really going to go blog by blog to tell people about your platform? A less aggressive person might consider starting their own blog and linking to it, so that if I click on your name I can hear wonderful, proactive solutions or maybe see what super awesome foods you might make that don’t use bacon, but instead by shouting into a forum of someone who is so well regarded, you just come off as ignorant and preachy. Of all the blogs I read, at least Macheesmo takes the time to mention farm-raised food, and investigate some of the nastier ingredients that go into things. I don’t do that. If you really want to argue the semantics of meat eating in a blogger’s comment section, click on my name and come to my blog instead. I cook with bacon, and I could really use some activity on my page. Thanks-Catfish
April, I want to jump in here. I agree that the world needs to become more aware of the way our meat is raised, slaughtered, and processed. Thanks to efforts from groups and people with views such as yours, that awareness is rising quickly. I believe a generation from now, the way we eat will be completely different, in a good way (at least in places with enough resources).
Thus, your wrath should not be honed upon a food writer who is among the most conscientious of meat-eaters (he’s a Yale philosophy major!). I know Nick very, very well, and you will not find another omnivore who focuses more on the quality of his meat ingredients.
If you wish to voice your position in an effort to make change, and by all means you should, there are a thousand other people and groups up the food chain (so to speak) that are responsible for the pathology of the problem of inhumane livestock practices, not merely the symptoms. Our market is flooded with meat, produce, and processed food irresponsibly raised or supplemented. This is mostly due to corporate farms and large international conglomerates (see: Monsanto) that focus on one metric in determining how to produce food: volume.
In sum, your arguments about the plight of mistreated livestock resonate with me, with Nick, and probably with most readers of this blog. However, your ire should be focused on the producers and processors who force these unsafe and inhumanely-produced foods on American consumers. A food blogger who is an outspoken supporter of local, healthy ingredients and mindful of the moral issues related to meat-eating is not the best outlet for your criticism.
http://www.kpic.com/news/health/17020346.html
Q: What’s Michael Pollen’s favorite breakfast!
A: Fried Eggs and Bacon!!
I think you should immediately take this up with his millions of followers before he ruins the food culture of our country any further!
You buy meat?? As in, you buy the flesh of an animal that has been murdered?? How dare you, April? You sick bastard. I can’t believe you actually eat dead animals. That is completely inhumane.
Of course, I love meat and dead pig is one of my favorites. That’s why I read Nick’s blog. Because I like his work and his recipes are delicious.
If you don’t like bacon, DON’T READ THIS BLOG!!!
Unless you think your stupid comment is doing to change Nick’s opinion on pig meat. In which case, you probably could have been a little nicer and a bit less bitchy about it.
For Nick:
If you are a philosophy major from Yale then you should know about the practical application of philosophy from people like Peter Singer and Gary Francione. They are strict vegans and make a very convincing argument about having a vegan diet.
Second, a sociopath is someone who knows that their actions will inflict harm on some other living creature but they engage in the behavior anyway. Thus, I did mean that you are a sociopath and now that you expressed that you have seen all the videos and been witness to the cruel and inhumane treatment of animals in the slaughterhouses plus the immense environmental destruction that animals produce, you are even more of a sociopath then I originally thought. I am not being insulting, merely stating reality.
Third, you stated in your first reply that you never once wrote Who doesn’t love Bacon? but then in your second reply you stated that it is your website. So, this demonstrates that you are contradicting what you originally wrote, which makes you a lier.
For SeanG: conscientious meat-eater? That’s they most hypocritical thing that someone could say. And to justify this statement by writing that just because Nick went to Yale means he is more of a conscientious guy? A very weak argument there because there are a lot of really “smart” people out there that went to Harvard, Yale, Standford, etc. who have contributed to our economical and environmental disaster our of greed and sociopathy.
For John:
I do plan on writing my own blog on the subject but right now I am focusing on more important matters such as finishing my dissertation, etc. It will come after the first of the year and focus on veganism, yoga, and women’s health and community issues.
Lastly, Niki. You don’t make any sense.
Well, good on ya, April. I was starting to think you were one of those people who simply starts a fire and then leaves. But while you say you might start a website down the road, you never fully addressed my most burning question, which is whether or not you intend to pursue every bacon loving food blogger? Don’t get me wrong, it’s good that you have strong convictions, but what made you single out Nick for putting bacon on a potato, which is pretty much a universal commonality among meat eaters? I mean (not to sound stalkerish,) I looked you up on Google to verify that you were a real person, and it sounds like you are a fan of Micheal Pollan. He eats meat, or at least he did when he wrote Omnivore’s Dilemma. Have you corrected him? What brings scorn here, specifically?
You do sound stalkerish and who else would I be but a real person? That doesn’t make any sense.