Air-Fryer Baked Potatoes

A baked potato made well is one of the great pleasures of plain cooking. Crackling salt-crusted skin you can peel off and eat first. Fluffy interior, scooped out, mashed roughly with butter and salt and pepper. Topped with whatever's around — sour cream, chives, chopped bacon, grated cheese, broccoli, chilli — until it stops being a side and becomes the meal. Made badly, the same potato is a soft pale lump with damp skin, which is what you get when you bake one in the microwave or wrap it in foil and shove it in the oven.

The air fryer fixes both problems. The direct convection heat dries the skin out into proper crackling — not just brown, but genuinely crisp. The interior cooks evenly because the heat surrounds the whole potato. Forty minutes from cold to plate, no preheating a whole oven, no foil wrapping (foil steams the skin and ruins the crispness).

The technique has only one step worth mentioning: salt the outside heavily after oiling. The salt sits on the wet skin and clings as it dries, ending up baked into the crust like a thin crystalline exterior. The first bite — through the salty skin — is the point of the whole dish. The photo shows what you're aiming for: a deep amber skin split open down the middle, fluffy interior steaming through, butter melted in, scattered chives, a few crumbles of bacon. The small bowl in the corner has the extra bacon, for the next bite.