Baking experiment: Bacon-grease covered potatoes.

For like a year or more, I've been rubbing baked potatoes in olive oil before you bake them, to make sure that the skin gets all nice and moist when they finish baking.  Although it's such a small thing to do, when you're done, the skin comes out tender and nice and tasy, and not tough like shoe leather at all.

Anyhow, the other month when I was googling baking times and temperatures for potatoes since I'd forgotten them, I saw a reference somewhere on some online recipe to covering the potatoes with bacon grease instead of olive oil, so I put that idea away in my head for future reference, especially since the pieces of bacon fat I'd kept in my freezer had run out like right before that, as it turned out.

So, like a few weeks ago, I got some more bacon at the local supermarket when I was doing my weekly shopping there, and on a snowy day I tried the bacon fat thing, when the snow was just falling outside and you were inside and it was nice and warm and all you wanted to do was cook things and eat.  So, I fried up like half of a piece of bacon cut into chunks, and then I rolled each raw potato in the melting fat and spread the fat all around all over it with my fingers as it cooled.  And, with two of them, I experimented by putting some bacon inside of it for as it baked; with one of them, I cut open a wedge on top of it, put some bacon under it, and then put the wedge back on, and for the other one, I cut a slit, and then I used the blunt side of a knife to cram some bacon fat in, as I tried to hold the slit open a bit with my fingers.

Overall, they turned out pretty good.  The potatoes had the barest little hint of bacon taste, almost like a mildly flavored bacon potato chip, and most of the potatoes had this crazy good crispy skin, especially the ones I'd left in the oven longer (I took out a couple small potatoes twenty minutes early, since they were done and I was super hungry; with those ones, the skin wasn't as crisp).  A couple of them had had the grease pool at the bottom, too, since maybe I had put more grease on those ones and it had run down during the baking.  With the ones I put the bacon into, the insides of the potato tasted a bit like bacon, too, especially the one where I had put the bacon into a slit.

The next time I experiment, I think I'm going to do more slit potatoes, and I'm going to try to get as much as like a quarter-to-a-third of a piece of bacon crammed inside of it.

I think that that will make the best bacon flavored potato, in terms of the potato insides, and I'll just keep doing the outsides the same as I did, since the outsides have been turning out pretty well so far, so long as I keep the potatoes in the oven for at least a full hour.