From Quora
How do restaurants make a baked potato so quickly? At home it takes close to an hour or a little more in the oven, and 45 mins on the BBQ.
Even in a commercial kitchen, baking a large russet potato still takes an hour. Getting one to your table in ten minutes requires a clever illusion—and occasionally a metal spike.
The secret is that the potato was cooked before you even walked through the restaurant doors. Restaurants anticipate their dinner rush and bake large batches in commercial convection ovens, which circulate hot air with high-powered fans to transfer heat faster than a standard residential oven.
Once the batch is finished, the potatoes are transferred to commercial holding cabinets or warming drawers. These units maintain a steady, food-safe temperature between 150°F and 180°F. When a ticket comes into the kitchen, the line cook simply reaches into the drawer, grabs a hot potato, slices it open, and adds the toppings. The aluminum foil you often see wrapped around steakhouse potatoes is primarily there to trap moisture and prevent the skin from drying out during this prolonged holding period, rather than to speed up the cooking process.
When a restaurant miscalculates the dinner rush and runs out of pre-baked potatoes, they switch to rapid-fire techniques to bridge the gap. The most common emergency method is microwaving a raw potato for five to eight minutes to steam the interior, then throwing it into a 500°F oven, under a broiler, or into a deep fryer for two minutes. This crisps the skin and dries out the surface, mimicking the texture of a slow-baked potato in a fraction of the time.
Some kitchens also use potato nails. These are thick aluminum or stainless steel spikes driven straight through the center of the raw potato before it goes into the oven. The metal acts as a thermal conductor, drawing the oven’s ambient heat directly into the core of the potato. While it doesn’t reduce a 60-minute bake to a 10-minute one, it shaves about 15% to 20% off the total time, helping the kitchen churn through massive prep batches just a little bit faster.
