How Potato Nails Help Baked Potatoes Cook Faster

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The only bad thing about fluffy baked potatoes is how long they take to make. Yes, you can microwave potatoes in minutes, or zap them most of the way and finish them in the oven to crisp up the skin, but they never taste quite as good. Piercing the spuds with potato nails is an old trick to reduce baking time, and the hack keeps the taste and texture benefits of entirely oven-baked potatoes.

Baking spikes, like Weber Original Potato Nails, are essentially large standard nails with a flat top made of food-safe metal — usually stainless steel or aluminum. (Don't use regular nails, which can have unsafe coatings.) The nails are poked through the entire length of the potatoes before they go into the oven. Since metal conducts heat, the nails become a heat source in the center of the potatoes, which helps them cook from the inside as well as the outside, speeding up the process.

Potato nails need to pierce the entire potato to work best. They can range from about 3 ½ inches long on the low end, to 6 inches or more; So if a nail isn't long enough for the potato, a second nail can be inserted from the opposite end. Ditch wrapping the spuds in aluminum foil, and bake your potatoes right on the oven rack. Once they're done, carefully remove the hot nails from the potatoes and immediately cut open the baked potatoes right out of the oven.

Nail-pierced potatoes really do cook faster, but you won't be getting a baked potato in 20 minutes. Different tests have found that the nails measurably reduce cooking time, but not by a lot. The potatoes were generally done about 10 percent more quickly, a decrease of around seven to 10 minutes, with aluminum nails doing best because they conduct heat better than stainless steel. Timing isn't everything, however. Another test found just a modest seven-minute improvement, but that the nails produced a fluffier potato than a non-nailed one, baked at the same time.

A test that took a more scientific approach suggested the potatoes only cook a little faster partly because the nails only heat a small surface area. It also said much of the extra heat evaporates as steam since potatoes are mostly water. But many people commenting about potato nails online still swear by them, particularly for larger potatoes. 

Potato nails can also be used to cook potatoes on the grill or in a convection oven — including air fryers. They'll even work with sweet potatoes (You can then boost your sweet potatoes with Tex-Mex toppings). You can even skewer sausages with the nails before grilling to get them on your plate even faster.