Give Baked Potatoes 10x More Flavor With This Canned Soup

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What is the biggest mistake people make with baked potatoes? From the point of view of your taste buds, it would probably be serving it plain. It's like eating salad without dressing or bread without butter ... just no fun. It's a well-known fact that toppings take boring tubers and transform them into something actually worth eating, but one ingredient that may not have occurred to you is canned cheese soup. The ideal is the condensed kind, such as Campbell's Cheddar Cheese (which is available at Walmart for around $2 per can, although prices may vary by location).

Cheese and potatoes are as perfect a pairing as peanut butter and jelly, but cheese soup has the benefit of being already in a semi-liquid state. It's also shelf-stable, so if you bought a tin way back when and forgot about it, you can still make cheesy potatoes even if every last bit of cheese in your fridge has grown moldy.

The simplest way to add canned cheese soup to your baked potato is to spoon it over the top. There's no need to reconstitute — in fact, it's best that you don't since in its thickened state it's more like a sauce. The heat from the potato will melt and warm the cheese soup, or you can stick the potato in the microwave or back in the oven for a moment to take off any residual chill from the can. You could also cut the baked potato in half, scoop out the flesh, mash it up with a few spoonfuls of cheese soup, then spoon it back into the skin.

The cheese soup alone will take that boring baked potato and turn it into a far more flavorful side dish or even a main. You may also want to upgrade to an enhanced cheese soup — the Campbell's lineup includes other options such as Broccoli Cheese, White Cheddar, and Garlic Parmesan with Herbs. You can even mix in some other popular baked potato toppings that go well with cheese, such as crumbled bacon, diced ham, chopped green onions, pickled jalapeños, or sour cream.

Yet another idea is to make cheesy loaded baked potato stacks using a muffin pan. Cut the potatoes into rounds while they're still raw, then sandwich a few slices together with condensed cheese soup and stick each stack in a cup. Again, you can take some of the aforementioned additions and sprinkle them between the layers. This method of potato baking requires more prep work, but it also takes less time to cook – 30 minutes in the oven instead of an hour. The reason for this is that potato slices will soften more quickly than whole ones, while the cheesy soup filling helps keep them from drying out.