The Comforting Canned Ingredient Your Baked Potatoes Have Been Missing

The mere mention of baked potatoes conjures up comfort and warmth. They're starchy, savory, and earthy, and a hearty vehicle for your favorite creamy toppings or spicy seasonings. They're also good for you, with plenty of fiber, vitamin C, and a smaller but high-quality amount of protein. Baking potatoes actually preserves more of the root vegetable's nutrients than frying or boiling them, too. As if you needed another reason to add more baked potatoes into your cooking rotation, they're pretty easy to make — it's the additions you can really get creative with. In fact, it's learning some of the best tips and ideas for loading up your baked potatoes that can give this dish more variety from dinner to dinner, and can even turn it into a whole meal itself. Case in point: canned soup.

There are all kinds of unexpected toppings that can level up your baked potatoes, and canned soup can actually combine a handful of these into one satisfying meal — think steak, chicken, or meatballs with a variety of vegetables. The potato-and-soup combination makes it so quick and easy to bring together a delicious, filling lunch or dinner, as you simply bake your potatoes, heat your soup, and enjoy. If you remember that microwaving potatoes to bake them can deliver tasty results, your prep just got even more effortless. The possibilities are endless, too — lean Mexican with tortilla soup or Italian with minestrone. 

To combine soup and potatoes for ideal results, first consider some of the best canned soups to have for simplified recipes like this potato idea. There are two ways you can go: Straining off the broth and just using the soup's solid ingredients as toppings, or making your potatoes the base of a stew by adding the liquid, too. For the former approach, tasty options include minestrone, tortilla soup, beef barley and vegetable, really any bean or vegetable soup, and a chicken noodle soup if it's made with a tiny, not-dense-and-starchy pasta like pastina. For the latter, any kind of chili would work a treat; you could also mimic the creaminess of butter or sour cream with a cream of chicken or mushroom soup, or lean decadent and cheesy with broccoli and cheddar. French onion soup would be delightful, too, especially with a bit of gruyere melted on top.

Just remember you'll have to tweak your usual baked-potato topping approach when you add soup. If you usually add sour cream, that would still be perfect with tortilla soup, but not so much with, say, minestrone or mushroom. For seasonings, keep things simple — like salt and pepper — so you don't compete with the soup. Concentrate on the outside of the potato — one of the best tips for leveling up baked potatoes is to flavor the skins with olive oil and the spices of your choice.