Upgrade Basic Baked Potatoes With This Southern-Style Transformation For A Major Flavor Boost

A simple baked potato is a neutral canvas that can take you from basic toppings like butter or sour cream to more elaborate options like pulled pork, baked beans, and cheesy broccoli. Tasting Table even listed the unexpected toppings to level up your baked potatoes, but if none of those hit the spot, try a seafood boil baked potato.

A traditional seafood boil contains potatoes, so this recipe doesn't come completely out of left field. Though recipes can vary from cook to cook, seafood boils often feature corn, sausage, potatoes, and shellfish like shrimp, crab, or crawfish in a heavily seasoned broth. Try Tasting Table's festive seafood boil recipe to see how it all comes together. 

Bake the potato until soft and fluffy inside, then split it open and load your toppings. Since a seafood boil baked potato has so many toppings, use a larger potato as your base. Rather than boil everything together, cook the elements individually and add them to the potato with seafood boil-seasoned butter. You could also cook the sausage, corn, crab, and boiled eggs together in a pan with stock and seasoning to bring the flavors closer to a traditional boil.

Crawfish boils became increasingly popular in Louisiana in the 1950s, and the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, which began in 1959, helped expose them to thousands of people. Huge baskets of crawfish were boiled in seasoned water along with corn, potatoes, and sausage. Onion, lemon, and mushrooms were sometimes included. Since there are no hard and fast rules about required ingredients, your seafood boil baked potato has some flexibility in how you assemble it.

Shrimp and crab are more common than crawfish today, but some recipes still call for crawfish, which can be added to a potato. You can also use broccoli, okra, cheese, artichokes, lobster, mussels, and clams. You can even combine the idea of a traditional baked potato, adding ingredients like shredded cheese and bacon. Some versions of a seafood boil potato don't even have a traditional deep red sauce, such as the crab, shrimp, and sausage stuffed potato from the Florida State Fair. 

A traditional seafood boil uses the boiling liquid as part of the sauce, but since you're probably not doing a boil here, you may not have that option. Butter and Old Bay seasoning should be major components of whatever sauce you do make, however. You can even make your own Old Bay at home. Some versions of this dish whip the insides of the potatoes with cheese, butter, Old Bay, and other seasonings to make a sort of seafood boil stuffed potato skin. Others make an Old Bay butter sauce to slather on all the individual ingredients once they're piled on.