Skillet Baked Potatoes, Barbecue Edition

As the weather finally gets nicer, I’m starting to think about all those summertime recipes that I’ve kept in my back pocket for way too long now. These skillet baked potatoes are one of those recipes, not because they are a particularly summery dish, but because in our house this recipe was born of a love for the grill. While these skillet baked potatoes can just as easily be made in the oven inside, there’s something about the smokiness of the grill that lends itself to a simple ingredient like a potato, just begging to absorbed by all sorts of tasty flavors. Not only that, but the smokiness of the grill is a perfect compliment to the smokey bacon topping, and the potatoes can   baked right on the grill while you grill any other foods, that way you don’t have to light the oven inside on a hot summer’s day.

There are two pieces of equipment that my household, particularly my brother, loves to use, and those are the grill and the cast iron skillet, and this recipe is the perfect combination of the two. The use of cast iron skillets in our family goes back a long time, to my grandfather who pretty much exclusively cooked in cast iron. These pans were passed down to us as we inherited my grandparent’s house, and the years worth of food cooked in them has made them more non stick than any teflon pan you could ever buy. These skillet baked potatoes are the perfect use of those pans, with bacon being fried up in the cast iron and the grease being reserved in the bottom. When the potatoes are cooked, they then get split open, mashed with butter, and layered into that same skillet to absorb all of that tasty bacon flavor. And of course they’re topped with more bacon and lots of melty cheese – we use gruyere because it’s super creamy when it melts and has a nice tang to it. These skillet baked potatoes make a perfect side for any barbecue dinner when cooked on the grill, or any other meal when cooked inside in the oven.