The Annoying Reason You'll Never Be Able To Recreate Wendy's Cheesy Baked Potato At Home

It can be super fun to try to recreate your favorite fast food recipes at home (we're partial to homemade McDonald's fries with a bit of beef flavoring), but copycat pursuits don't always turn out like we'd hoped. One that's particularly hard to nail down: a Wendy's baked potato, topped with cheese sauce. The ingredients section on the chain's website for the cheese sauce is pretty lengthy and features several things that you probably don't have laying around in your pantry, making it nearly impossible to recreate the exact cheesy baked potato you'd get in the restaurant in your kitchen at home. 

Here's what we do know: Wendy's tops its cheese baked potatoes with both cheddar cheese sauce and shredded cheddar cheese, so using both a liquid-style cheese and a solid version can help you achieve a similar texture. When it comes to the cheese sauce itself, however, it's not so simple. While the first few ingredients listed are simple — water, cheddar cheese, milk, and butter — it gets a bit dicey from there. Modified corn starch, whey protein concentrate, oleoresin paprika, and konjac, to name a few more, are tougher to pin down. The ingredients list also includes natural flavoring. While natural flavors are extracted from animal-based or plant-based (not chemical) ingredients,  Wendy's doesn't disclose what it uses for its natural flavoring, or what components of cheese (if any) are used. This means, basically, any cheese-derived product could fit the bill here.

Making a baked potato is pretty simple — a bit of oil, salt, and a piece of aluminum foil is all that you'll need. Start off by giving your potato a good scrub (Reddit says that using russet potatoes is key to getting Wendy's-style fluffiness), poke a few holes in it to let out some steam, wrap it in foil, and let it cook in the oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour or so. If you want your potato's skin to get crispy, you may want to take the foil off for the last 15 minutes of cooking. Don't slice it in half until you're ready to add your toppings — you want a piping hot, steaming potato for your cheese to melt into.

As we mentioned, you'll want to go with two types of cheese — both a shredded cheddar and a more liquid, saucy cheese. You can certainly go with cheese in a can for the saucy component (we don't judge), but it's not impossible to make your own — just be sure that you shred cheeses (you'll want to use more than one type for a cheese sauce) from a whole block rather than trying to create a sauce out of pre-shredded cheese, as the latter typically includes anti-caking agents that will put a quick stop to a smooth consistency. Finally, take the foil you originally wrapped your potato in and tent it over your spud loosely once it's topped with that and your shredded cheddar, allowing the steam to melt every shred of delicious cheese.