Making Baked potatoes for a crowd (70) & keeping hot: help please

[dillonmck]

Hello. I have to bake 70 potatoes for a jacket & chili fundraising quiz (all the glamorous jobs!). I'm really worried I've underestimated the task. I found a few American websites that said they'll be fine in a cooler for up to four hours (I only need two hours from baking) but I tried it last night with 24 potatoes (yes we now have a lot in the freezer for lunches) but there was a lot of steam & then condensation in the cooler...and the potatoes definitely suffered. Has anyone done this and have any tips? The oven at the venue is very small & Im not sure we can use it anyway. We'll heat the chili on the stove top. Thank you (desperate face)

Did you wrap them in foil?
We used to do a spuds & puds event and the spuds were cooked at various people's houses, wrapped I'm foil and kept in coolers (obviously without any icepacks!), they were always fine.

Their own heat will keep them pretty hot if they're piled up. Using tea towels over them will help to keep them warm but not too much condensation. So I'd put them in a cooler, couple of tea towels over the top, but no lid.
Or use cardboard boxes for them, again no lid, tea towels.

If you can use the oven, to keep them warm, put as many as possible in there on a low oven.

I should imagine that it will take HOURS to cook them - if you have 3 shelves in an oven, how many can you get on a shelf? Having that many in an oven at the same time will mean it takes longer to cook them.

Wrap them in foil and put them in slow cookers?

Cooler with cardboard and lots of tea towels and potatoes wrapped in foil. Then we used to use disposable BBQs to heat them more( and heat toppings) worked for 50 cubs/ scouts/ leaders etc.

Thank you everyone for advice & suggestions. I went with using the cooler again but layering very loosely with tea towels and propping the cooler lid open with a bundle of tea towels to keep warm but not steamy. It seemed to do the trick for anyone else foolish enough to agree to something similar! The potatoes were fine (tho not gourmet standard as there still was a bit of 'steaminess'). I did read online that you shouldn't wrap in foil to keep warm as bacteria can grow in closed environment....but I'm not sure whether that's true/a real risk, but just in case that's why I stuck with loose tea towels. Thanks all.