Loaded Baked Potato Soup

Fresh cooked crumbled bacon - thin and crispy or thick and hearty. Your choice. You can also use real bacon bits if you're short on time
Cheddar cheese - fresh grated. Did you know pre-shredded cheese has a powdery coating to prevent it from sticking together? It does. And that prevents the cheese from melting as well as it should. It also has a little hint of a powdery taste. If you have time, go natural. Get a block of cheddar and give it a quick shred. If your kids are older and you trust them around blades ? this is something they can do. Use you discretion of course. You can also use a food processor to quickly shred cheese (and without shredding your fingers too!).
Sour cream - a very small dollop goes a lot way to enhance the overall flavor of this soup.
Chives - fresh or dried depending on what you have available. Green onions are also yummy.
Roasted corn or chopped broccoli - either one of these would be a yummy addition!

Whatever you have one hand is going to be fine. However, if you're buying potatoes just for the purpose of making this recipe, then the best type of potatoes to use for soup are:
Yukon Golds - these are good all-purpose potatoes with a lot of flavor. They are starchy but also hold their shape fairly well. This would be my ideal choice for potato soup.
Russet potatoes - these absorb liquids and are pretty starchy so they don't hold their shape well. They can also become glue-like if you overcook them so be cautious. They will give you a thicker, less chunky soup overall due to their starchy quality. Maybe you'd like that? If you think so, go for it!
Red potatoes - I really like the flavor of red potatoes and they hold their shape well. You can also eat their peel since it's softer than a regular potato. Great if you're feeling lazy and don't mind the skins showing up in your soup.
Sweet potato - you could also use the potato's sweeter, more orange friend! 🙂 Of course, this will give you a completely different, sweeter overall flavor, but you may just love that.
Experiment and see what you like best!

I prefer to make potato soup on the stove top using my dutch oven. I have a green 6-quart Lodge cast iron dutch oven I love to use. It's what I use for almost all my soup making and a lot of my general cooking. It's very versatile and lives on my stove top so it's just easy. You could make this in the crockpot. Just increase cook time to 1 hour on high or 2 hours on low and check for doneness of the potatoes. I usually do this by carefully pulling out a large chunk of potato and seeing if it's soft all the way through. If you have an Instant Pot, you could also use that to cook the potatoes quickly and then add the rest of the ingredients to make the soup.