Kyl Haselbauer has 20 years of experience working in fine-dining and modernist kitchens, including Bar Cotto and Anchovies &amp; Olives in Seattle. He is also the owner of Bright Spot, a café and coffee shop in Seattle.

Kyl Haselbauer

If you’re going to take the trouble to make duchess potatoes—a potato purée enriched with egg yolks and piped out all fancy-like—you might as well load them up with flavor. A fully loaded baked potato is straightforward. Fully loaded duchess potatoes? Not so much. Since duchess potatoes are piped into pretty rosettes, incorporating the large amount of fat characteristic of a loaded baked potato into the egg yolk–enriched purée leads to some structural issues: The ridges on the rosette don’t hold and the rosette itself deflates, since the puréed mixture is too soft. So, we incorporated about as much fat—bacon fat, butter, egg yolks, sour cream, and cheese—as the potato purée could reasonably handle without losing its structure, which produces rosettes that retain their ridges and shape once baked. In fact, they’re just firm enough that you can carefully pick them up and pull off the finishing move: piping more chive-spiked sour cream into their bases.

Fully Loaded Duchess Potatoes