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

The best twice-baked potato? Bake it three times!Or at least that’s what I initially thought. Twice-baked potatoes have a lot going for them—cheese, sour cream, bacon, and chives mixed with potato, come on!—but they also almost always have leathery skins. A third trip in the oven seemed like a simple way to give them a boost. But it wasn’t so simple.My first impulse was to <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/airfry">air fry</a> the scooped skins, but after many trials, they remained stubbornly leathery. Deep frying yielded a better texture, but they didn’t look very appealing, to say the least. But then I remembered a kind of deconstructed twice-baked potato we used to serve when I worked at <a href="https://canlis.com/">Canlis</a>: a twice-baked potato filling set in a small cocotte, broiled just before serving so it was crispy and browned on top. All it needed was crispy skin.If I was going to go the deconstructed route, it made sense to deconstruct the skins, too. After baking and scooping the flesh out of the potatoes, I cut the skins into strips and fried them, which yielded crispy, fry-like potato bits that I could shower all over the individual serving dishes of loaded baked potato.Technically, this is more of a twice-baked-then-broiled potato with fried crispy skin on top, I guess. But once you taste it, I’m pretty sure you won’t care what it’s called. You’ll probably just think it’s the best version of twice-baked potatoes you’ve ever had.

Thrice-Baked Potatoes