Baked Potatoes with Caviar

We love baked potatoes for dinner in my house. One of the teenager’s favorite meals is to take a potato and top it with cheese and a poached egg. Sometimes I contaminate it by adding broccoli, but it is still a popular supper item – click below to see.

Baked Potato with Poached Egg

So I am always on the lookout for baked potato recipes that could serve as a meal unto themselves, and this one was a doozy. The New York Times recently ran a piece on twice-baked potatoes that included a few really tempting recipes, and this was one of them. For those of you who haven’t experienced the wonder that is a twice-baked potato, you are basically getting a baked potato and a mashed potato all in one heavenly meal. You bake the potato, cool it a little, scoop out the insides, mash it up with whatever your heart desires, spoon it back into the potato shell, and bake it again until the edges are golden and crusty.

In this case, the potato is rubbed with coarse salt before it is baked so that the salt kind of bakes into the potato skin. (Potato chip-like, if you will.) Then when the potato is nice and baked, the inside is mashed up with creme fraiche (you can also use sour cream), butter, chopped chives and salt and pepper. You stuff this incredible mixture back into the potato, bake it until it is golden, and then…take a deep breath…you top it with a little more creme fraiche and a spoonful of caviar or salmon roe. I found a little jar of inexpensive red caviar right by the canned tuna in my supermarket that worked just perfectly.

The teenager, of course, opted to top hers with a poached egg instead of the caviar and creme fraiche. But the Southern husband and I were in creme fraiche/caviar heaven. Give it a try!

Baked Potatoes with Caviar, from The New York Times