Easy Loaded Potato Skins Recipe

Loaded baked potatoes are all very well, but oftentimes the toppings are gone when you're halfway through eating it, leaving you nothing but plain, bland spud. With loaded potato skins, however, the potatoes are less of an overwhelming presence, thus allowing you to finish both the toppings and the taters at the same time.

While this potato preparation may seem somewhat wasteful, you're not actually using just the skins and throwing away the rest of the starch. You can either set apart some of the potato you've scraped from the skins, or you can do what recipe developer Catherine Brookes does and use all of the potato, mixing the rest of it with the fillings to make what are essentially potato skins filled with loaded mashed potatoes. Brookes describes this dish as "packed with melty cheese and bacon, with a soft fluffy middle and crisp skin on the outside." Add a tall glass of beer and a TV tuned to the game, and you'll have the perfect bar snack.

To make these over-the-top potato skins, you'll start with potatoes, something along the lines of russets or Yukon golds. You'll then need olive oil and salt, plus some bacon (Brookes, hailing from the U.K., uses British bacon, but if you're on the other side of the Atlantic, go ahead and grab that American-style bacon made from pork belly), both cream cheese and cheddar cheese, and chives for the filling.

Set the oven to 425 F. While it preheats, clean your potatoes off and pat them dry, then rub them with half of the olive oil. Sprinkle the potatoes with salt and then, once the oven is hot enough, bake them for an hour. When they are done, the skins should be crispy, but there should be some give when you poke them; if you stick them with a fork, it should pierce them easily. Take the potatoes out of the oven and let them cool down for 15 minutes.

As the potatoes are cooling, cook the bacon, whichever way you prefer or that the package instructions advise. Once it's crispy, crumble or cut it into small pieces.

When the potatoes are cool, cut them in half lengthwise and scoop the potato from the skins (leaving those intact). Mash the potatoes with the bacon, cream cheese, and half of the cheddar.

Divide the mashed potato mixture between the skins, then sprinkle them with the rest of the cheddar. Lower the oven temperature to 400 F and bake the skins for 10 to 15 minutes, until the cheese melts and is starting to turn brown. Remove them from the oven and sprinkle with chives.

You can serve these as an appetizer, as part of a buffet spread, or as a main dish, although for the latter you'll probably want to eat at least two.