These Duchess Potatoes are the perfect dinner party or Christmas side dish. These light, fluffy French potato rosettes are golden and crispy on the edges. You can also make them ahead of time and refrigerate on a tray ready for baking. Just slide these into the oven when ready and in 15 minutes these will be done!
About These Duchess Potatoes
Dear Reader, I have the BEST Christmas potato side dish for you! Duchess Potatoes or Pommes Duchesse are delicious seasoned mashed potatoes that are light and fluffy and piped into rosettes. This French mashed potato recipe is made with mashed potatoes mixed with butter, cream and an egg yolk.
Duchess Potatoes are perfect for Christmas because they are best made ahead of time. YES!! Basically a day or two before, mash and season the potatoes and pipe them and then leave them uncovered on a tray in the fridge. Then 15 minutes before you want to serve them, brush them with butter and slide the whole tray into the oven and bake! 15 minutes later, et voila, perfect fancy (but not really fancy) mashed potatoes.
That 15 minutes cooking time is important because if you've made a Christmas roast, you'll have to rest it for 15-30 minutes. So the oven will be free for you to finish these Duchess Potatoes off at a higher heat than you would cook a roast.
Duchess Potatoes are so good because you get a lovely crust on the ridges but they're also so delicious and light thanks to the egg yolk in them that allows them to become so addictively puffy and delicious. We seriously love them. And I love them even more because they're the ultimate dinner party potato.
I'll also share with you a really handy tip on how to do a bulk amount of these! This recipe can be easily doubled or tripled, provided you have space in the fridge for the trays.
Video How To Make Duchess Potatoes
Video: How to Make Duchess Potatoes with tips
Ingredients For Duchess Potatoes
Potatoes - Use a floury or mashing potato like Coliban, Sebago, King Edward, Dutch Cream, Russetts or Yukon Gold.
Salt - Go for fine salt or kosher salt.
Cream - Pure or thickened cream works perfectly in this.
Butter - Use salted butter
Egg yolk - Technically you can omit the egg yolk but I would advise against omitting it because it really adds a lovely lightness to the mashed potato.
Tips For Making Duchess Potatoes
1 - I always boil potatoes with extra salt so that the potatoes absorb the salt from the water. Once they're boiled just drain - there's no need to brush the salt off the potatoes. In fact potatoes require quite a bit of salt to be truly delicious so I always add a little once I taste the mash.
2 - I use a 845 Closed Star tip to make these rosettes. But you can also use any XL star tip but make sure that it's an extra large tip.
3 - If you are doubling or tripling the recipe this tip will help with piping. Place around 1 cup of the potato mixture on top of a square of cling film and shape into a log with open ends and repeat with remaining mashed potato. You will slide one of these potato "cartridges" into the piping bag. This makes reloading the piping bag much easier and saves using multiple piping bags.
4 - These are best served from the oven so that they're hot, crispy edged and light.
5 - You may be tempted to add some grated parmesan. I did find that the resulting rosettes weren't as able to hold their shape as those without parmesan. But they were delicious!
Duchess Potatoes Recipe
Did you make this recipe? Share your creations by tagging @notquitenigella on Instagram with the hashtag #notquitenigella
Step 1 BOIL - Cut potatoes into even sized pieces and place in a pot of water. Add 2 tablespoons of salt and bring to a boil. Boil until tender and soft. Drain the water and then place the pot back on the stove to steam dry the potatoes to get rid of any excess water. Don't worry about washing off the salt.
Step 2 MASH - Pass the potato pieces through a potato ricer into a large bowl. Mix well with the cream, melted butter and egg yolk. Taste for seasoning adding salt if needed.
Step 3 PIPE - Line a baking tray with parchment. Place potato mixture in a piping bag fitted with a 845 XL closed star piping tip. See tip above if you're doubling or tripling the recipe. Pipe rosettes (or in my case mini Christmas trees) on the tray. At this stage, you can slide this tray uncovered into the fridge overnight or for up to 2 nights. Or you can bake them straight away.
Step 4 BAKE - Preheat oven to 220C/428F conventional or 200C/392F fan forced. Lightly brush each rosette with extra melted butter and bake for 15 minutes or until you get caramelised edges.
Video: How to Make Easy Christmas Crackers
Personal Note
Video How To Make Christmas Crackers
I love having Friendsmas because it allows me to see my friends for a Christmas dinner but also make all of these Christmas recipes. This year Laura and LimaLimaDelta (her boyfriend) came along to Friendsmas along with Queen Viv. Laura asked me what she could bring. I thought about it. Queen Viv always brings champagne and flowers so I asked if she could bring bread rolls and oysters. I would make some ginger and lime oyster dressing and some seaweed butter to go with the rolls.
Everything was going on schedule up until 2 days before. There was one thing that I realised that was one step too far. A few weeks ago I decided to make Christmas crackers. However this decision, made foolishly in the relative quiet of November managed to send me over the edge 2 days before Friendsmas. Cooking is all very easy and fun but craft? Who did I think I was? Was I deluded? Clearly!
I lay in bed one night exhausted and worried about what I would put in the Christmas crackers. Then Mr NQN and I went on a late night supermarket visit and grabbed some bouchon chocolates. They were the perfect shape.
So I'm going to share with you this little craft project to making your own Christmas crackers here. All you need are:
Napkins - just a regular square napkin around 40x40cms or 16x16inches
Ribbon - 2x 40cm/16inch pieces of ribbon per Christmas Cracker
Wrapping Paper - 12x18cms/4.7x7inch rectangle.
A treat to put inside.
Sticky tape
Step 1 - Wrap up the treat in the wrapping paper and create a tube out of the wrapping paper. Secure with sticky tape.
Step 2 - Place the tube in the centre bottom of a napkin. Roll up. Secure each end with a ribbon bow! And that's it!
They were actually quite easy and took about 2 minutes for each one although if you were doing it for a massive crowd I'd recommend against making your own. Or if you're exhausted before Christmas forget these. The way I described them to Laura was a "Sharp descent into madness"!
So tell me Dear Reader, are you good at crafts? Have you ever made your own Christmas crackers?
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