I’m the potato latke maker in my family. I long ago stopped making them from a recipe; I just kind of wing it every time. However, given that we pretty much only make them on Chanukah, a year goes by between batches, and hard-earned lessons are forgotten. This blog posting is my attempt to capture my accumulated wisdom, fresh off a perfect batch of latkes, for the benefit of future me and anyone else who stumbles across it.
The stuff in bold below is particularly important to producing quality latkes.
Ingredients:
- yellow potatoes, not white, about six
- a large yellow onion
- matzah meal
- eggs
- salt and pepper
Instructions and observations:
- Grate the potatoes.
- Doing it by hand is better than using a food processor, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
- Squeeze excess water out of the grated potatoes.
- Method 1: Put them in a colander and squeeze them with your hands against the bottom and sides of the colander to press the water out through the holes.
- Method 2: Use cheese cloth.
- Start heating up the frying pan now, on medium-high heat with no oil in it.
- Peel and dice the onion and add it to the potatoes in a large bowl.
- Dicing is better than grating for the onion.
- Dicing is much better than a food processor for the onion.
- Add about a half inch of oil to the frying pan.
- Spread a thin layer of matzah meal on top of the potatoes and onion. It’s probably about a third of a cup total, but that’s just an estimate, I don’t measure.
- Sprinkle in about two teaspoons of salt. It’s hard to put in too much salt, don’t skimp.
- Sprinkle in about half a teaspoon of pepper.
- Add eggs as follows:
- Move the potato mixture to the side of the bowl to open up a space to beat the eggs.
- Crack four eggs into the space and beat them lightly with a fork.
- Mix everything together.
- The potatoes should be fully coated with egg. Add and mix in additional eggs as needed until you can see egg between the pieces of grated potato.
- Use a large flatware spoon (i.e., a “tablespoon” in the colloquial sense) to spoon the batter into the pan as follows.
- Put the latkes around the edge of the pan, leaving the middle empty.
- Leave about an inch of space between them.
- Use slightly heaping spoonfuls, like maybe an inch above the spoon. About the volume of a ping-pong ball. Small latkes cook better, don’t use too much batter.
- If the oil doesn’t bubble immediately when you drop the batter in, it’s not hot enough.
- Once you’ve spooned latkes all around the edge of the pan, use a fork to flatten them slightly.
- When the edges of the latkes are golden brown, flip them over carefully.
- Tongs or a spatula plus a fork will give you more control and splash less oil than just trying to use a spatula by itself.
- About a minute and a half after you flipped them over, use tongs or a fork to remove them from the oil and put them on a plate covered with a couple layers of paper towels for the excess oil to drain off.
- Unless you’re one or two rounds from the end of the batter, add a couple tablespoons of oil to the pan; each batch of latkes soaks up some of the oil and it needs to be replenished.
- Add new latkes to the oil if the salt and paper have already been adjusted properly as below.
- Otherwise, wait 10–15 seconds for the latkes on the paper towels to drain.
- Flip the previous batch over on the paper towels to drain the other side.
- If it’s one of the early batches, taste one of the latkes to see if you need to add more salt or pepper to the batter, add seasoning to taste, and add new latkes to the oil.
- If people aren’t going to eat them immediately, then you can put them in a pan in a 275°F oven to keep them hot and crispy until you’re ready to eat.
- Serve with sour cream, applesauce, and/or ketchup (yes, I’m a heathen, I eat my latkes with ketchup) depending on the diners’ tastes.
