This post is kindly sponsored by Rachel Conlon, in honor of her friend Renée Gibbins’s birthday.
Happy almost Chanukah, everyone! Chanukah is always a little bit up in the air for my family because, like many Jews, we have our larger celebration of it “whenever seems most convenient for everyone.” We light the candles all eight nights, but otherwise our actual lives are often unchanged for the span of the actual holiday.
I love holidays, and I love winter holidays especially. One of my favorite Chanukah traditions is frying latkes (potato pancakes) with my mom. Whether we have family over or go somewhere for the holiday, we always set up a little frying station at the stove and argue for fifteen to twenty minutes about whether the latkes are perfectly shaped. Latkes are comfort food, and they always make me think of the times when my mom would bring latkes into my elementary school classes — and, more recently, the rare occasions on which my mom and I actually want to cook the same thing at the same time. When I asked her if she would make the latkes with me for this article, she said, “Yes — but we have to make them perfectly!” I agreed to her terms, and here we are.
One of the lasting controversies of my life, and one of the few fights I’ve ever consistently participated in rather than avoiding, is whether one should use pulverized or shredded potatoes in latkes. My mother makes them using pulverized potatoes, so I always thought pulverized were the way to go. Only in college did I discover that most people shred their potatoes, or use a shredding attachment in a food processor. I fought with my entire college Hillel about this every single year, alienating many — senior year of college, in fact, I got so worked up I skipped the official latke celebration and instead made latkes for some friends who lived off-campus, carting my blender over in my backpack.
In my old age, though, I’ve mellowed out: I realize that taste is subjective. I understand why people have different latke preferences! For the most part, people like what they grew up with — latkes are, for many Jewish people, inherently linked to childhood holiday memories and family.
Ingredients:
4-5 Idaho potatoes
¼ Spanish onion
2 eggs
½ cup matzo meal (or ¼ cup flour)
1 teaspoon salt
Half a lemon, squeezed
Materials:
Non-reactive bowl (glass, china, etc) so the potatoes don’t turn black
fine mesh sieve (or paper towels)
Frying pan/skillet
Blender or food processor
Yield: one batch, or about 20 medium-sized latkes.
(If you really want to make latkes with shredded potatoes, I’m sure this recipe would still work fine, but I have not tried it out myself.)
Directions: Set up your frying station. You have to work fast with latkes, because as soon as you peel your potatoes they will begin to turn pink, then black. The potatoes (and eventual latkes) are still edible and will taste fine, but the discoloration really bothers my mother and she’s passed on her fear to me.
Get out the potatoes, onion, lemon, eggs, and matzo meal or flour. To set up a frying station the way my mom and I usually do, put oil in a frying pan. Put a plate or platter next to the frying pan with paper towels on it and more paper towels right next to it; place these far enough away that there’s no danger of anything catching on fire.
Peel your potatoes, or better yet make your younger brother peel potatoes. If you have an older brother and your older brother is exactly like mine, he will be sitting nearby using his computer and asking you how far you are in Jessica Jones.
Cut the potatoes into largish chunks, about 1 to 2 inches. Peel your onion. (I usually use about a quarter of an onion, but you can go to a half or even a whole; it just depends on how much onion you want. Honestly, this whole thing is hard to screw up.) Cut the onion into similar-sized pieces as the potatoes. Put potato and onion in food processor or blender and pulverize until you have a homogenous white mixture and no solid pieces left.
Pour potato/onion mixture into a fine mesh sieve and press on it with a spatula or stack of paper towels. Liquid should pour out the bottom. Keep moving around and pressing on the mixture until liquid stops consistently draining. Pour into nonreactive bowl.
Crack eggs, mix into bowl. Mix in Matzo Meal. Pour in salt and squeeze in your half-lemon.
Turn your stove on high. Let the oil heat up — this is different pan by pan and stove by stove. I would say let the oil start shimmering. You can put a small amount of latke dough in the oil to see if oil starts bubbling around it — this will mean your oil is heated enough. At this point, I usually turn the stove down to a medium or medium-low flame.
(I use corn oil; you can also use vegetable oil or olive oil. My mom wants me to tell everyone that her college friend makes latkes fried in schmaltz — rendered chicken fat — and they’re “out of this world.”)
Form a latke by taking your desired amount out with one spoon and shaping with another spoon. They should be an oval or round shape, and I typically make them with about 3-4 tablespoons of batter. Latkes can be whatever size you want, though, and this just means the frying time will vary depending on the size. Gently slide the formed latke into the oil. Repeat this step 3-4 times depending on the size of your pan; there should always be some space between the latkes, at least an inch or so so they don’t cook together.
You will be able to see the bottom edges begin to brown, starting with the first latke you put in. Using a spatula, check the bottom of the latkes. Once the majority of the bottom is light brown (extremely defined from the original white) gently turn it over. Again, this will depend on the size of your latke and your pan.
Keep checking on the bottom of the latkes. Once the bottom is the same brown as the top, it’s done!
Gently lift latke out of pan and place on top of the paper towels. Lift all of the latkes out as they finish. If you are planning on making latkes for later on or to bring somewhere, stop frying before latkes are fully browned. You can cover them on a platter in cling film and later put them in the oven at 400 degrees for a few minutes to crisp up.
Place new paper towels on top of finished latkes. Using the same oil, repeat process until dough is done, replacing paper towels between layers of latkes. If you are making more than two batches, or when the oil seems watery, change out oil. Potatoes will start to turn pink and then black, so work continuously. When I fry lates with my mom, we put the bowl with the latke dough between us to maximize efficiency.
Enjoy your latkes! They’re traditionally served with applesauce or sour cream. I’m not a huge sour cream fan, so I go applesauce every time.
Jackie, my photographer, was a bit dubious because she’s only ever had the shredded potato latkes. She loved these, though. We meant to save a bunch to eat later, but Jackie, my parents and I ate all of them, and then we all took long, long naps.
All photos by Jackie Friedman.
My father likes to pulverize the potatoes. I’ve always mocked his way, because making his (handed down from Grandma, who specifies “grate the potatoes”) recipe with pulverized potatoes leads to a big soggy mess that does not fry well.
I’m going to send him this recipe. Maybe this Chanukah I won’t hurt his feelings by refusing to eat latkes!
This makes me so happy! Even though our family always uses shredded potatoes.
Also, my grandmother used to serve these with a cup of “someday when you marry a nice Jewish doctor, you can cook these for him!” But now my Mom has taken over so she serves them with a half-cup of “oy vey I’ll never have any grandchildren to spoil” along with a nice complementary sprinkling of Jewish guilt.
Dogs and potato pancakes seem totally dreamy. Shades of my grandmother who was born in 1897. Yes, I’m ancient myself. We shred our potatoes.
Traditional Jewish side dishes.
#TeamShredded
Yay latkes!
#shreddedinschmaltz4lyfe
your username. is so so wonderful.
Thanks!
Pulverized potatoes probably make delicious latkes, but they look like the box mix kind so I would have a hard time getting people to try them.
Also, there are few things that schmaltz does not improve. I call it “liquid gold”.
I feel like this is the brilliant part though! It gives you the nice consistency and easy-to-work-with dough of the box mix kind, but the fresh taste and moral superiority of making them from scratch.
Or so I imagine – I’ve never tried pulverized-potato latkes from scratch.
Those look amazing. Since the potatoes are so fine, it almost resembles a kind of fried mashed potato ball, of which I heartily approve.
Can you get schmaltz anywhere–like at any butcher’s shop–or is it a specialty item that you can only get in big cities? #theruraljew
Oh! I’m actually not sure, but I think you can get it at a large grocery store or butcher’s shop? I know my mom’s friend makes it own but I don’t know how time or labor intensive it is.
If you have a chicken, it’s really easy to make actually. You just take the pieces of fat off the bird and cook them way down and the collect the rendered liquid. Then you can also saute the leftover pieces with onions, which is a Yiddish delicacy called gribnes and is the most heavenly way to give yourself cardiac arrest.
I just salt and pepper the fat/skin bits and microwave them, pour off the fat (for matzo balls), and then eat the crispies.
Some butchers will give you chicken skin at a discount rate.
I was going to say “if you ask nicely”, but really it seems to depend on whether they have a lot of chicken skin hanging around. I once called in the morning, and they saved all the skin from the boneless skinless breasts for me when I came in in the evening.
Put in in a pan in a low (300-325) degree oven for a couple hours. If you want the fat to not be super chickeny, add half a cup of water to the pan. Strain it into a jar and keep in the fridge for… over a week?
Personally, I have a very open mind about different takes on fried potatoes.
In my family latkes, potato pancakes, and fried mashed potato patties are three separate foods, possibly just to give us an excuse to eat fried potatoes more often.
what kind of oil and how much should we use? these look amazinggg
Olive oil. The whole thing is about the olive oil that miraculously lasted for eight days.
I usually just use canola oil, and a fair amount of it. A lighter olive oil would probably be fine, but the one time I cooked them in olive oil, they just tasted weird. You’re not deep-frying, but you want the latkes to be nice and oily.
My dad grates them, and it is his job to do the latkes. Apparently making them is For Men in our family. He only does them once a year because they’re a pain in the ass and make the house smell like fried for a while, but it is so worth it. (It might be in February this year because that’s when I come home, but.)
You can get potato pancakes here easy enough, and anywhere east of here even easier, but somehow they’re not the same as my dad’s.
I love my shredded latkes, but there’s room enough in my world for pulverized too 🙂
Question for my #teamshredded sistern: do you cook the potatoes first or shred them raw? I use a box grater to shred them as I don’t have a food processor, and I’ve always grated them raw – the potato cooks as you fry them and you get nice crunchy crispy bits around the edges. I tried grating parboiled taters the other day and it was a fail – they just moosh all over the grater – but in a food processor, maybe YMMV?
Raw! Only raw.
Finally I find someone else who makes them with pulverized potatoes! I also fought with my Hillel as a wee sheltered freshman being exposed to the shredded latkes for the first time. I tried them. They are not as good. Obviously that is coming from a place of nostalgia/my mom is the best cook in the world bias, but it is my truth. My home will never see the shredded ones. I go box before shredded. I will also be trying this recipe for sure this winter, since I will still be at school for Hannukah and my mom’s recipe is “I don’t know, you just throw some potatoes and onions together until it looks right. Figure it out!”- so having some sort of numerical base to start with is nice.
Ok this is v timely. I tried to make latkes today (shredding? I think? What in the UK we would call grating?) but they didn’t cook all the way through…what am I doing wrong? they weren’t super thick and it was on a medium-high heat. Help!
If the outside is burning before the inside is cooked, you need to turn the heat down a bit.
I know but they weren’t burning they were browning nicely but I would have had to cook them for like 10 mins on either side for them to cook….
That’s perfectly normal.
Ok, so here’s a very serious solution. (1) Do what you do in the pan till they’re nice and crispy, then (2) put them in a low oven (say, 100-120 degrees C), and accumulate them there till you’ve finished standing there frying stuff like that’s all you want to do in life. The low heat will cook the insides, and will not harm the external crispiness, which is very important in a latke.
I have only ever had ones with shredded potatoes, but this recipe looks amazing!
Okay, I don’t know fancy cookin’ terms like shredded vs grated vs pulverized, but if you wanna make good latkes (aka my family’s latkes) you gotta run a bunch of potatoes (and up to half an onion) through one of these babies:
Any graters that leave you with identifiable little strips of solid potato instead of a glorious bowl of mush can get right out.
Malt vinegar instead of lemon!
Though probably not if you go applesauce maybe.
Mmm, latkes. I always use shredded potatoes, I’ve never even tried pulverized ones. I also like sweet potato latkes, but I’ve learned from experience to mix them half and half with white potatoes (sweet potatoes on their own aren’t starchy enough).
Wait, lemon? Wtf? That’s just wrong!
My mother’s latkes were made of mush — she has a sadistic grid of wire mesh that goes over the bowl that she uses to “grate” the potatoes. Or rather, she used to tell me to grate them. My knuckles were so bloody… Also, shredded potatoes give the latkes a more interesting texture.
My mother used a meat grinder! It was very easy to use, produced a lovely smooth batter, and you didn’t have to worry about grating your fingers. I was at some youth thing at our synagogue once where we were making latkes and they introduced us to graters, and I was shocked at how annoying they were. These days I use my food processor’s shredding blade, but someday I’ll get a meat grinder attachment for my mixer and do it right.
I am also very excited that Lisa’s recipe includes matzoh meal; everyone I know uses flour and that’s just wrong.
Shredded potatoes forever. That’s how you get the crispy parts.
NO JOKE
This article is heresy. Shredded potatoes for life and wtf is this lemon juice nonsense we put in cream of tartar to keep them from turning odd colors n you gotta put a lot of salt and pepper in the mix fry in olive oil only and idk i’m a good jew but i’ve never liked sour cream OR applesauce on my latkes? someone expressing this Opinion caused a huge debate on jewish tumblr but I’m a big fan of mustard on my latkes sorry
we like potato latkes, mostly grated but partially pulverized, in my house.
but mostly what we like are my dad’s spinach latkes, sprinkled with sugar before frying. i’m craving them now.
Here in Israel every Hannukah we are inundated with recipes for Latkes of all sorts and from all vegetables (although of course potato is the traditional).
I thought I’d seen every variation possible, but I admit I have never before encountered Hannukah Latkes made from pulverized potatoes. Always shredded.
I love how ‘Mush potatoes and fry’ has made its way to every culture in the world!
In Ireland (Where we are admittedly potato obsessed) we have potato farls (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/14/how-to-make-potato-farls-back-to-basics) which frankly I’ve never liked, but then I’ve only had the shop bought kind.
However we also have potato cakes which are the holy grail of leftover breakfast foods. Its essentially: Take left over mashed potato, roll into ball*, roll in flour, fry. Then cover with butter and gorge! (These are an essential part of an ‘Irish’ breakfast imo.)
I’ve been making them since I was a kid, but they never turn out quite like my mums (and she is a terrible cook, so I have no idea how that happened.) which makes me sad. I make have to crib from the jewish culture and give this a go instead!
*My mother taught me an amazing trick using a plastic carrier bag that means this can be done in 5 mins and doesn’t result in messy hands or messy kitchens. I will happily document for Toasties if anyone is interested
I’m amazed it took 3 hours from time of posting for someone to ask you to detail a new and better way of making potatoes! Please document thoroughly.
I don’t know if I can do this without pictures or a video (Maybe I can spin this into a Toast debut; How to make potato balls using a carrier bag when you’re very hungover and just want fried potatoes without washing up)
Basically:
1-Take old carrier bag and lay it flat on your counter with the opening facing you
2-put flour on top of bag
3- use a spoon to put a lump of mashed potato in the middle of the flour
4- put hands inside the bag (so as to separate potato & flour from hands)
5- use bag like a glove to shape potato ball and cover in flour
Rinse and repeat until you have a plate of potato cakes ready to go in the pan (Don’t ask me about cooking, I usually end up with a pan full of warm, oily, mash.)
This makes no sense.
So I read your comment and thought I MUST COMMENT ABOUT TATTIE SCONES, then promptly googled and found out that tattie scones and farls are the same thing.
Here in Scotland, folk will sometimes eat them as a breakfast roll sandwich filler, but I have never been one for carbs-on-carbs.
Potato bread in a bread roll. It’s so amazingly Scottish. (I won’t deny that hash browns in a breakfast roll has never happened…)
Did you know that breakfast rolls are not a thing in England!!! Cause I didn’t when I chose to move to this silly country. It’s the perfect hangover food.
Oh man, these look amazing. Thanks for sharing the perfection, Lisa!
Huh, I always think of these as diner latkes. Though I am #TeamShredded (and want desperately to post my recipe but don’t want to be tacky), any form of fried potato is good eating.
This is also super timely, because I’m teaching a latke CLASS this weekend and am excited/terrified.
POST IT, fearing tackiness is such a waste of time.
Here you go: http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/latkes.aspx
Oh boy, pulverized potatoes, lemon, and NO ONIONS TO SPEAK OF? How are these latkes? I am enraged.
I guess it’s true that anything *can* happen in America.
You just laid out pretty much all the truth.
All I could think of when I read this title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg51la8Yayc
(The Maccabeats singing about latkes to the tune of Shut Up and Dance, yes it’s perfect, you’re welcome, bye)
My mother has always insisted that for proper latkes, the potatoes must be grated by hand.
I’m not really inclined to agree.
My mother has always insisted that for proper latkes, the potatoes must be grated by hand.
I'm not really inclined to agree.
I’ve always been a bystander on the Toast before but I feel I can finally contribute on a latke thread. I make ’em just with potatoes and pepper. Srsly. Grate them, squeeze as much as you can out of them, grind pepper all over them, mush them with your hands a bit more and then fry them. So crispy. So delicious. Mmm. Latkes.
I’m going to go home and put on my Hanukkah jumper and make latkes this very night.
I've always been a bystander on the Toast before but I feel I can finally contribute on a latke thread. I make 'em just with potatoes and pepper. Srsly. Grate them, squeeze as much as you can out of them, grind pepper all over them, mush them with your hands a bit more and then fry them. So crispy. So delicious. Mmm. Latkes.
I'm going to go home and put on my Hanukkah jumper and make latkes this very night.