This One-Ingredient Latke Hack Is the Product of My Utter Laziness

Anybody who’s made latkes is aware of that it is a course of with built-in ache. There are the tears shed over a noxious mixture of grated onion, and the inevitable bloodied knuckles if you’re making an attempt to get just a bit extra out of that final nubbin of potato. After which, to prime all of it off, comes the squeezing. And squeezing. And extra squeezing. As a result of everyone knows—we have all heard it one million instances—it’s important to wring each final drop of unwelcome moisture from the combination, lest your latkes find yourself damp, under-browned, and (oy vey iz mir!) damaged!

I lived by these self-evident potato-pancake truths my complete life, till sooner or later a number of years in the past a lazy urge disrupted issues. I merely did not really feel like squeezing the potatoes till my fingers damage. And I certain as hell wasn’t in any temper to rig up a sack with a stick, to twist and twist it like a garrote till the potatoes had been compressed into dryness.

So I blithely squeezed my potatoes simply sufficient. After which I drew on my culinary data to care for the remainder. When you’ve ever learn Max Falkowitz’s nice recipe for latkes, you will see halfway down the headnote that after squeezing the potatoes and onion and mixing in matzo meal and eggs, he harvests the hydrated potato starch from the drained liquid (after first letting it settle) and stirs it again into the latke combination, a step that improves moisture administration and the binding of the latkes. I noticed I might do the identical factor with the dry potato starch I preserve in my pantry. (Actually, you possibly can most likely make it work with cornstarch too.)

The method goes like this: Grate your onions and potatoes, then squeeze them as a lot as you are ready, however with out going blue within the face or establishing any form of elaborate system to additional wring them out. Add your binders like egg and matzo meal after which simply sprinkle slightly potato starch in too, simply sufficient to bind issues up and absorb any remnant moisture you did not handle to squeeze out.

Now, I do know the following query, which is, How a lot potato starch do I add? And I am sorry to say, I’ve no concrete reply apart from this: simply barely sufficient, however completely not an excessive amount of. I’ve realized the onerous means that if you’re not merely lazy however insufferably slothful—as I used to be sooner or later after I received slightly too cocky about simply how little wringing I might get away with due to this trick—you’ll find yourself in a really dangerous place. The fact is that dumping increasingly more starch in a bowl of too-wet potatoes is not going to clear up your issues. As an alternative, it’s going to make gummy latkes.

So consider it this fashion: Do your greatest, attempt to get the water out. Then proceed as regular, solely counting on sprinkling a judiciously small quantity of potato starch into the combination as wanted to get a lift in binding and crisping.

Does this trick produce the best latkes of all time? No, I would not say so. However when your initiative is low, that is one thing you possibly can benefit from to make them greater than ok.