Time for something a little different, a post by Raven. This morning I decided I wanted to make latkes. Now, I have eaten a few potato pancakes in my day, and have made a few using mashed potatoes, but never traditional latkes. I think it was last night that we watched a Food Network show where they were making them, and that was breakfast this morning. Like most of my recipes, I looked up a number of latke recipes until I has a sense of how they work, then I went off book as it were to make mine. I used russet potatoes, onion, flour, an egg, baking powder, salt, pepper and some garlic powder in the batter, well if you can call it a “batter.” I am not sure it qualifies in my book, but I tend to think of a batter as a rather wet thing. As one of the important steps in making latkes is squeezing all the water out of the potatoes and onions it is a dry batter.

I used the grating disk on our food processor for the first time with this. This created nice small pieces of potato, and for most of the onion. I did have some large chunks that I had to fish out after all was said and done. The disk was quick and efficient for this kind of job, so I expect I will use it more in the future.

I know latkes are usually cooked in schmaltz, but, well, we do not have any. I am not even sure I can get it in Pocatello. Instead I used some bacon grease we had left over from something (I let it cool and put it into jam jars and store in the fridge anytime we render fat out of bacon or similar meat we are not going to use right away). I needed a little bit more fat so I added some avocado oil to make up the difference. Then I fried those puppies. They turned out nice and crispy with a clear potato flavor. They needed a little salt, but that was it. We had them plain with scrambled eggs with ham and cheese. All in all it was a good breakfast.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 2 large russet potatoes quartered lenghtwise
• 1 large onion quartered
• 1 large egg beaten
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• salt and pepper to taste
• Fat of some kind to fry in. Schmaltz is traditional, but I used bacon grease.

Process

1. Grate potatoes and onion together. You can do this with a box grater, or with a food processor.
2. Place grated potatoes and onion in a tea towel, wrap it up and squeeze the liquid out of the grated veg.
3. Put the now dry grated veg in a bowl and add the rest of the ingredients, save the fat. stir until the flour is incorporated.
4. Heat the oil until a drop of water sizzles.
5. Working in small batches drop about 2 tablespoons of the batter into the oil. Use the spoon to flatten out the latke.
6. Cook until deep brown on the first side, about 3-5 min. Flip and cook on the second side for the same.
7. Pull out the cooked latkes and place on a plate with a paper towel over them. Sprinkle salt on them while they are still warm.
8. Keep in a warming oven as you make the rest.
9. Serve. Though we did ours plane, applesauce or sour cream are common additions.