Latke Love
Hanukkah's traditional dish: Great for a party or just 1 or 2
Hanukkah arrives this year on Thursday, December 10, at sundown.
If this was a “normal” year, I’d be planning my annual Hanukkah party for 20 to 30 close family and friends. But nothing’s normal. We’re in strict lockdown mode once again as the ICU capacity of local hospitals shrinks to alarming lows. It’ll be me and Jeff lighting candles, just as it was the two of us for Thanksgiving. No brisket and roast chicken to feed a crowd. No jigsaw of card tables in the living room.
But we’ll still light candles, adding one more each night to reach a full count of eight a week later. And of course I’m making latkes, as I do every year. It wouldn’t be Hanukkah without filling my entire kitchen (and the house!) with the smell of grated potato, onion and egg pancakes frying in bubbling oil.
Usually a week or so before the holiday arrives, I make more than 100 latkes and freeze them in ziplock bags. A food processor miraculously shortens the work of grating 10 to 15 pounds of potatoes and 5 or 6 onions. They freeze and reheat beautifully.
(This year I’ll make at least 10 pounds worth to give out to friends and family. Be sure to leave a comment if you’d like me to bring you a few—from a safe distance, of course! Unfortunately, they don’t ship well, so non-LA readers, stay tuned for my 2021 Hanukkah party!)
I don’t recall my mother or aunts using a food processor to make latkes or storing them in the freezer. There weren’t processors in those days; the work was done laboriously on the large holes of a hand grater. The latkes were either made early in the day and kept warm or, more often, took a turn in the boiling oil while the party was in full swing. They were dished onto platters to be served sizzling hot right out of the pan, with orders for more as the current batch was being gobbled up with applesauce and sour cream.
I distinctly remember one Hanukkah at my Aunt Gerda’s house hearing shrieks from the kitchen as the oil from the latkes caught fire and threatened to burn the place down. It seems to me there were several latke fires in my mother’s kitchen as well. In mine, the more common occurrence is that the smoke alarm goes off multiple times and has to be disconnected until I’ve finished making the last pancake.
This year, I’m a little tardy in getting to the latkes—we’re still consuming pie from Thanksgiving. But the calendar is relentless—and the Jewish calendar, which relies on the moon, is even more merciless. In 2013, the first night of Hanukkah coincided with Thanksgiving, something we’re unlikely to see again in our lifetime—a good thing, in my opinion. One holiday at at a time, please.
In this Groundhog Day moment we’re living through, it’s hard to get excited about holidays that seem to blend together and include the same person you’ve been hibernating with for the past nine months. But then, how ungrateful am I? We’re not in the ICU. We’re safe an warm. I’m not alone and actually like the person I’m stuck with—at least most of the time. I’ve got a full freezer that shortly will be even more overstocked when I shove a few bags of latkes in there. But they will have a short stay in cold storage—my Hanukkah presents will all edible this year!
But now, about those latkes.
My go-to recipe is from Joan Nathan’s The Jewish Holiday Kitchen, which for several decades has been a bible for me for traditional Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine (mostly from Eastern Europe). In addition to great recipes, Nathan provides engaging historical references on the origins and etymology of many dishes, including latkes. The word latke derives from the Yiddish word for pancake, which, in turn, may hark back to the Greek word for oil, elaion, Nathan explains. Sixteenth-century Jews probably adapted a local Ukrainian dish for Hanukkah, she says.
“Because their daily diet consisted of potatoes and bread, they wanted to include a special dish cooked in oil to symbolize the main miracle of Hanukkah.” (The miracle, for those who aren’t sure, is the sacred oil in the temple that was supposed to burn for only one day but lasted for eight. Here’s a link to the story behind the holiday.)
Although the Jews of that day may have used plentiful goose fat, I make my latkes in vegetable oil—usually grape seed, sunflower or canola, all high-heat oils, unlike extra virgin olive oil, which has a low smoke point.
Like so many traditional recipes, there are numerous debates surrounding the best way to make latkes. Some people insist on hand-grating them, even now when we have access to processors. If you’re feeding large numbers, peeling and hand-grating dozens of potatoes provides quite an arm workout and the distinct possibility of injured knuckles, not to mention smarting eyes from the onion. Talk about blood, sweat and tears!
I like my potatoes coarse-grated, not fine, and I usually use russets, which I wash and peel first and leave soaking in water while I run them one by one through the machine, alternating with onions, which Nathan claims—and I can verify—help keep the potatoes from turning color.
Perhaps the most important pre-frying step is wringing out as much moisture as possible from the potatoes and onions before adding the other ingredients. You can put the mixture into a colander and press hard with a spoon or potato masher. But, with large quantities, I never feel this does an adequate job. Usually I take a clean kitchen towel, spread the potato-onion mix in the middle lengthwise, fold it snugly, then grab the ends and twist in opposite directions, as if I was wrapping a giant Tootsie Roll. Another arm workout!
Nathan says that the following recipe serves 8 to 10 people. I often double it for my crowd and give away the leftovers. Recently, my mother-in-law Judy Graham told me that she and boyfriend Mike discovered a bag of my latkes from last year in the back of their freezer and heated them up in a bit of oil. She pronounced them “delicious.” I wouldn’t recommend keeping them so long—but what do I know?
For those who are gluten-free, you can easily substitute gluten-free flour, use the residual potato starch from pressing out the liquid from the grated potatoes as a binder, and/or add more potato starch. I prefer to use as little flour as possible and keep the pancake mixture less dense and more “potato-ey.”
Another important step is to make sure the oil is hot enough—but not too hot (no kitchen fires, please!)—when frying latkes. I use a large (12-inch) cast-iron pan and about an inch of oil. Sometimes I have my second 10-inch skillet going as well! To test if the oil is sufficiently heated, I throw in a teaspoon of batter to see if it sizzles before adding more pancakes. The first pancakes cook rather slowly before browning enough to be flipped. Once the process gets going, I’m racing to add more batter as I remove pancakes to a platter covered with paper towels. I keep adding oil as I go.
As for amounts, it really depends on how large you make them, the size of the potatoes, etc. I make about four to five latkes per medium (6- to 8-ounce) potato. One recent batch (pictured below) yielded 41 from eight potatoes. But my notes in the Nathan book say I made 45 latkes from five pounds on another occasion. I usually just fill a large bowl with batter and start filling the skillet with heaping spoonfuls.
There are many possible latke variations, including ones that use apples, zucchini and carrots, Nathan points out. This cookbook was written in 1988, long before we could expand our repertoire via a Google search (I found 39,700 entries under latke variations).
Two intriguing options: serving them with crème fraîche, gravlax and caviar or using a mix of vegetables and cooking them in a waffle iron. This week, I noticed that Nathan had come up with a new recipe that pared the recipe down to its essence—potatoes—and was both gluten-free and vegan. You can check it out here.
There are plenty of other vegan versions too I’m a stickler for tradition, though last year I made a batch of latkes with sweet potatoes—and they were excellent. I will most likely repeat the experiment this year.
For me, one constant is applesauce—and, though I always have a few jars of commercial applesauce on hand just in case, I prefer to make my own. I find it distinctly superior to store-bought. It’s quite easy to make. Here’s Joan Nathan’s recipe for that:
As I don’t own a food mill, I core and peel the apples before cooking and use a potato masher to create a somewhat chunky sauce. My son told me he recently made a delicious applesauce without removing the peels and using an immersion blender to puree the mixture. I sometimes throw in a few cranberries for color and taste and a tablespoon or two of King Arthur’s Boiled Cider. Maple syrup is also an excellent addition.
Another Hanukkah standard at my house is cookies—especially rugelach, the rolled cookies made with a cream cheese dough and filled with jam, nuts, chocolate, Nutella—or whatever else strikes your fancy. Look for another post on my favorite rugelach recipe, plus other Hanukkah cookies before the holiday ends.
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Thanks Ruth! Great recipes I will keep!