Latkes are a should for lotsof Hanukkah events. They’re likewise a labor of love. Onion stinging your students, oil catapulting towards your lowerarms, familymembers shrieking from the sofa. So this year, our test kitchenarea asked: How can we make latkes even the smallest bit mucheasier? Recipe designer Amelia Rampe had the response with her innovative Extra-Large Latkes.
These skillet-size latkes can be made the night before you’re prepared to consume them so you can invest your vacation with pals and household rather of stuck at the range. But benefit aside, the dish has a technique that may simply modification the method you make potato pancakes from this year forward.
After you shred the spuds and capture out the excess liquid, Rampe shares this clever suggestion: Don’t wash the bowl. The natural starches, comparable in consistency to buttermilk, will settle at the bottom of the meal. Saving that starch and blending it back into the potatoes yields stronger lacy-edged latkes.
What does this method achieve?
Similar to cornstarch, potato starch “can be utilized as a thickening representative or as a covering representative when making fried foods,” Rampe shares. In this dish, the homemade potato starch left in the bowl types a slurry “that will bind the potatoes together and will likewise help in producing a crispy outside.” Because the starch acts as a covering, the pancakes will takein less oil and, as a result, endedupbeing lighter and wispier in texture. A latke wonder!
This strategy may be familiar to you currently. Maybe it was passed down from your bubbe or you read about it in Joan Nathan’s 1994 book Jewish Cooking in America. Some dishes usage simply natural starch and egg as binding representatives. Rampe calls for egg and flour. And others, like Max Falkowitz’s and Rebecca Firsker’s, include matzo meal for even more body.