Latkes are a must for many Hanukkah celebrations. They’re also a labor of love. Onion stinging your pupils, oil catapulting toward your forearms, relatives hollering from the couch. So this year, our test kitchen asked: How can we make latkes even the slightest bit easier? Recipe developer Amelia Rampe had the answer with her ingenious Extra-Large Latkes.
These skillet-sized latkes can be made the night before you’re ready to eat them, so you can spend your holiday with friends and family, instead of stuck at the stove. But convenience aside, the recipe has a trick that might just change the way you make potato pancakes from this year forward.
After you shred the spuds and squeeze out the excess liquid, Rampe shares this smart tip: Don’t wash the bowl. The natural starches, similar in consistency to buttermilk, will settle at the bottom of the dish. Saving that starch and mixing it back into the potatoes yields sturdier, lacy-edged latkes.
What does this technique accomplish?
Similar to cornstarch, potato starch “can be used as a thickening agent or as a coating agent when making fried foods,” Rampe shares. In this recipe, the homemade potato starch left in the bowl forms a slurry “that will bind the potatoes together, and will also aid in creating a crispy exterior.” Because the starch acts as a coating, the pancakes will absorb less oil and, as a result, become lighter and wispier in texture. A latke miracle!
This technique might be familiar to you already. Maybe it was passed down from your bubbe or you read about it in Joan Nathan’s 1994 book Jewish Cooking in America. Some recipes use just natural starch and egg as binding agents. Rampe calls for egg and flour. And others, like Max Falkowitz and Rebecca Firsker’s add matzo meal for even more body.
What’s the difference between this starch and the starch you’d buy at a store?
“Store-bought potato starch is the dehydrated version of the naturally occurring starch in the bowl,” Rampe explains. To make the store-bought version, potatoes are crushed to release their natural starches, then the starch is dried into powder.
So next time you’re ringing out potatoes for pancakes, I beg of you, save that starch. It’s the difference between good latkes and great latkes.