Did you know it’s Chanukkah? I mean, I know it’s Christmas Eve and everything (hey, that’s also my birthday. Oh yeah. I’m old(er) today), but it just so happens that for the past three days, and for five more, Jews around the country and the world will be remembering that, back in the day, the Syrians invaded Jerusalem, trashed our temple, killed a whole bunch of people, and left us cowering in fear in the ruins trying to figure out how to survive for the next however many days. Man, all of our holidays are such downers.
But on an up note, those cowering, scared, traumatized people set up a couple menorahs (eight-cup oil chandeliers, basically) and poured oil in them, and set them alight for warmth and light and the ability to cook. There was enough oil to burn for a single night but — warning: miracle ahead — the oil lasted for eight nights, giving the Jews enough time to make more oil and get back on their feet.
So, what do we do to celebrate? Eight days of presents and deep fried food.
Yeah, you read that right. DEEP FRIED FOOD.
The most traditional and best way to celebrate this festival of lights is to deep fry everything you eat in oil. Or at least pan fry it in oil. Which, in my humble opinion, totally counteracts this downer of a story because how many other religions have holidays that specify the consumption of deep fried food? That’s right: NONE. Jews are special.
The best of these deep fried foods — and the most well-known — are latkes, known to many others as potato pancakes. This is true and not true. The problem is, when you say something like “potato pancake” to a non-Jew you conjure in their minds things like this.
No. No no no no no.
Do you see how many ingrediants those have? How they make little shapes that look like pancakes? You get those, you’re doing it wrong.
Latkes are one of life’s most delicious and absolute simplest foods to make. I made them on Saturday with a large group of friends, with toppings like dill sour cream and creme fraiche with tarragon, lingenberry jam and cilantro-cucumber relish. They were great. But the recipe for the latkes was never touched, never changed; it was exactly what me and my friend (the dinner’s co-host and the other resident Jew in the house) had been making with our parents since we were wee babies. Unsurprisingly, the recipes we had from our respective families were identical. And I made the same recipe on Tuesday night. It takes roughly 10 minutes. Here’s how it goes:
(For the record: If you have a food processor, this entire process will take about 3 minutes. If you have to grate by hand, it will take longer.)
1. Potatoes. Use anywhere between 3 and 30. Ok, maybe 30 is a lot. For the party (to which about 10 people came) we used, I think, 12-15 potatoes and had TONS of leftover latke mix. When I made these for myself the other night, I used 3. Either way: Peel them. Grate them (by hand or via food processor). Put in mixing bowl.
2. Onions. For 3-5 potatoes, use 1/2 an onion (white onions only, please, though they can be sweet, candy, spanish, vidalia, whatever). For 5-15 potatoes, use between 3/4 and 1 whole onion. Grate as well. Put in mixing bowl with potatoes, stir.
3. Using spatua to hold things in place, drain off immediate extra liquid.
4. Add 2-3 eggs (2 for smaller batches, 3 for bigger). I add them into the mix and just mix them in, but you can beat them together a little bit before you add them, if you want.
5. Add salt. Add pepper. Stir around to incorporate.
6. Add a small handful (yes, handful. There is no freakin’ reason you need to bring measuring cups into this!) of flour to the mix. You’ll want to use more, obviously, if you’re doing a big batch. It should be just enough to help hold things together. In no way should any of this resemble a batter, or a dough or anything like that. Just a little bit, folks.
It should look like this:
7. While you’ve been doing this (at the moment it’s been roughly… 5-10 minutes since you started), you should have had a frying pan on the stove with oil in it. You want a pan with substantial sides; no need at all to use a soup or sauce pot, but you want to make sure that when you put the oil in it’s not going to spill while frying and start a fire. Fill the pan about 1/3 to 1/2 up the sides with oil. You want the latkes to be able to float a little bit while they’re frying, but there’s no need to duplicate a deep fryer.
8. When the oil is hot enough (when you touch the end of a chopstick to the bottom of the pan, you should get little bubbles almost immediately), use a tablespoon (or, rather, a soup spoon — remember, no reason to get measuring cups or spoons involved!) to drop little blobs of your grated potato and onion mixture into the oil. Press on those globules a little to flatten them out. Fry to golen brown on each side, flipping once, and then place on a plate covered in paper towels so they can drain.
That’s it. Latkes complete. (Side Note: Heeeey. Eight nights. Eight steps. Coincidence? I think not!) If you want to be a traditionalist (and on this, I am), just eat with sour cream and apple sauce, both cold, both straight from the tubs if you want to. Alternatively, you can do what my friends did and add some extras in there: add taragon leaves and salt to creme fraiche, add some dill leaves to sour cream. The lingenberry jam was, I think, bought at Ikea and plenty tasty (it went very well with the tarragon creme fraiche). For the cilantro cucumber relish, we peeled, halved, seeded and roughly chopped one cucumber, added two large handfuls of cilantro leaves, a little bit of water, some salt, and some olive oil, and half a seeded jalapeno and blended them together until they were nearly a puree.
There’s lots of delicious food available around the holidays, but very few are as simple and instantly satisfying as a latke (or 10). So enjoy this little gift from us Jews to you, too.
