Eric Rochow: Hey everyone. Welcome to Gardenfork. It is the 1st of December and that means Hanukkah is right around the corner and I heard about that the other day. And I merely thought of Latkes, which are potato pancakes. And I love potato pancakes. Latkes are kind of potato pancake, but potato pancakes kind of transcend just Hanukkah and actually they are not really used in any specific Hanukkah ceremony; they’re -- just for some reason we make Latkes.
Female Speaker: Because they are good.
Eric Rochow: Because they are good. The Germans, the great people of Germans make a potato pancake, the Swiss make a potato pancake, even the Koreans make a potato pancake, but of course the Koreans put green scallions on them. So, today I wanted to make potato pancakes or Latkes and my favorite thing is to have them with applesauce and of course we’re going to have them with homemade applesauce. And this is really simple to do, it’s -- we are having Bill Nousa are coming out for dinner, we made some --
Female Speaker: You know that.
Eric Rochow: The 40 garlic chicken
Female Speaker: Oh can I see it?
Eric Rochow: Yeah.
Female Speaker: Let’s see how you do that. Oh, wow, chicken 40?
Eric Rochow: No. I just dumped in. So, this is really simple, all you’ve to do is you get russet potatoes.
Female Speaker: Just russet.
Eric Rochow: They are baking potatoes.
Female Speaker: Okay.
Eric Rochow: And then your onion and some eggs, and ideally, you would have –
Female Speaker: Matzah.
Eric Rochow: Matzah, which is kind of like a big cracker, big saltine in a way. But can you believe that the store because we live in the middle of nowhere out here, they didn’t have any matzah, so we got saltines instead. So, the eggs and matzah form a little binder for the onion and the potato to stick together. And all you do is you fry them in oil and boom, they are done. I mean you are going to get a -- if you Google, that you are going to get up a zillion different versions of American potato pancakes and this is the Gardenfork version, which I’m kind of making up as we go along, so you could either hand grate your potatoes or you can put them in the jug and to our food processor here. I’ve never grated anything in this one before, so we’re going to find out how this works.
Does that move or something?
Female Speaker: It’s moving. It’s got a swivel thing.
Eric Rochow: Okay.
Female Speaker: Do you have any goggles on it?
Eric Rochow: Yeah. Here we go, hold on. Okay, so we got our potato shredded. Now we are going to shred our onions. You really want to have one potato for every person that’s coming and people like me and Bill who like more, you want to have more so. And the onion, it’s kind up to taste, I like them a little more oniony, some people, they put barely any onion in it, so. Well, that’s a lot of -- that’s a lot, lot be there. this goes in here. Now you noticed that your potatoes, they’re kind of brown, after you shred them, they brown and that’s just going to happen. You can put a little lemon juice in there and that’ll stop that to a point, but --
Female Speaker: Like apple’s brown?
Eric Rochow: Yeah, like apple’s brown, so I don’t care because it’s going to get cooked anyway. So, into this we take our -- well those are making me -- my eyes hurt, okay.
Female Speaker: Oh, this is onion?
Eric Rochow: Yeah, yeah it’s like grilling, okay, crackers, couple of eggs, nice. Okay, we take this and we mix it all up, you know I’m going to forego the spatula Tracy? And I’m not going to use it for – I’m just using my hand. My sister has this thing about me and the fork. There might be some eggshell in here but, or you preheat your cast iron.
Female Speaker: What kind of oil?
Eric Rochow: This is just canola oil. Oh, I forgot, little salt and pepper here. Get yourself a couple of spoons and let’s start cooking. I like them big, you can make them small if you want. You would brown them on both sides. It’s some --
Female Speaker: We want to flip it?
Eric Rochow: Yeah, you got to flip them, that’s what you want to leave some room, you don’t want to crowd the pan, you could get a bigger pan, but I do about three at a time. You all like a medium heat; you’re going to feel for it. You know, the recipes has medium-high heat or medium heat, I mean what is medium, you know, I think it’s -- there is low, medium and high. So, I am in the middle, I can roast things. And so these are ready to turn. So you want to take this. Look at that.
Female Speaker: That’s great big down turn.
Eric Rochow: Yeah, nice turn. Could you see how they are nice and brown? All right so, we just cook more of these, then we’ll applesauce them, it’s very nice. Bill suggested they are a little undercooked so, but the classic, I mean the classic for me is applesauce on here.
Female Speaker: And then I can see was --
Eric Rochow: That’s delicious. All right so there you go, I got a little character with our friends and their 5 year-old invading the house, but those are really quite good. I think I need it more salt than what I added, so the combination, the egg and the cracker and everything, it made it really nice, I --- if you hand grate the potatoes, I think they have a little bit better texture then running it through the food processor, but that’s just a personal thing. But I want to point out that if you notice that we used cast iron throughout our show today, and that this is -- I just wanted to show you this is my best-seasoned cast iron pan here. And we made the cornmeal, the corn bread in this.
So, and I just washed it out with water, hot water and I just wilted wipe it down with some oil here. And we’re good to go so. Alright so there you go, visit the green house for the recipe, if you want to post some comments or thoughts about your ideas about potato pancakes or Latkes and send us an email if want at eric@gardenfork.tv and make it a great thing. Alright. I’ll see you later.
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