Good evening everyone and welcome to Chef Live in a fabulous downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Chef John.
The first step is to grate potatoes. I’m going to take we call this a box grater, okay. I’m going to use Idaho potatoes, now when we make latkes, the key to potato pancakes is to keep everything dry. You don’t want a lot of water on your grill. You don’t want a lot of water on the pancake. You don’t want to dilute the flavors. You want a concentrate all this stuff because you want to keep it dry.
Now, so we start with an Idaho potato. Idaho potatoes are probably the driest variety of potatoes that we have out there known as Idaho potatoes or baking potatoes or they’re also known as russet potatoes, so we’ve take a russet potato. We’re going to peel them, and I’m going to grate them on the coarsest side of my grater, okay. I’m going to watch my fingers too. This is a brand new grater; it will take the tip of my finger right off.
Now, you can do this ahead of time, and if you do happen to do it ahead of time you want to cover your potatoes with a little bit of water to prevent too much oxidation from going on. When the oxidation takes place they tend a little bit brown, and that’s okay this is oxygen it’s good for you, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to take it now. I’m going to put my grated potatoes and going to go into my strainer or colander.
Once I’ve got them in there now, I want to press the water as much as possible. You could see how much water would come off. And you give it a good squeeze with your hand, just press them right down onto the colander, okay that will work. So, now into a clean bowl, I’m going to put my grated potatoes.
And the next step, we’re going to take again, you want to remember by keeping it dry. Now, if you think about a hard boiled egg, dry part is the yoke, so eggs will bind up the pancakes when they go with the grill later, but what I’ve done is I take them one whole like on one extra egg yoke, just so I want to get the binding qualities but I also want to keep it dry. And before I do anything else, I’m also going to turn on my grill, my grill and I’m going to turn on medium high heat right now.
So, the next step like I said, I’m going to beat these eggs. Once I’ve beaten these eggs up a little bit, I’m going to go right inside of this. And I want to mix this I want to combine the two just to mix up the potatoes and the eggs.
Now, the next ingredients I’m going to add, I take some fine chopped onions. Now, we started out. This recipe started out and we had—there were three medium size potatoes that are peeled and grated. And to that I’m going to take one medium size onion probably just a little bit smaller than this one here, so we got three potatoes. One medium size onion that has been finely diced, we’re going to put right into the potatoes and mix that in.
Now, the next ingredient that I’m going to add, here I have four tablespoons of flour, all purpose flour and to that I’ve added a half of teaspoon of baking powder. Baking powder is good, it’s a leavening agent. And when we mix it in to the potato butter, when we go to the grill, it’s actually going to lighten things up. It’s got a lot more air in there and the air is going to help to dry things up a little bit more. We also make a fluff for your pancake and a lighter dish when we go to eat. So, I’ve got four tablespoons of flour. I have a teaspoon of baking powder that goes in there. I’m going to season that with I guess some kosher salt I’m going to put a three finger pinch in there probably twice, put three fingers in there twice and I want three fingers pinch of black pepper.
Okay, that gets turn down. Now, you might want to, when we the time is good to let this sit probably for about 10 minutes just so everything kind of get soak together and it’ll dry a little bit the flour and the flour is going to soak up some of that moist that’s in there within the 10 minutes, so I want to place this on the side right now just for a moment.
Now, my grills are hot enough that’s if you don’t do that at home—I’ve been doing this forever. I can put pans on the oven with my bare hands but not everybody else can do that. I’m going to turn this down to medium. I’m going to use some peanut oil, I like peanut oil. Peanut oil has the highest smoked point of oil than the different oils that we’re using in the kitchen which means that it will stand up to the higher heat than anything else. It will hold out, it has the highest temperature before it burnt, before the smokes are burnt, so with that, it’s going to enable me to get a nice high temperature on that oil, and it is going to put me a nice brown crisp on my potato pancakes.
Also, this is the tradition in a Jewish family is to have potato pancakes that are high like time which is a celebration of lights and it’s the time when the miracle was that the oil lasted for the whole, was that 10 days? I think it was 10 and maybe I’m wrong but they had this much oil to light their candles and it lasted for the whole week. It was a miracle so now once a year they celebrate by cooking with oil. So, I’m going to put some peanut oil on my grill. Don’t be too shy with the oil when you make potato pancakes. Remember, the oil that lasted for a whole week so you don’t want to be shy with peanut oil.
Now, the next step is I’m going to start to make potato latkes. Now, this can be served as appetizers or as a side course. If I was serving as a side course, make them a little bit bigger if I have them with dinner, but since those are appetizers, we’re going to make them smaller. I will use a tablespoon and a real help the tables and let’s say yes good table spoon. Here, pancake now, with the back of the spoon, I’ll just spread that out a little bit and save it into the round pancake shape.
Okay, now ideally, I like to serve them hot right off the grill, but sometimes we have a number of guests coming over and you don’t want to get too tight up in the kitchen, so you could do this a few hours before your guests arrive. You could brown them on both sides. You don’t want to cook it all the way through. You don’t want it them really to be well, well done but we want to brown them on each side then I could put them on a sheet pan. And then maybe about 15 or 20 minutes before my guest arrive, but before I want to when I want to serve this I can put them in a 350 degree oven for about 10-15 minutes just to warm them up and finish the cooking. And that works fine; you can spend more time with your guests than you do in the kitchen that way.
We can enjoy this. A lot of time chefs don’t get to enjoy the party. I’m always in the kitchen cooking, so when you come into my house, we have a lot of salas and those types of things right because I don’t want to be out there with my guests.
Now, the traditional accompaniment to these potato latkes are apple sauce and I’ve mixed up some sour cream and some fresh chives. Now, you see that’s the perfect color right there. They are nice golden brown color. You want to get that on both sides. Now, just quickly double up a cup of paper towels, put them on these side.
Now, if you are going to go into the oven, this is another reason why I like to finish them in the oven, the oil has the tendency to—the oil comes out a little bit better, so you don’t have to go to the step to drain them off. I’m going to go straight from the frying pan to the plate then I’m going to drain them just a bit on the paper towel. Take that excess oil off.
I spend a lot of money for this in the restaurant, so my mother would say, “Well, it’s my money.” We’re going to add this for a little bit of Italian parsley here. Hope you have some fresh chives, it would be nice or accompany with the apple sauce and then sour cream and chives. There we are, the Potato Latkes!
Thank you.
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