My Mom's latkes recipe

When I was in college, the beginning of the winter break usually coincided with Hanukkah, so my first meal at home inevitably included latkes. After months of cafeteria food and ramen noodles, nothing said home to me as much as those golden potato pancakes. The first Hanukkah after graduation, I asked my Mom for the latkes recipe. "It's a lot of work," she warned me. "You have to use the small hole grater for both potatoes and onions." The idea of grating potatoes by hand seemed tedious, but the idea of grating the onion seemed down right tearful. After coming to US, my Mom embraced the kitchen power tools not available to us in Russia, and I was wondering why she didn't use a food processor. "Yeah, that's what they do in US, but their latkes aren't as good. Food processors don't have an attachment that grates finely, so it's not good for latkes." I knew what she meant. Latkes at my friends' houses never tasted as good as my Mom's. They either used the grating attachment of a food processor, whose holes were too big, or the chopping blade that made potatoes into a wet mush. My Mom said that the secret to her latkes was to grate potatoes finely and then squeeze all the water out of them before frying. This resulted in latkes that were golden and slightly crisp on the outside, but soft and moist on the inside. I wasn't going to settle for anything less.

I didn't get an engineering degree for nothing, and was determined to find a high tech way to make latkes while preserving the taste I grew up with. I decided to give the food processor another chance. I started by grating potatoes and then squeezing as much liquid out of them as possible. I now had a pile of potatoes that were dry, but too course for my Mom's recipe. I changed the attachment on the food processor to a chopping blade with the hope that if I pulsed grated potatoes for a few seconds, I'd end up with the right texture. It worked like a charm. Since the potatoes were already grated, it only took a few pulses to chop them into smaller bits. I ended up with a homogenous mixture of very small bits of potato, but not a puree. I squeezed the remaining water out of potatoes and moved them to a bowl. Now it was time to deal with the onion. I processed it using the chopping blade until it was almost pureed, and added it to potatoes. I finished the batter with eggs, flour, seasoning, and scallions, and got ready to fry my latkes. They came out just like my Mom's - so good that I ate half of them standing by the stove while frying the second batch.

My Mom's latkes recipe