Latkes and Hanukkah: Spilled Milk #153

My "no-recipe" version of the quintessential holiday food.

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Here are some photos and a video of my no-recipe latke making. More latke recipes are on www.andrewzimmern.com, along with tons of other recipes for the holiday season, from brisket to latkes, from borscht to bagel egg bakes.

This time I decided to just go for it without measuring, not to show off but to show you how malleable this technique is. I used my base premise, that a few Yukon gold potatoes, steamed and peeled, riced into the bowl helps create the best texture for the pancake AND the julienned Idaho bakers make the best crispy lacy edges.

From a myth-busting perspective, if you do things in the right order, you don’t need to julienne the potatoes into water — just let their own juice and starch combine with the matzoh meal and egg, onion, etc., and you have latke heaven. Mix it all in the right order, and you won’t even see any oxidization. I also didn’t peel the Idaho bakers, allowing the flavor of the skin to be a part of these latke.  This batch made 12 very large latkes that I topped with sour cream and my friend Gillian’s apple butter. I only plated the first eight in the video. The rest my friends ate.

1 egg

1 egg yolk

1 onion, chopped

1 garlic clove

1 medium-sized Idaho potato, diced

1 cup matzoh meal

3 medium Idaho potatoes

2 large Yukon gold potatoes, steamed, cooled and peeled

Salt and pepper

• Place the eggs in a large bowl.

• Pulse and purée the onion/garlic/1 diced Idaho potato.

• Combine with the eggs.

• Julienne the remaining Idaho potatoes into the same bowl. Season with salt and ground pepper.

• Add the matzoh meal and combine, increasingly more forcefully. The potato strings won’t break.

• Rice the Yukon Gold potatoes into the bowl and combine.

• Form 1/3 inch-thick pancakes the size of your palms.

• Brown in 375-degree oil until very crispy, drain on a rack, season with more salt, top as you like and enjoy.

Potato latkes are the quintessential holiday food, and for many reasons they leave the Easter ham or Thanksgiving turkey in the rear-view mirror when you consider narrative, holiday symbology, deliciousness, historical relevance and group fun when cooking. Hanukkah is when we celebrate a miracle: the lamp in the temple filled with only enough oil to last an evening, divinely lasting for eight nights. So anything fried in oil is a tangible, edible way to relate to the holiday itself. Only the Pascal lamb can compete for importance. Ham was never an Easter food until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and, well, we all know turkey was never consumed at the first dinner party at Plymouth Rock. On the flip side is the savory pleasure taking — the lotus eater in me worships the latke in a way that a drunkard loves his bottle, with one big difference; I only eat them one week a year.

Occasionally in a deli or restaurant, during some other time, a plate arrives and I partake, but for me, the seasonality of it makes the pleasure-taking that much more enjoyable. And I should tell you that many years I make them flatter with more threads of potato so they are lacier and crisper. Others I am more into the pancake vibe. Some nights it’s just us, the family with the sour cream and applesauce (or apple butter, even better) on the counter in the kitchen, eating until you’re stuffed, the condiments still in their tubs. Then later in the week, paired with brisket at the dining room table to sop up all the gravy and of course bedazzled with luxury, crowned with caviar and smoked fish. It’s the progression of the season, the progression of the ways in which we enjoy them, and ultimately a celebration of the struggle, historically, of our people.

This year, it’s more relevant than ever. The pain of this year’s events, the horrors of October 7 and its continuing aftermath both at home and abroad have reminded me that we all need to pray for miracles. For an end to the hate. Last weekend one of my best friends’ restaurants was raged at by an angry mob, and others called for boycotting his businesses. It’s simply unfathomable that the antisemitism has come so close to me as we enter this season of Hanukkah. I shouldn’t be surprised. This hatred has existed and been endured by others for, well, forever.  That so many in my world hate me for one reason is no longer a shock. Maybe the shock is that I am only now seeing it and living it.

Hate in America has been cosigned and made to seem acceptable for too long. Maybe it’s a 400-year-old, foundational issue for this country, which became the most powerful nation in the world on the backs of institutional slavery and Africans stolen from their homes. Maybe it just started there. My people have also endured a similar history for millennia, and in my parents’ own lifetimes, half the world’s Jewish population was exterminated during WW2. Should I not be surprised to see hate crimes against Jews quadruple in this country since October 7? My grandmother wouldn’t be. She told us every week that this would happen someday. Should I have listened more? Been less naïve about my beliefs? Been more aware of the fragility of our young democracy and its ability to endure this hate?

So this Hanukkah is indeed very different for me. I have been taught that faith is patience, and I am hurting so much that I am solely praying for more of it as we kindle the lights of our menorah, eating fried potato pancakes as a reminder that anything is possible in God’s world. I choose to be hopeful. I choose to believe in the power of love over hate.