Life-Changing Latkes, Part 1

Ep 3:  Dori talks about the big latke-making popup she did over the holidays. It didn't go as planned.

Read more about her latke venture here.

Here's Dori's recipe for her Life-Changing Latkes, an adaptation of the recipe published after she won the 2011 Edible Brooklyn Latke recipe contest, which she forgot to mention in the podcast - whoops!):

Ingredients:

• 3 large russet potatoes (about 2 pounds)
• 1 large yellow onion
• 1T kosher salt or to taste
• Freshly ground black or white pepper or a combination of both
• 1 large egg
• Duck fat and/or vegetable oil for frying. (A mix of the two is fine. Or if you’re vegetarian, can’t find duck fat, or are on a duck-free diet,  just use vegetable oil.)

Directions:

1. In medium bowl, grate onion on the large holes of a box grater.
2. Peel and grate potatoes into the onion (this helps prevent the potato from discoloring).
3. Add salt and pepper and mix thoroughly, tasting a strand of potato and adding more salt and/or pepper to taste.
4. Scoop the potato-onion mixture with your hands, squeezing out excess liquid and placing dry mixture into another medium-large sized bowl. Repeat until all the “dry” potato-onion mixture is in one bowl, and save the potato liquid in the other. Let the liquid sit about 10 minutes, giving the potato starch time to settle to the bottom of the bowl.
5. Add egg to potato-onion mixture and mix well (hands are the best mixing implement here!).
6. Pour off the liquid squeezed from the potato and onions. There should be a nice layer of potato starch accumulated at the bottom of the bowl (the starchier the potatoes, the more you’ll find). Scoop out the starch and incorporate it into the potato mixture.
7. In a heavy, good-quality skillet or cast iron pan, add about an inch of oil (you’ll want the latkes about halfway submerged in fat while frying) and heat over medium-high flame. You’re ready to go when a strand of potato sizzles when added to the pan.
8. Scoop out a small handful of the potato mixture, and press between your hands to flatten and squeeze out any excess liquid. Make sure the pancakes are even, not too thick in the middle, and about 3 inches around for an average-size latke. Gently add to skillet and cook, making sure not to crowd the pan, for about two to three minutes per side or until golden brown. Take care not to fuss with them while they’re cooking or they may fall apart.
9. Add more fat after each batch as necessary. Too little will cause the latkes to burn on the outside before cooking inside.
10. Remove from pan and place on a paper-towel lined cookie sheet rack.

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Email me: lifechangingwithdorifern@gmail.com

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Transcript

One batch of my latke recipe makes more or less 18 potato pancakes. This is significant because as it happens, 18 is a lucky number in Hebrew. 'Chai' means life as in l'chaim, as in Life-Changing Latkes,  the name that I came up for this charitable food venture I did this past holiday season, and also a riff on this podcast name.

I didn't expect that this podcast wouldn't launch for another six months. And also what I didn't anticipate was that my Life-Changing Latkes pop-up would turn out to be such a killer.

Welcome to Life Changing with Dori Fern, a podcast about the messy middle between when you hit pause and what comes next. I'm Dori Fern, a single empty nester in Brooklyn, New York who quit a corporate job at 55 on a quest to live a more purposeful exceptional. I dunno, happier life. I'm figuring it out as I go along.

But as my high school drama teacher used to say, the trip is the trip. I hope you'll join me.

I'm reading Maggie O'Farrell's memoir, "I Am I Am I Am: 17 Brushes with Death." Looking back on how the early academic career she had imagined for herself when painfully off the rails, before it began, she wrote that the things in life which don't go to plan are usually more important, more formative in the long run than the things that do.

I don't have the distance for a complete perspective just yet. But one thing I know with complete clarity is that making a thousand potato pancakes by myself over the course of a month was insane. And too literally painful to repeat. I'm talking aching, arthritic hands, acute nerve compression shooting from my neck down my arms type pain.

If you're familiar with the process of making latkes with a box grater, like I make them, you might think this repetitious knuckle skin risking motion was the culprit. But years back, I bought an electric grating machine to alleviate a lot of this manual work and to speed up the cooking process so I could feed Hanukkah's most beloved fried food, hot from the pan to the 50 plus people who, uh, were cramming into my 750 square foot apartment one joyful day into night each year.

But because the machine actually grinds the potatoes more than grates. And because I'm a bit of a lunatic, okay, a perfectionist, I still hand grate over half of every batch to get the pancakes to the exact texture I like. But still, it wasn't the grating that caused me all this anguish. It was squeezing the water from the potato mixture, the potato-onion mixture that did it.

Most latke recipes you read will tell you to ring out the water and a towel, but I've never found that to work as well as hand-wringing. Plus I could not possibly have enough towels on hand to squeeze out the volumes of water coming from that amount of latke mixture. So as it turned out,  Omicron's arrival mid-December, right after Hanukkah was a perverted blessing since my body was giving out while the latkes, which I planned to sell through year-end, sold like hotcakes.

I made no push to remind anyone, once the holiday ended, that potato pancakes made a fine a company meant for Christmas and New Year celebrations too. I wrote all about this latke stuff for Millie, a magazine about women and money, which I'll put a link to in the show notes, I talked about how much easier and more joyful this venture was in 2020 when I fried up as many latkes as I was able to in between doing my day job and then sold them to friends and friends of friends over a couple of weeks, donating the entire $1,500 I grossed to grassroots organization working to transform the food system. You can read the details there. You might wonder though, how latkes became such an obsession for a reform New York City Jew like me with no strong family memories of them, though my mother does tell me that we did in fact have latkes growing up, which I do not recall. It started for me with an article I wrote in 1998, about New York city's best potato pancakes for Time Out. It was and remains fascinating to me that you can take a few simple ingredients, potatoes, onions, and egg-- I make mine without flour or matzoh meal-- and depending on your mastery of the technique and any number of other factors like the duck fat I typically fry them in, produce something so beloved. At first, I made them kind of obsessively for my family all the time throughout the year, but I believe it was 2007, not long after my divorce that I threw my first latke party.

It was a relatively small affair attended by a diverse assortment of mostly friends, including a crew of fellow Brooklyn parents. The memory that sticks with me of that time and really persisted over the years was that early middle and late night waves of people, family, and folks with young kids who arrived early for the latkes and the menorah lighting, the early evening arrivals that usually included my closest friends and colleagues who often helped out by bringing a dish or washing dishes.

But it was the late-night crew that was the most fun for me. That was when, after I made sure they got their fill of latkes, that I got to sit down finally and relax with a beer or something stronger. After five or so hours face down in a steam bath of duck fat and grease I could finally let loose, relax, laugh, and enjoy the feeling of having done something hard, but deeply gratifying.

People raved all night about the latkes and accompanying food and clearly dug getting to chat with an interesting assortment of people they did and didn't know. Now I got to bask and having pulled it off. It was often in the afterglow of this party that I would think about starting my own food business, latkes or otherwise.

In fact, one of my first big ideas was to open a sandwich food truck. It was around 2003. I maintain that it's still not easy to find an interesting assortment of really great sandwiches in New York City, even before COVID. But I digress. And speaking of which, this is probably where I should take a step back. Big life changes don't, at least not for me, stem from just one thing at just one time. Pretty sure that the urgency I feel to get this next stage of my professional path, quote unquote right, started many years ago, grounded in the paths I didn't take. Is there a place I wonder now, like years ago, for latkes or another cooking venture in my future?

If so, what kind of room do I want to make for it personally or professionally? I'll explore this more in my next episode. Subscribe if you like this and come back next week and you'll hear part two of Life-Changing Latkes. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Life-Changing with Dori Fern, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts.

And please come join me next week for part two.