This One-Ingredient Latke Hack Is the Product of My Utter Laziness

Anyone who’s made latkes knows that it’s a process with built-in pain. There are the tears shed over a noxious mix of grated onion, and the inevitable bloodied knuckles when you’re trying to get just a little more out of that last nubbin of potato. And then, to top it all off, comes the squeezing. And squeezing. And more squeezing. Because we all know—we’ve all heard it a million times—you have to wring every last drop of unwelcome moisture from the mixture, lest your latkes end up damp, under-browned, and (oy vey iz mir!) broken!

I lived by these self-evident potato-pancake truths my whole life, until one day several years ago a lazy urge disrupted things. I simply didn’t feel like squeezing the potatoes until my fingers hurt. And I sure as hell wasn’t in any mood to rig up a sack with a stick, to twist and twist it like a garrote until the potatoes had been compressed into dryness.

So I blithely squeezed my potatoes just enough. And then I drew on my culinary knowledge to take care of the rest. If you’ve ever read Max Falkowitz’s great recipe for latkes, you’ll see midway down the headnote that after squeezing the potatoes and onion and mixing in matzo meal and eggs, he harvests the hydrated potato starch from the drained liquid (after first letting it settle) and stirs it back into the latke mixture, a step that improves moisture management and the binding of the latkes. I realized I could do the same thing with the dry potato starch I keep in my pantry. (Honestly, you could probably make it work with cornstarch too.)

The process goes like this: Grate your onions and potatoes, then squeeze them as much as you’re able, but without going blue in the face or setting up any kind of elaborate device to further wring them out. Add your binders like egg and matzo meal and then just sprinkle a little potato starch in too, just enough to bind things up and soak up any remnant moisture you didn’t manage to squeeze out.

Now, I know the next question, which is, How much potato starch do I add? And I’m sorry to say, I have no concrete answer except for this: just barely enough, but absolutely not too much. I have learned the hard way that if you are not merely lazy but insufferably slothful—as I was one day when I got a little too cocky about just how little wringing I could get away with thanks to this trick—you will end up in a very bad place. The reality is that dumping more and more starch in a bowl of too-wet potatoes will not solve your problems. Instead, it will make gummy latkes.

So think of it this way: Do your best, try to get the water out. Then proceed as normal, only relying on sprinkling a judiciously small amount of potato starch into the mixture as needed to get a boost in binding and crisping.

Does this trick produce the greatest latkes of all time? No, I wouldn’t say so. But when your initiative is low, this is something you can take advantage of to make them more than good enough.