About this Recipe

I could personally eat breakfast for 3 meals a day. Mind you , my breakfasts are elaborate and always involve some sort of fresh raw green salad, so it makes for a full and balanced meal. These delicious potato pancakes are an excellent addition to your favorite egg breakfast. They are delicious served up with ketchup, hot sauce or just some cracked pepper and nice Himalayan salt.

Grandmother's TIPS for Potato Latke Recipe:

1. The type of potato you choose will make a difference. Russet potatoes or Idaho potatoes are the highest in starch. When it comes to potato pancake recipes, high starch can be your friend and will help you to prepare a super fluffy soft potato pancake with nice crispy edges. We did use red potatoes for this recipe and they have little to no starch and stay quite firm, but were also super tasty but do give a little bit different texture than a Russet or Idaho potato will do.

2. Use a mandoline slicer or a food processor for quick and painless grating.

3. Squeeze out as MUCH of the liquid you can from the potatoes once they are grated. You can do this by putting them in a strainer and just pressing down on them with clean hands. Some potatoes varieties have no liquid and others have quite a lot.

4. Wait to add salt until the moment before you fry your potato pancakes. Salt will pull liquid out from the potatoes and turn the mixture into a watery mess.

5. When cooking with oil, make sure it is an oil with a high smoke point. Our two favorites for our cooking and baking needs are grapeseed oil and a high quality olive oil which is able to take a higher temperature if the the quality of the oil is good. Since it takes medium high heat and quite some time to really cook the potato pancakes you will need to watch them.

6. Cook your potato pancakes on medium - high heat. This will brown them nice and actually help them to NOT stick to the pan.

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Ingredients

(Print)

Makes 4 servings

3 medium size potatoes, grated or julienne style

1/4 large sweet onion, diced

1 egg

1 Tablespoon all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/8 cup olive oil or grapeseed oil

1/8 cup butter

Directions

1. Wash potatoes, cut off any bad spots. If using potatoes with nice skins you can leave on, otherwise peel.

2. Julienne cut the potatoes with a mandoline cutter or if you do not have you can use a medium size grater.

3. Dice the onions into small pieces.

4. Place the potatoes and onions into a bowl, stir together, cover and let sit for 10 minutes.

5. Depending how you have prepared your potatoes and onions, there may be liquid that forms in the bowl. If there is any liquid, drain out. The more liquid you can squeeze out the better.

6. Break the egg into a bowl and use a fork to stir. Add the flour, salt, pepper, baking powder and olive oil to the egg and stir together.

7. Pour the mixture into the potatoes and mix thoroughly so all the potatoes have a light coating.

8. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Spoon four equal portions of the potatoes into the frying pan and let cook on the one size for about 5-8 minutes. You want the potatoes to be a nice golden brown.

9. Keep an eye but don't flip at this point as you want them to hold together. Watch your heat though and turn down or up as needed. Once they have cooked for a few minutes they should hold together.

10. Flip the potato pancakes once they are a golden brown. Let them cook 5 minutes or so until brown on the second side.

11. If the potato pancakes are thicker like ours were about 1/2 inch thick, put a lid to cover and turn the heat to low once the first side has browned.

12. Cook for another 5-8 minutes. Do a little taste test to see if they are cooked all the way through.

13. Remove the lid, turn the heat back up to medium high, and let the potato pancake cook a couple minutes to crisp it up. Flip and do the same to the second side. Don't walk away once you turn up the heat as you don't want to burn them. This part of the process can be skipped if you like the outsides softer, but if you want them a bit more crispy a quick hit of high heat will accomplish that.

14. Potato pancakes go so very well with fried eggs for breakfast.

15. Leftovers and be refrigerated in a container with a lid. You can reheat for any meal and they also taste wonderful with sour cream.

ENJOY!

Return to this Potato Pancakes aka Potato Latke recipe or check out more recipes at Grandmother's Kitchen

If you tend to make potato latkes and end up with a raw middle, you can also try parboiling the shredded potatoes before squeezing out all the water and mixing with the other ingredients. Really, there are many many many ways to cook potatoes to delicious perfection. Like all recipes that exist many of the ‘how-to’s are based on personal taste or family tradition.

It is not just on the online recipe world there is a lot of debate over the correct way to prepare a certain recipe. Since being a young girl I can remember my relatives lovingly having discussions on the correct way to mix the dough, cut the onions or dress the plates.

Also keep in mind that you can be creative with potato pancake recipes. The ingredients in the potato recipe above are not set in stone and really do depend on the moisture of your potatoes and the ingredients you have on hand. You may like to use a different binding agent. The main key is that the potato latke recipe when raw does not fall apart in your hands, as this will pretty much guarantee that they will also fall apart in the pan.