What is Potato Latkes?
Potato latkes are a traditional Jewish food served at Hanukkah with apple sauce and sour cream. They are also called potato pancakes. The latkes are a savory blend of potatoes, salt and onions lightly fried until the round, flat latkes are crispy and golden with a tender interior. They are made using grated potatoes with a bit of egg to hold their shape.
Ingredients
The potato is a starchy vegetable and tuber that forms under the soil. There are a number of varieties of potato, including Russet potatoes, the yellow colored Yukon Gold, and many others that are purple, red, small and large. All potatoes have a very thin skin, though baking potatoes have a slightly sturdier skin. The potato is hard and inedible until cooked. It can be boiled, baked, fried or cooked any number of ways and is an extremely versatile starch vegetable. The texture of a cooked potato is soft, while holding its shape and has an earthy and sweet flavor that is extremely bland, until salted.
The onion is a bulb vegetable, meaning its bulb and not its leaves are eaten. Onions come in many varieties, including white, yellow and red. Shallots are small and mild onions. Vidalias are sweet, while red onions are strong and sharp. The onion is usually round and has a thin dry skin around its juicy layers. This skin depends in the color of the onion, as does the flesh. The flesh, or body of the onion is made of multiple round layers, that get smaller towards the center. The flavor of onions are sharp and sweet when raw, with an astringent taste. When cooked, these flavors mellow and the sweetness emerges. Onion are a very common flavoring and ingredient for many savory dishes.
Eggs are an incredibly versatile protein and binder. Most eggs used in cooking come from hens and are usually unfertilized. Eggs are oval shaped and roughly 53 mm in length and 40 mm in width. Eggs have a hard, but thin and delicate shell that is brown or white and occasionally green. Inside is the clear and glossy white, with a slimy texture and in the center is the yellow opaque, round shaped yolk. Once cooked, the whites become opaque. Eggs can be scrambled, fried, boiled, and more. They are used in desserts and baked goods as a binder. Egg is also used as a wash to glaze items or dip meat into before breading it. The flavor is mild and sulfurous. It has many uses.
All purpose flour comes from wheat and though wheat is cultivated all around the world today, it was first cultivated in Turkey 10,000 years ago. All purpose flour is white in color and has a soft texture. This incredibly versatile flour is used in everything from breads, cakes, pastries, crackers, pasta, sauces and much more because of its pleasing and mild flavor that is slightly nutty and buttery. The gluten protein is what helps hold together breads and other products, part of what makes all purpose wheat flour so popular.
Vegetable oil is obtained by extracting oil from seeds. Types of vegetable oil include canola, sunflower, corn, and safflower. Light and with a neutral taste, vegetable oils are used to fry foods, or can be used to lightly coat meats and vegetables before roasting. Vegetable oils are also used as ingredients in salad dressings and sauces.
Matzo meal is traditional to Jewish cooking. The meal is made from matzo bread; an unleavened flatbread-like cracker made with wheat flour, water and salt. The matzo bread is ground into a fine meal that is used as a coating and as the base for matzo balls. The flavor is bland and a little salty.
Salt is a mineral composed mostly of sodium chloride. It is the main flavoring used in food and is naturally occurring in certain foods, such as cheese, beets, meat and celery, plus many others. Salt is white and has finer granules than sugar. Many commercial salts include iodide, while others exclude it. Most salts are white, while some are naturally pale pink with minerals. Salt brings out the flavor of something and can create a tangy mouthfeel, if used in excess.
Baking powder is a fine, white, powdery substance with a neutral smell and a very bland taste. It is an acid and used to instantly leaven baked goods. It reacts when it touches moisture and differs from yeast because of its instant leavening reaction. Baking powder is primarily used in flour-based baked goods to help cakes and cookies rise. Baking powder can be found in many non-yeast baked goods.
The peppercorn plant grows in tropical climate and produces tiny black fruit. The fruit is dried and become hard. At this point it is ground into a textured powder comprised of black and grey dots. It has a flavor that is spicy, pungent and sharp. Pepper is an extremely popular spice, especially in Western cuisines and lends a gentle heat to dishes. There are different varieties of black pepper and the flavor changes subtly because of this.
