PSA: How to get the latkes you want

The Internet is host to a zillion latke recipes. Some of them aren’t what you would expect. I’m not going to cram in another one, but since tonight is the first night of Chanukka I thought I should say something about them. Whichever recipe you choose to follow, here are some tips for making delicious, problem-free latkes:

1. Know your potatoes (assuming you’re making latkes out of potatoes). Waxy potatoes, also known as boiling potatoes, contain less starch and therefore don’t get as thick or bind to each other as well when fried. If you’re using these—and you might want to, because some of them are delicious—make sure you use a little extra egg and flour/matzo meal/whatever as binder. Starchy potatoes, also called baking potatoes, bind to themselves naturally when fried. Yukon golds also make excellent latkes without too much extra binder.
2. Alternate grating onions and potatoes, and mix the batter a little when you switch. When you grate a potato, you expose its internal starches to oxygen, which causes them to turn brown. (This is the same process that browns the slices of a cut apple.) The acid from onion juice slows down this process and makes for a nicer-looking latke. Grating all the potatoes and then the onion allows the reaction to get started quickly, while keeping the potato always in contact with some onion prevents this.
3. Drain the potatoes and onions once they’re grated. Many a cook has mixed up what seemed like the perfect latke batter, only to have it become watery and difficult to handle when the time comes to fry. (Frying very wet batter can also be dangerous, since lots of water dropped into hot oil causes spattering.) This happens because the vegetables continue to “bleed” watery liquid for a while after they’ve been grated. You can let them sit in a bowl for ten minutes and then tip it out, or even better, drain them for ten minutes in a colander and then squeeze out the excess.
4. Stir in the salt at the last minute if your circumstances allow. Salt leeches more moisture out of the vegetables and creates the same problem addressed in point 3.
5. Stir the batter between frying batches. No matter how diligent you are about steps 3 and 4, some liquid will always settle at the bottom of the bowl. Stirring from the bottom up redistributes it and keeps the batter moist, while not stirring results in a puddle at the bottom and a final batch of weird, splotchy latkes.
6. Keep the oil hot. Fried foods don’t have to be fatty, and the best way to keep them crispy and not soggy with oil is to make sure that the oil itself stays between 350 and 365 degrees Fahrenheit (177 to 185 Celsius). If you have a frying thermometer, use it. If not, drop a small test latke into the oil—enthusiastic sizzling should begin on contact, rather than sluggishly building up. Also, if you find your oil running low, do not add oil while there are latkes in the pan. This will cause the temperature to plunge and result in soggy, oily pancakes. Instead, finish the batch in the pan and then add more oil, giving it time to heat up before you start on the next round of latkes.
7. After frying, drain the latkes well. Some extra oil always follows a latke out of the pan, so place them on a towel-lined plate to dry. You can also drain them directly in a wire mesh strainer positioned over a bowl or the sink, which allows both sides to remain crisp rather than steaming the underside.

If you have any other advice for better latkes, please share! Chanukka sameach!

Goodbye H&H

The H&H Bagels retail store on 80th and Broadway, an Upper West Side fixture for nearly 40 years, has closed. Lest anyone spend too much time panicking about the looming end of the true New York bagel, Slate’s Brian Palmer offers some insight into the nature of great bagel making. It’s not about terroir, it’s about knowing how to do the job and being willing to put in the effort of doing it right.

More on this soon. Also, stay tuned after Shabbat for Korach-themed bread! (It’s kind of a funny story, actually.)

Mit schmear

Deep thoughts are nice, but sometimes you just have to have pretty (and of course, tasty) food.

I may have given the impression two posts ago that I don’t think much of Schwartz’s Jewish Home Cooking. I do have some complaints, but for the most part it looks like a solid book so long as he’s talking about food rather than generalizing about the people who make and eat the food. One element I really enjoy is the author’s research into the origins of classic, but apparently not timeless, New York Jewish foods. A spread on pages 158 and 159 examines the combination of bagels, lox and cream cheese, recognized as a classic New York breakfast even if it is declining in popularity. (In fact it’s quite hard to find real lox even at groceries in New York City. Lox is made by curing salmon in brine and then slicing it thinly; smoking the fish turns it into Nova Scotia salmon, or just “nova” for short, a different product entirely.)

“Guilty pleasures”

Every now and then a confluence of events and ideas takes place such that the only possible human reaction—the only reaction anyone could imagine ever since we emerged from the trees and stood upright—is to blog about it.

Event the first:

About a month and a half ago, a friend who is recovering from an eating disorder posted the following on Facebook:

Eating has no moral valence. You are not “good” or “bad” for eating, or not eating one thing or another, and while there may be better and worse choices, there is no inherently morally good or morally bad food. (And this from someone who keeps Kosher.)

Eight “likes” and 84 comments later, the posting had turned into a series of parallel debates about the nature of morality as applied to food. Some of this was the result of ambiguous language, leading my friend to clarify that “what prompted this is the fact that I’m constantly surrounded by women who imagine themselves to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on whether or not they have a piece of the cake brought to school for someone’s birthday, how many days a week they eat nothing but salad, and the fact that eating disorders are the most deadly of all mental illnesses, disproportionately affect women, and are continually fed into by the media.”

French toast and bal tashchit

כִּֽי־תָצ֣וּר אֶל־עִיר֩ יָמִ֨ים רַבִּ֜ים לְֽהִלָּחֵ֧ם עָלֶ֣יהָ לְתָפְשָׂ֗הּ לֹֽא־תַשְׁחִ֤ית אֶת־עֵצָהּ֙ לִנְדֹּ֤חַ עָלָיו֙ גַּרְזֶ֔ן כִּ֚י מִמֶּ֣נּוּ תֹאכֵ֔ל וְאֹת֖וֹ לֹ֣א תִכְרֹ֑ת כִּ֤י הָֽאָדָם֙ עֵ֣ץ הַשָּׂדֶ֔ה לָבֹ֥א מִפָּנֶ֖יךָ בַּמָּצֽוֹר: רַ֞ק עֵ֣ץ אֲשֶׁר־תֵּדַ֗ע כִּ֣י לֹא־עֵ֤ץ מַֽאֲכָל֙ ה֔וּא אֹת֥וֹ תַשְׁחִ֖ית וְכָרָ֑תָּ וּבָנִ֣יתָ מָצ֗וֹר עַל־הָעִיר֙ אֲשֶׁר־הִוא֙ עֹשָׂ֧ה עִמְּךָ֛ מִלְחָמָ֖ה עַ֥ד רִדְתָּֽהּ:־

When you lay siege to a city for a long time in order to capture it, do not take an axe to its trees to destroy them; you may eat from them, but not destroy them. Is a tree a person to whom you should lay siege? You may destroy a tree that you know is not a fruit-bearing tree, and use it to build siege works against the city that is warring with you until it falls. (Deuteronomy 20:19-20)

This passage, forbidding the destruction of fruit trees during a siege, is the basis for a broad swath of Jewish law known as bal tashchit, roughly “do not destroy.” A quick summation of bal tashchit would go something like this: Do not needlessly waste resources, or exhaust a resource in a way that minimizes the benefit derived. For example, throwing a perfectly good raw potato in the garbage is prohibited, but so is eating it raw, since this provides neither the nutrition nor the enjoyment normally associated with potatoes. (Now I know what I’m having for lunch.) Jewish environmental groups often cite the principles of bal tashchit, if not the specific laws, as a religious foundation for ecological conservation programs.

The Kugel Confusion

The most recent Mixing Bowl post at The Jew and the Carrot contains a link to a very silly article in TIME Magazine by food writer Josh Ozersky. “Silly” would appear too weak a term for some people, and most of the ones represented in the comments section might opt for something like “offensive” or “deeply misguided.” Really, though, it’s just silly. Let’s examine why.

Ozersky’s titular kugel conundrum, as far as I can tell, is Ashkenazi Jews’ ability to be passionate about their (our) awful cuisine. Chief among his complaints is “dry and flavorless brisket, cooked in a salty fluid of Campbell’s beef broth and Lipton onion soup mix,” and I’m at a loss to explain why. Presumably a food writer knows a thing or two about cooking, so why doesn’t it occur to Ozersky to replace the Campbell’s with some homemade stock and the onion soup mix with some actual spices (and maybe a vegetable or four)? Would that cease to be Jewish brisket? In the author’s mind, is reliance on MSG—a chemical that has only been commercially available since 1909—an inherent part medieval Jewish foodways? His other objections, while not quite as detailed, tend to be similar: it’s not that matzo balls are bad, but that the ones he’s been served have been flavorless; he doesn’t like dense kugels and apparently can’t be bothered to try making lighter ones. (I’ve always thought density was part of the charm, but such is taste).

By the time I’d finished reading his article I wanted to call him up on the phone and suggest, as politely as I knew how, that he might just have grown up surrounded by bad cooks. It seems never to have occurred to Ozersky that the food wasn’t supposed to taste bad, and that people were attached to it because genuinely delicious versions exist. In fact, despite his assertion that “[n]obody is giving Jewish food the Torrisi treatment, raising up to a world-class level and celebrating its flavor profiles,” there’s been a recent swell of haute cuisine aspirations among traditional Jewish cooks, largely inspired by the Kosher by Design series. While my reactions to those books are generally mixed,* I have to applaud anyone who is at least trying. (It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Mr. Ozersky has never heard of Susie Fishbein. We’re talking about a guy so out of touch with American Jewish eating habits that, despite writing about food for a living, he only discovered this week that hummus can taste good.)

Thoughts (and breads) on Parashat Kedoshim

מֹ֧אזְנֵי צֶ֣דֶק אַבְנֵי־צֶ֗דֶק אֵ֥יפַת צֶ֛דֶק וְהִ֥ין צֶ֖דֶק יִהְיֶ֣ה לָכֶ֑ם אֲנִי֙ ה֣׳ אֱ•לֹֽהֵיכֶ֔ם אֲשֶׁר־הוֹצֵ֥אתִי אֶתְכֶ֖ם מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם:־

You shall have just balances, just weights, a just efa-measure and a just hin-measure; I am Adonai your God who brought you out of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:36)

It’s a pretty straightforward commandment: having accurate weights and measures is an important part of professional honesty when you live in a society where lots of things, including the currency, have to be checked by weight. It only strikes Americans as a little odd because most of us aren’t used to weighing things other than ourselves. (Who even owns a postage scale anymore? I typically send one paper letter a month, to pay my rent, and I already know how much the postage costs.) We’re unusual in this regard, since in most parts of the world solid ingredients tend to be measured by weight for use in recipes. Open any European cookbook and you’ll be confronted with instructions to use a certain number of grams of potato, leaving you stuck unless you happen to own a food scale.

Food scales are good to keep around for two reasons:

1. You really can use that European or Israeli (or whatever else) cookbook now, as long as you can read it.
2. Weight is a much more accurate way to measure dry ingredients than volume, which is how Americans tend to do it.

A cup of flour is a cup of flour is a cup of flour, right? Wrong. A loosely packed cup may weigh four ounces, while a more densely packed one might weigh five. Some instructions dictate how to measure the flour—spoon into the measure for a lighter cup, level-and-scoop for a heavier one—but these are still approximations. I read somewhere once (I honestly forget where), that there’s a joke among cooking professionals that most Americans never make the same cake twice. How could we, if our flour measurements are so imprecise?

The Fat that Dare Not Speak its Name

I wrote this a few months ago for The Jew and the Carrot. Though editorial dialectic eventually produced a rather different essay, I still enjoy the original and thought I’d share it. Thanks go out to my friend Andrea for proofreading and suggesting a few tweaks that really improved the article.

My spouse, suffering the loss of appetite that accompanies mononucleosis, has been taking in about 300 calories a day in the form of miso soup and apple juice, so when she requests chicken soup for Shabbat I know that it has to be serious chicken soup. In fact, it has to be emergency chicken soup, crowded with meat, vegetables and egg noodles two fingers wide. We’re talking about real Jewish azithromycin here. (Everything is resistant to penicillin these days.) It’s Friday afternoon, and I am stripping skin off of raw chicken leg quarters, when the little voice in my head speaks up.

“What, you’re just going to throw that away?” The voice knows I have a strong aversion to wasting food.

“This is chicken skin. I save bones for stock, but skin?”

The voice is having none of it. “Waste not, want not,” he says. “Doesn’t a commitment to sustainability mean using resources as efficiently as possible?”

“But what am I supposed to do with this stuff?” I can tell where the conversation is going, but don’t want to admit it.

“You know exactly what to do. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.” The voice is clearly growing impatient with me. “You cook with butter all the time, and butter is solid at room temperature, but it isn’t.” The voice doesn’t have to tell me what it is.

“What will my wife think? What about my friends?” I know that this is a lame appeal as soon as it comes out of my mouth.

“They’ll come around. You’ll tell them about the economy, and the new austerity.” Another pause. I can feel the big one coming. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

I cave. Driven by patriotic guilt and a secret desire to know what I’ve been missing, I cut the chicken skin into strips and place it in a skillet along with a few lumps of white fat from the legs, then put the heat on very low. For a long time nothing happens, which is great, because it gives me time to chop carrots while pretending I’ve done nothing wrong. After several minutes, though, a clear liquid begins to creep southward in the skillet. (Our stove top is not quite level.) Soon a distinct crackling sound announces itself, and I find that I’m shaking the pan and turning the bits of skin without having any real control over my actions. Before I have time to think, the crackling has all but subsided and left me with a once-praised, now-reviled inheritance from my Ashkenazi ancestors. Figuring I might as well go through with it, I pour the result through a coffee filter into a jar that once held fruit preserves, separating the golden-clear liquid from the crunchy, light-as-air skin fragments. I cross out the writing on the jar’s label, replace it with the words “Don’t ask,” and put it in the fridge immediately, figuring that the Mediterranean Diet Police might batter down the door any second.

Schmaltz (the rendered chicken fat, of which I now have maybe an ounce) and gribenes (the skin cracklings, which were delicious) aren’t the sorts of things people normally talk about in the context of healthy or responsible eating, but they should be. They’re made from something that many of us have been eating around and throwing away at least since the fat-phobic ’90s, and using them means reducing the environmental impact of meat production by stretching the product further. It is also, of course, a financially sound thing to do. As for health, how many people who cringe at the idea of schmaltz make regular use of hydrogenated margarine or shortening in their pareve baking? Schmaltz is a naturally occurring fat; it contains no trans fatty acids and a surprisingly benign balance of saturated, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. (At least one commercially available brand of kosher chicken fat is partially hydrogenated, and therefore contains at least some trans fatty acids, even if the FDA’s labeling rules allow the makers to claim that their product contains “0 grams” thereof. Check the ingredient list, not the nutrition information.) The strongest argument I can find against using schmaltz, assuming that you’re eating chicken anyway, is that it takes some getting used to. To be blunt, it tastes exactly like the sort of thing we’ve been told for decades is so bad for us that it’s practically immoral, and dwelling on recent epidemiological data seems unlikely to make that feeling go away.

So try this: if you’re the sort of person who can’t bear to eat soggy poultry skin—and I count myself among that august body of consumers—take it off before braising or stewing. A few simple steps and a relatively hands-off process will transform that wasted material, which you paid for, into some sadly overlooked building blocks for great flavor. When was the last time austerity tasted this good?