Anyone who has done latex knows it’s a painful process. Tears over a dangerous mix of chopped onions, and the inevitable bloody knocks when you’re trying to get a little more out of that last potato nib. And then, to top it all off, comes the squeeze. And squeeze. And More Squeeze because we all know—we’ve all heard it a million times.You need to wring every last drop of unwanted moisture out of the mixture.Lest your lashes become wet, less brown, and (Oy vey iz mir!) broken!
I lived my whole life with these self-made potato pancake truths, until one day many years ago a lazy whim interrupted things. I didn’t feel like squeezing a potato until my fingers hurt. And I sure as hell wasn’t in the mood to rub a sack with a stick, twisting and twisting it like a garrote until the potatoes were dry.
So I brutally squeezed my potato. Just enough And then I focused on my culinary knowledge to take care of the rest. If you’ve ever read Max Falkowitz. Great recipe for latkesyou’ll notice in the middle of the headnote that after squeezing the potatoes and onions and mixing in the matzo and eggs, he hydrates the potato starch with the dry liquid (after letting it cure first) and Stirs back into the latex mixture, a step that improves moisture management and improves latex adherence. I found I could do the same with dried potato starch in my pantry. (Honestly, you could probably make it work with cornstarch, too.)
Here’s how it works: Grate your onions and potatoes, then squeeze as much as you can, but without getting blue in the face or setting up any kind of elaborate device to mash them up further. Add your binders like eggs and matzo meal and then sprinkle in a little potato starch, just enough to bind things together and soak up any remaining moisture that you didn’t manage to squeeze out.
Now, I know the next question, which is, How much potato starch should I add? And I’m sorry to say, I don’t have a solid answer other than: just barely enough, but not much at all. I’ve learned the hard way that if you’re not just lazy, you’re unbearably lazy—as I was one day when I got a little antsy about how much younger I was thanks to this gimmick. Can avoid skirmishes — so you will be finished. Very bad place. The reality is that adding more starch to a bowl of soggy potatoes won’t solve your problems. Instead, it will form a sticky latex.
So think of it this way: do your best, try to drain the water. Then proceed as usual, relying only on sprinkling a small amount of potato starch into the mixture as needed to enhance binding and crisping.
Does this trick produce the biggest latex ever? No, I wouldn’t say that. But when your initiative is low, this is something you can take advantage of to improve them considerably.