When I named this blog "Trivial food", I gave the name quite a bit of thought. Through the years my notion of good food shifted from "fancy with exotic ingredients" to the challenge that with good-quality every-day ingredients one should be able to make spectacular food.
Today I am pretty confident that we met the challenge. Our daily food is largely plant-based, vegetables and legumes abound, preparations require fairly basic techniques and a manageable dose of attention. Yet, every time when we go to a fancy restaurant we pretty much shrug and acknowledge it is for the experience. The quality of food we consume on the daily basis tends to meet the bar consistently.
Thinking of dining experience, let me add an unsolicited plug for Sierra Mar, the restaurant at Post Ranch Inn. The food is beautiful and really well prepared, the ingredients are top notch, the service is ridiculously non-pretentious, and the view makes you extend a lunch to a two-hour event. That is something I cannot reproduce at home!
The topic of this post, however, are potato pancakes. A dish that must be trivial, it's really just grated potatoes mixed with a few additives and cooked on a griddle. Yet, around Hanukkah, every year internet surfaces an abundance of recipes and advice for how to make latkes or the pancakes perfectly. After looking at various recipes and making the dish several times, I do believe potato pancakes do qualify as trivial food. To get there, they need an uncommon twist.
That is, there are two key steps to making really good potato pancakes . The main one is to eliminate the excess moisture from the potatoes. In the original post I suggested squeezing the liquid out of grated potatoes with a paper towel. That is the standard method that works well, but it makes the pancakes trickier to cook so that they are cooked inside and not burned on the outside.
Recently I saw a recipe recommending to use leftover mashed potatoes for the pancakes, and that gave me an idea: Cook or bake the potatoes first, then grate them and use that to make potatoes. I turned to my trusty instant pot, steamed russet potatoes for 10 minutes and graded them when they cooled down. Note that steaming results in incomparably better potatoes than boiling, and with an instant pot, it is much faster and reproducible than baking. I also decided to replace the flour with starch (corn, potato, tapioca) dissolved in a bit of cold water to help with crispiness. The result were literally perfect potato pancakes without any fuss or preparation challenges whatsoever. Very satisfying.
The second secret was to cook the pancakes at a medium to medium-low heat, slowly enough so that the outside only gets crispy and not burned while the inside is fully cooked. That recommendation stays even when using steamed potatoes. We still want to minimize the opportunity to burn the pancakes, and we still need to allow the egg and the cornstarch to cook through.
Ingredients for about 8 pancakes, enough for two hungry people:
- Two russet potatoes, peeled and grated
- One egg, whisked
- One tablespoon of corn starch mixed with a tablespoon or two of cold water
- Optional: One teaspoon of baking soda
- A pinch of salt
- Cooking oil - I prefer extra virgin olive oil
- Steam the potatoes in an instant pot (or any handy pressure cooker) for 10 minutes, with natural release.
- When the potatoes are cold enough to handle, peel them - the skin will come off with ease.
- Grate the potatoes
- If you do not have the pressure cooker, grate the peeled raw potatoes, squeeze the grated potatoes in a paper towel to remove the excess moisture
- Mix all the ingredients in a bowl
- Heat a large pan with a few TBS of oil on medium
- When the pan is hot and the oil "dances" in the pan, add the potato mix, about 2 TBS per pancake
- Wait for the pancakes to set and separate from the pan easily, then lower the heat to medium-low
- Flip the pancakes periodically, cook until golden and cooked through
- Peel and cut celeriac to small cubes, about 1/5 inch. I used about 1/2 of a large celeriac.
- Peel 5 or so garlic cloves and cut them into three roughly even-sized pieces.
- Heat olive oil in a pan, and add celeriac cubes and garlic, and season with a pinch of salt
- Cook on medium to medium-low until both celeriac and garlic are cooked through, about 15 minutes
- Smear a teaspoon of Dijon mustard on a cooked and warm pancake
- Top with about 2 TBS ricotta. Spread the ricotta over the pancake.
- Top with a couple of TBS of cooked celeriac-garlic mixture.
- If you wish, garnish with some chopped parsley and drizzle with a good olive oil
