More Latkes, Please

An occasional series in which staff members share a recipe that we turn to time and again:

Just one miracle is associated with Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights commemorating the rededication of Jerusalem's Holy Temple some 2,200 years ago. It can be recounted even by those who don't celebrate the holiday: Only a small amount of purified oil could be found for lighting the temple's eternal flame. It lasted eight days instead of one. And so the custom of eating foods fried in oil was born. I'll be doing that starting at sundown on Sunday, when Hanukkah begins this year.

But I'm thinking there's a second, lesser miracle involved: when cooks can turn out dozens of latkes, seemingly at once, at parties they also are hosting. Perfect, crisp-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside fried potato pancakes.

Well, maybe not so much a miracle as a heroic feat.

Latke recipes have been written to address the need for frying in large quantities. When baking expert Marcy Goldman's children were in nursery school, her kitchen became a field trip destination. Troops of 3- and 4-year-olds would gather around her gas range to watch Goldman produce those perfect, crisp potato latkes, which they would then consume on the spot.

She shortened the process by parboiling the potatoes, then letting them dry and cool before grating them. That eliminated the chance of creating latkes with too-browned exteriors yet raw or starchy interiors. Goldman deep-fried the latkes in a wok. They took less time to fry because they had been partially cooked; the oil didn't splatter on her small audiences, either.

In 2001, barbecue expert Steven Raichlen directed latke cooks to heat a small amount of oil in a large, shallow pan in a very hot oven, then load it up with the small, flattened piles. His intention was to make them with less fat, he says. But it also meant they could be done in crowd-pleasing batches of eight to 10.

Since then, a latke built from russet potato, a little onion, egg and a binder such as matzoh meal has become almost quaint. Zucchini, cauliflower, carrot, celeriac, cabbage, beets, apples and pears are all latke material now. My own go-to recipe for the past few years has been sweet potato-scallion, with uneven results.

This year, with help from all who have tried and fried before me, I have experimented.

I used Goldman's parboiling method, with red-skinned potatoes that don't need to be peeled. I added parsnips for sweetness. I threw in a pinch of baking powder to inflate the interiors just a bit. I dispatched the vegetables with the shredding disk of my food processor. I folded in more egg white than egg yolk, to keep things light.

Then I oven-fried a la Raichlen's less-oil, more-latkes approach. The result was just what I wanted: perfect, crisp-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside fried potato pancakes.

Bring on the dreidels. I'll be out of the kitchen in no time.