During the holiday of Shavout, everyone eats dairy. During Chanukah, everyone eats fried food. Over the eight days, we’ll have latkes, fried green tomatoes, fried okra, fried pickles, and of course, fried chicken. This year, we did something we had never done before.
It was something inspired by the recipe in last week’s New York magazine for latkes with jalapenos. Jalapenos! Jalepenos with latkes in New York Magazine.
That gave me the best idea! Latkes with a Southern Jewish twist. Rather than jalapenos, I would slice up some mini dill pickles and try those! Av loves fried pickles and I knew that these would turn out to be either genius or, well, disgusting. But they were really good!
Now, if you don’t like pickles, you are not going to like latkes with pickles. But if you do like pickles, even a little bit, the tee-tiny slices in these latkes lend just the very nicest bit of pickle-ness.
Here’s the recipe I made up – it’s enough to serve 4-6:
1 large baking potato
1 egg
1/2 onion
4 tbsp. cornmeal
4 mini dill pickles, sliced very-very thin
oil for frying
salt and pepper
Directions:
Put oil in skillet, and put it on medium-high heat. Prepare a plate with a couple of layers of paper towel for draining the latkes.
In the Cuisinart, grate the onion and potato (I don’t skin my potatoes because they taste great with the skin).
In a large bowl, add the egg, cornmeal, and pickles to the potato and onion mixture, and stir well to combine.
Once the oil is nice and hot, place mounds of the potato mixture into the skillet. When one side is nice and golden brown, turn them over (season with salt and pepper on both sides)
Cook on the other side until golden brown, then place on the paper towel-covered plate to drain a bit:
So yummy!
The cornmeal was a good choice for these rather than the flour because fried pickles are typically made using an either all- or most- cornmeal mixture for frying.
If you try these, let me know what you think!
We have made latkes with sweet potatoes several times (which are *really* good) and I have thought about making them with rutabagas – I wonder how that would turn out?
When I was looking up these jalapeno latkes on Google, I found that other people have been really-really creative when it comes to latkes. This page at NPR has recipes for pesto latkes and spana-latke-kopitas.