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A Latke Recipe from Acclaimed Pastry Chef Mindy Segal | A Celebration of Hanukkah with Geoffrey Baer

A Latke Recipe from Acclaimed Pastry Chef Mindy Segal

Chef Mindy Segal and Geoffrey Baer in bakery kitchen with latkes and cooking equipment around
Chef Mindy Segal with Geoffrey Baer Credit: Liz Markel for WTTW

You can trace James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Mindy Segal’s career to a childhood Hanukkah, when her mother bought her a KitchenAid mixer. Now she’s the owner of the popular Mindy’s Bakery in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.

Display of dozens of sufganiyot

The Festive Fried Foods of Hanukkah

During Hanukkah, oily foods are eaten to remember the miracle of the oil – when the menorah in the temple in Jerusalem burned for eight nights, even though there was only enough oil for one night.

She made her own version of the latkes her mother cooks for Hanukkah and demonstrated the process for WTTW’s Geoffrey Baer in A Celebration of Hanukkah – just as her mother once demonstrated the recipe for Segal’s own restaurant staff. “She would line the kitchen with paper bags” to absorb the grease, Segal recalls of childhood latke-making sessions. “The entire room would just smell.”

Fried foods like latkes are traditionally eaten on Hanukkah to celebrate the story of the holiday, in which oil that should have lasted for only one night burned for eight instead, keeping the sacred candelabra known as a menorah lighted in the ancient Jewish temple.

These days, most home cooks fry their latkes in vegetable oil. But Segal uses schmaltz – rendered chicken fat – “to give it extra Jewish flavor,” she says. “All grandmas fry their stuff in schmaltz.” You can follow her example or use more readily available vegetable oil – her basic recipe is easily adaptable to your own taste in numerous ways, and its measurements and steps are rough estimates. “You’re going to see I’m not really using a recipe,” Segal told Baer.

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Chef Mindy Segal’s Latkes

While the common debate in the United States is over applesauce vs. sour cream as a latke topping, Segal offers “chef”ed-up variations on the sweet-savory divide. She replaces applesauce with apple compote made by cooking apples in cider and caramel. (Her mother makes her own applesauce for her latkes.) And she complements sour cream with brisket, a sauce made from its cooking liquid, peppers in a vinaigrette, and crunchy sprouts for an elaborate savory latke.

Or you could eat them how you had them as a child or in whatever manner your family enjoys them now, either honoring or starting a tradition.

“Sometimes traditions are the most important thing,” Segal says. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s proper technique – it’s the warmth and the family and the mother and the grandmother and the aunt and all that stuff. Those are the memories of why you cook. I mean, that’s why I cook.”

Chef Mindy Segal’s Latkes

Ingredients

  • 3 Russet potatoes, rinsed and scrubbed but not peeled
  • ½ red onion
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/3 cup cornstarch
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • Schmaltz or vegetable oil, for frying

Directions

  1. Grate the potatoes and add them to a large bowl of cold water to rinse off the starch. Swirl the grated potatoes around in the water, then squeeze the water out of handfuls of potato before adding them to cheesecloth or a clean dishtowel. Grate the ½ red onion and add to the potatoes in the cheesecloth or dishtowel. Squeeze as much liquid out of the mixture as possible.
  2. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and mix onions in evenly with potatoes. Mix in two eggs, cornstarch, and salt and pepper to taste.
  3. Heat schmaltz or oil in a pan over medium-high heat, making sure there is about 1/4 inch of fat in the pan. When a piece of potato dropped in the pan sizzles, add a handful of the potato mixture to the pan and flatten with a spatula into a thin layer, so it gets crispy. Cook in batches; do not overcrowd the pan. Flip the latkes when the edges begin to brown, then cook until the second side is also brown. Transfer the latkes to a paper towel-lined plate or pan to drain. Add more schmaltz or oil to the pan, if necessary, and cook the rest of the latkes in the same way.