Latkes

These potato pancakes get a boost of flavor from sweet beets and thyme. They’re delicious with sour cream.

Writer Periel Aschenbrand learned how to make these onion-sweetened potato pancakes from her late grandmother, who escaped Lithuania during the Holocaust and settled in Tel Aviv before moving to the U.S. She made these latkes at Hanukkah, as Periel does today.

“My mom used to make zucchini fritters on the Jewish holidays,” says Rachel Klein. Klein’s latke version is unexpected and delicious, especially with red pepper jelly and smoked trout.

“You don’t have to eat latkes with applesauce or sour cream,” says Rachel Klein. She treats rustic potato latkes like regal blinis, serving them with farmed paddlefish roe (a sustainable, less expensive alternative to wild sturgeon caviar) and crème fraîche.

Gail Simmons’s mother, Renée Simmons, uses a food processor’s shredding disk to get long potato strands that fry up extra-crispy.

F&W’s Kate Heddings uses an unlikely piece of equipment to make her lacy, ultracrispy Hanukkah latkes: a Benriner turning vegetable slicer, which produces continuous thin curls of potato that fry up beautifully.

Vinny Dotolo found inspiration for this elegant dish by thinking about New Year’s Eve classics. Both Champagne and caviar flavor the butter sauce that he spoons over seared scallops set on mini potato pancakes.

Luckily for you, these are amazing. Every year at our house, we have a Hanukkah night when we invite the neighbors and stand around the kitchen shoving these hot, crispy little beauties into our mouths as fast as you can say “dreidel, dreidel, dreidel.” Enjoy.—Andrew Zimmern

These crisp potato pancakes come from Eric Bromberg and Bruce Brombergs’ grandmother, Martha Finkelstein, who insisted that there is no flavor substitute for schmaltz (rendered chicken fat). Schmaltz is available at kosher delicatessens.

Although Wolfgang Puck is best known for putting smoked salmon, caviar and dill-flecked crème fraîche on his designer pizzas, he also loves this trio of toppings with his exceptionally crispy potato pancakes, a dish he makes frequently when cooking at home. All three garnishes are wonderfully decadent together; still, you can leave out the smoked salmon or the caviar.

Rachel Klein mixes sweet and spicy flavors in this whimsical recipe, stirring pungent wasabi paste into crème fraîche to top the slightly sweet latkes and garnishing them with wasabi tobiko (flying fish roe) and peppery radish sprouts.