Germany: Potato pancakes

The potato pancakes really ended up being our own invention, largely because we couldn't find a recipe we were entirely happy with. They all had some good elements, so we just took the best of several of them and came up with our own. The difficulty making potato pancakes is getting a nice, firm little cake - as opposed to a crumbly mess of potato that falls apart when you cook it. The potatoes can't be too watery (you should drain them), and you need to make sure you have enough stuff in the mixture to bind it all together. You'll probably want to gradually add the ingredients in gradually to make sure you get the right consistency.

So this is what we came up with ...

(And yes, we did make 10 pounds of potato pancakes. My family is a big fan of these. Feel free to adjust the recipe for smaller quantities).

Ingredients:

10 pounds white potatoes (boil four of them)

3 yellow cooking onions

1 1/2 cups chives

lemon juice

10 eggs

4 tbsps. milk

3 tbsps. flour

4 tbsps. salt

applesauce

sour cream

What we did:

The first, and most laborious thing, we did was finely shred all of these potatoes. Luckily for me my sister's boyfriend Amit is a self-proclaimed awesome shredder and volunteered for this activity. So we peeled all of the potatoes and then using a fine grate shredded them into a strainer (Heather and Amit later pointed out after about two hours of this that you could probably achieve the same affect in a food processor).

As they were shredding we started to notice this, like, foamy stuff oozing out the bottom of the colander. The two of them are scientists, so they figured out pretty quickly is was starch from the potatoes (I'm not sure I would have picked up on that one). So after we shredded them all we took the colander to the sink and rinsed them to get the starchy stuff out. Then we let them sit and drain for a long while (Probably at least an hour. We did then let them sit on a towel for a bit as well. It's important to acknowledge, Heather and Amit did most of this).

We grated the onions to the same texture, and then drained them (no rinse). When this was all fairly dry we mixed it all together and threw some chopped, fresh chives in. We did all of this the night before and let it sit in the fridge overnight with some lemon juice to keep from browning.

The next morning we made the batter by adding in the eggs, milk and flour. We mixed it all together. We cooked them on two cast iron skillets outside on the grill (as to heat the house up and get it smelling like fried potato pancakes). You could, however, do this in a typical frying pan.

We like to eat them with sour cream and apple sauce.