I tried Ina Garten's and Martha Stewart's latke recipes, and Garten's buttery potato pancakes won me over
- I made both Ina Garten's and Martha Stewart's latke recipes to see which one I liked better.
- I preferred Garten's recipe โ the simple ingredients and butter gave them a lighter flavor.
- Stewart's recipe with oil results in a more classic latke, but they were harder to flip.
Ina Garten and Martha Stewart are both known for their delicious recipes. But whose latkes are the tastiest?
As someone who has grown up celebrating Hanukkah, I've eaten my fair share of the holiday's traditional fried potato pancakes. I was curious to see how two of my favorite celebrity chefs have made latkes their own.
You can read Ina Garten's full latke recipe here and Martha Stewart's full recipe here.
I taste-tested both recipes. Here's how they turned out.
The recipe lists potatoes, an egg, flour, salt, and pepper. I was surprised to find that the recipe called for frying the latkes in clarified butter instead of oil. Eating foods fried in oil is part of Hanukkah tradition, so I was a bit skeptical about this change.
I managed to cut myself almost immediately. Grate with caution.
The resulting batter had the consistency of oatmeal.
The recipe includes instructions for how to make clarified butter. You can also just buy ghee at a grocery store and skip this step.
It reminded me of skimming the fat off the top of chicken soup. It was easy, but took extra time waiting for the solids to settle.
Garten's recipe instructs using a tablespoon of the potato mixture for each latke.
I also loved that frying the latkes in butter didn't make my entire apartment and person smell like oil. It's a strong scent that tends to linger. These just smelled mildly like melted butter, which was amazing.
Because there weren't any other added ingredients to the batter, the potato flavor shone through and the buttery crust was delicious.
It didn't have the oily taste of a traditional latke, but I actually preferred the milder taste of butter.
Stewart's recipe involved twice the amount of potatoes and eggs that were in Garten's, as well as additions like grated onion and beer.
Stewart's recipe says to reserve this potato juice, let the milky starch sink to the bottom, and pour off the liquid โ similar to the clarified butter I made for Garten's recipe.
Grated onions are standard in latke recipes โ beer, not as much. I was curious to see how it would affect the flavor and texture.
The larger latkes took much longer to fry than Garten's, and they were a little more unruly to flip. I'm still trying to get a resulting oil splash out of my favorite jeans.
I could already tell that these latkes were going to be the more traditional of the two.
I couldn't taste the beer, but the grated onion and the crispy, oily goodness created a sharper flavor that screamed Hanukkah to me.
Even though they're not fried in oil โ which is kind of the point of eating them on this holiday โ I enjoyed Garten's latkes more because they were easier and faster to make, and they had a mild, buttery flavor that I loved. But Stewart's recipe is perfect for traditionalists.