How to Check Oil Temperature for Latkes

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Karen for Expert Village. Now these latkes as you can see are browning very nicely. As soon as you see that the edges are browning, then you flip them over. Now if the latkes are browning too quickly, you need to lower your heat, because what will happen is that they'll brown up so nicely on the outside but not be cooked on the inside, so you want to make sure that they are being cooked in the inside, and you could pull one out and test it. Make sure you test them; take a bite and see how they are coming out before you make a whole batch of them, finding out that your oil was a little bit too hot and that the insides were not being cooked. Now if you do cook your latkes like that and they are a little not cooked on the middle, they will eventually turn gray in the middle, so you want to avoid that. You want to make sure that your latkes are completely cooked through before you remove them from the oil. Okay, now here it is, you want to be very careful with the oil, I'm used to touching. But there is our latkes, beautiful latkes. I've put a tray with a little baking paper, you could put some foil down, little bit of paper towel or paper napkins to just sort of drain a little bit of the oil off of those latkes, because you don't want them to be oily and soggy and we will raise our heat a little. Now when you put the batter into the oil it also cools the oil, so you might find that the oil is nice and hot and ready, but after you've put a full tray of latkes into the pan, you may want to raise the heat under the oil a little bit to get the heat back up to temperature. These over here look done. You just want to hold it over and let it drain down a little bit, let some of that oil drip off, before you put it onto the. Now if your oil temperature is to low, your latkes can become a little bit oil laden and soggy, so finding the right temperature of nicely browning, like this, but not burning, not getting to brown to fast, that causes it to cook too quickly on the outside and not on the inside. I've got latkes in all different stages here. I've just pulled some out that were done, these are almost done. These I just put in. And as more space comes, I'll just add a little bit more and you just keep this going until all the batter is used. "