Frying German Potato Pancakes

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Chef Rainer Wickel here today with expertvillage.com. Well we are on to our last step in making German Pancakes. We have the mixture all ready and now we are going to fry. What we need to do right now is get the frying pan ready to cook our German potato pancakes. So I have my special olive oil mixture. I like cooking in olive oil and I have some herbs in here which is going to give it that additional flavor. So what we need to do is take our olive oil and just go ahead and pour into the pan and we need quite a bit of oil in here because these are pretty much going to be deep fried. So go ahead and spread the olive oil through there and you want to make sure there is enough to cover the bottom of the pan and go ahead and go ahead and turn the heat on. We want the heat to be about medium to medium high. Now the key to this is you don't want the oil to get too hot. If the oil starts smoking, the oil is definitely too high and you need to turn the heat down. So what I like to do is take a pinch of flour and I'll throw a pinch of flour into the oil and once the oil starts bubbling, then I know the oil is ready to put the potato pancakes in there. I like to have a plate next to it because that is where we are going to be putting the potato pancakes once we take them out of the frying pan. What I like to do is get some paper towels and I will get two of them because I want to double it up. The reason that we are using the paper towels is that we want to sop up all that excess oil once we bring them out of the frying pan. So go ahead and put that on the plate. Now make sure when you are putting the paper towels onto the plate that it is not too close to the stove because you don't want the paper towels to catch fire and then you are going to have a total mess. You see that it is already starting to bubble so the oil is almost there about ready for us to put the potato pancakes in there and that is how we get the skillet ready to fry our potato pancakes. "