Sourdough Latkes

One of the nice things about baking sourdough bread daily is that you always have a dish of sourdough starter hanging about. Sourdough starter is flour and water which is fermenting - in other words, it's batter. So you can quickly cook anything that requires batter. I already posted a recipe for sourdough pancakes. I forgot to photograph my sourdough onion rings, but next time I make them I'll tell you all about it. I've plans to make sourdough apple fritters sometime soon. But today I want to show you my sourdough potato latkes.

It's basically the same recipe as the potato latkes I blogged about in July:

Grate two pounds of peeled potatoes and soak in cold water for at least a couple of hours. Strain the potatoes and dry them well, for example by wrapping in a tea towel and swinging them round your head. Do this outdoors. And don't blame me if you accidentally let go of a corner and decorate your garden with grated spuds. If you're chicken you could just pat them dry between sheets of kitchen paper. Put the potatoes in a large bowl and add a grated onion and plenty of freshly ground black pepper and sea salt.

But then instead of making batter from scratch, I took a cup and a half of sourdough starter. I added a beaten egg, a splash of milk and half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda. I mixed the spuds with the sourdough batter, then fried dessertspoonsful of the mixture in butter, in a frying pan.

You can serve them as a side dish with roasted stuffed butternut squash, as I planned to do. But apparently they taste better red hot from the pan, stolen from the cook, and eaten with your hands burning your fingers in the process.