My plan was to each Latke half with apple sauce and half with sour cream but I was out of sour cream but did have a pint of Labneh in the fridge. OMG, labneh on a latke is a revelation. Here is a picture of me definitely not enjoying it.

I was expecting more of a visual contrast in the cross sections but what's maybe not clear is that in the par boiled latkes, despite maintaining shred integrity, had much softer shreds. They could probably be mashed with a spoon but, critically, weren't already like mashed potatoes.

Here is a picture of my plate, as you can see, I learned my lesson regarding the plate color but had gotten quite a bit of oil on my phone's Camera. Now the real experimenting could begin.

It was here that I realized putting browed latkes on brown paper towel on brown plates makes for horrible photography but so it goes.

Here is a side by side picture of the potatoes shredded both ways. It doesn't come out great in the images but the par cooked potatoes are much whiter than the non par cooked which start browning right away.