I imagine that would also be lovely! they aren't all that different.

That’s why I did the experiment now.

Conclusion: Latkes are dope, all of them. The traditional ones were excellent but a greater deal of that comes down to technique. I have made more bad latkes because I messed things up a bit than I would like to admit and it's great that I got better at this but the parboiling method is fool proof.

The 50/50 were the best. Perfect balance of al dente stings in a gooier mass from the parboil. Brilliant. I'll never be doing them this way again. you still need to squeeze half the potatoes, AND you need to parboil the night before. too much work for not enough reward but I had to know.

The parboiled latkes were incredibly good. This is a "hack" worth trying for sure. the interior is softer so if you love the stinginess of traditional latkes you might miss that quality but I absolutely did not. No squeeze and browning protection is a huge boon with this technique.

The traditional latkes came out really well. they were not over or undercooked, the internal shreds were soft but still had some bite, there is a reason people have made latkes this way for a bit, latkes are awesome. they did require a lot of squeezing a critical step that cannot be skipped.

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.

For frying I filled a 12" cast iron with about an inch of peanut oil which I favor for high temp fries. I can fit 3 latkes in the pan at once. to limit oil degradation effecting the experiment I fried 3 trad, 3 par, 3 50/50, and so on.

Everything else was according to the recipe, eggs, matzo meal, onions (which my tasting parter said were maybe diced too large). But before I get to frying I also took about a third out of both bowls and mixed them together for a 50/50 batch.

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.

The new technique has you put the potatoes in a pot, cover them with cold water, boil the water, then immediately remove them from heat, cool, and refrigerate over night. No draining needed!

The traditional recipe calls for shredding the spuds in a food processor and then squeezing the crap out of the shreds, letting the starch separate from the water and then reincorporating it. This is how I've always made Latkes.

The recipe I started with was Max Falkowitz's on serious eats. I split the recipe in half making the traditional version and the one using this new technique.