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Crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside,  latkes are objectively delicious — and notoriously a pain to prepare. They’re finicky, time-consuming, and physically taxing, but when made correctly (and topped with sour cream and apple sauce), they can be exceptional. We reached out to professional chefs from around the country to discover how to make the best potato pancakes imaginable. Here are the seven of their most essential tips.

Use russet potatoes

“The secret to an excellent latke? Start with selecting the right potato,” says Hillary Sterling, executive chef of Ci Siamo in New York City. The potato variety you select will not only impact the taste and texture of your latke, but also how simple they are to prepare. Sterling opts for russet potatoes, which are drier and starchier than other varieties like Yukon gold. “[This] helps them stick together without adding too much moisture,” says Sterling.

Season immediately after grating

“The best way to ensure the crispiest latkes is to remove as much moisture as possible after you shred the potatoes and onions,” says Eli Sussman, chef and co-owner of Gertrude’s in Brooklyn, New York. One easy way to draw that moisture out is by seasoning the potatoes and onions immediately after shredding. Liad Balki, director of operations at Miznon, suggests placing the potato mixture in a strainer, seasoning it with salt, then letting it rest for 10 to 30 minutes.

Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze

Here comes the challenging bit. The only way to ensure dry shredded potatoes is by using your hands to squeeze or press the starchy water out — a bit of manual labor that makes all the difference. “Once grated, squeeze them like hell in a dish towel,” says 2022 F&W Best New Chef Caroline Schiff. “And when you think you’ve got all the liquid out, squeeze some more.”

How you choose to squeeze the water out is up to you. “You can use a kitchen towel, cheesecloth, or carefully press it through a strainer,” says Sussman. “The key is to get the mixture dry before adding in eggs.”

Add the right binder

While liquid doesn’t benefit a latke, starch certainly does. “When you remove the water, the potato starch goes with it, and you want that starch for binding and crispiness,” says Schiff. So, she adds potato starch back into the mixture — one tablespoon for every pound of potato. You can use store-bought (which comes as a powder) or the starch that sits at the bottom of your strained potato water — in that case, make sure you strain the liquid into a bowl instead of the sink.

For another binding agent, Sterling likes to use grated cheese like young Pecorino or fontina. “It helps hold the mixture together and gives the latkes a nice crispy outside, while still staying creamy on the inside,” she says. 

Pay attention to the oil temperature

Michael King, chef of Sungold and NoMad Diner in New York City, says a candy thermometer is essential for making latkes at home. “If your oil is too cold, your latkes are never going to get crispy enough,” he says. “Because they are really just a loose paste before they’re fried, oil that’s less than hot will seep into the grated potatoes, giving you a result far worse than a limp french fry.” But if your oil is too hot, Schiff says, your latkes will brown too quickly, “leaving the inside raw.” For perfectly golden brown latkes, keep your cooking oil between 350℉ and 375℉.

Don’t overcrowd your pan

Even if you’re making latkes for a crowd, you should avoid frying too many at once. “Don’t overcrowd your pan, as it will rapidly drop the temperature of the oil,” says King. “A good rule of thumb: However big your latkes are, leave that much space between them while frying. It might take longer, but it’s well worth it.”

Cool on a rack

When your latkes are done, do not throw them directly onto a plate. Instead, let them cool on a wire rack. According to chef Michael Hackman of Aioli Sourdough Bakery and Cafe in West Palm Beach, Florida, this ensures that the “bottoms stay crisp instead of steaming into sogginess.”

After all that effort, no one wants to be left with a soggy latke.

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Credit: Food & Wine / Photo by Victor Protasio / Food Styling by Michelle Gatton / Prop Styling by Christine Keely

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As the debate turned more tense, several Republicans, both for and against the new map, reported threats or swatting. Long-simmering ideological and stylistic divides among Republicans in Indiana spilled into the open, with many long-serving or institutionalist figures who opposed the map clashing with Trump-aligned conservatives who favored the plan. Republicans would have been expected to flip the only two Democratic-held congressional seats among the state’s nine districts if the new map had passed.

In the end, a slim majority of the Senate’s Republican caucus voted against the map.

That Indiana lawmakers voted at all showed the enduring power that Mr. Trump holds over his party. Many in the State Senate did not want to debate the map, which was proposed outside the usual once-a-decade redistricting cycle, and the chamber’s leadership relented and brought the bill to the floor only after the president and his allies stepped up their pressure campaign. The map’s defeat, though, showed the limits of Mr. Trump’s power to bend Republican officials to his will.

“I believe the bill on its face is unconstitutional,” said State Senator Greg Walker, a Republican who opposes redistricting and who recently reported a swatting incident at his home, a form of harassment in which law enforcement was called to respond to a nonexistent emergency.

Another Republican opposed to the new map, State Senator Spencer Deery, said that “I see no justification that outweighs the harms it would inflict upon the people’s faith in the integrity of our elections and our system of government.” He added that “it’s time to say no to pressure from Washington, D.C.,” and that “it’s time to say no to outsiders who are trying to run our state.”

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Republicans make up a majority of the Indiana Senate, but more than a dozen voted against President Trump’s new political map, which aimed to add Republicans in Congress.CreditCredit…Jon Cherry for The New York Times

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The Leonid meteor shower is peaking this week, potentially bringing hundreds of long-tailed meteors with it. This annual fall display is an excellent opportunity to spot fireballs in the night sky.

Meteor showers are the beautiful result of Earth moving through the trail of debris streaming from comets and asteroids as they make their own way around the sun. As these chunks of space rock enter our atmosphere, they burn up as shooting stars. And if they land, they become meteorites.

The Leonids are an annual shower that occurs in early November and lasts through early December, when Earth passes through the stream of debris of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle.

Perhaps the most famous Leonid display in modern memory took place on November 17, 1966, when meteors seemed to fall like rain, and some witnesses said it felt as if Earth was plunging through space.

These storms tend to follow a 33- to 34-year rhythm tied to the comet’s orbit. Most years are quieter, however, which is the most likely outcome this week. The last major event occurred in 2002.

How to Watch the Leonids

The Leonids will reach their peak at 1 P.M. EST on November 17. Hundreds of long-tailed meteors will cross the sky at 44 miles per second, giving sky watchers a good chance to catch the display closer to dawn on November 18.

When many meteors appear to streak from the same point in the night sky, that point is known as the radiant. This year, the shower’s radiant rises around midnight and climbs highest just before dawn, making the predawn hours the best time to watch.

Favorably for sky-gazers, the next new moon will arrive on November 20, which means there is only a thin waning crescent in the sky during the Leonids’ peak this week. Under dark sky conditions, observers might see as many as 10 to 15 Leonids per hour. Experts recommend using binoculars or telescopes and lying flat on your back with your feet toward the east. After about 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adjust, and you will begin to see meteors.

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US forces have seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, in a major escalation of Donald Trump’s four-month pressure campaign against the South American country’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro, whose government called the seizure “an act of international piracy”.

Trump confirmed the operation on Wednesday, saying: “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela – a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually.”

“It was seized for a very good reason,” the US president added, declining to say who owned the vessel.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, posted footage of the seizure on X. The grainy, unclassified 45-second video shows US forces landing on the tanker from a helicopter.

In an accompanying statement, Bondi said the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and the US Coast Guard, with support from the Department of Defense, had “executed a seizure warrant for a crude oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”.

She said the tanker had been sanctioned by the US for “multiple years” due to its “involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations”.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted its own video edit of the seizure, soundtracked with an excerpt from LL Cool J’s song Mama Said Knock You Out. DHS has repeatedly faced criticism for poaching music for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment ads. DHS recently used a Sabrina Carpenter song, without permission, prompting the pop star to respond that the video was “evil and disgusting”.

LL Cool J did not immediately address the use of his song.

Venezuela’s government said in the statement that the seizure “constitutes a blatant theft and an act of international piracy”.

It continued: “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed … It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

Earlier, speaking at a rally in Caracas, Maduro urged citizens to act like “warriors” and be ready “to smash the teeth of the North American empire if necessary”.

Maduro has been in power since 2013, when he succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death from cancer. Widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election, Maduro has clung to power after launching a wave of repression that forced Edmundo González, the apparent winner of the 2024 vote, into exile in Spain.

Since August, the US has put a $50m bounty on Maduro’s head, launched the biggest naval deployment in the Caribbean Sea since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and carried out a series of deadly airstrikes on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 80 people.

On Tuesday, two US fighter jets circled the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes. The aircraft flew just north of Maracaibo, one of Venezuela’s most populous cities.

On Wednesday, González’s most important backer, the opposition leader María Corina Machado, was awarded the Nobel peace prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a peaceful and just transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, accepted the prize, telling a ceremony in Oslo that her mother’s struggle to end years of “obscene corruption” and “brutal dictatorship” would go on.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil and, although years of mismanagement and corruption have done severe damage to its oil industry, oil exports remain Venezuela’s main source of revenue. The main customer is China.

The objective of this week’s reported tanker seizure was not immediately clear.

In an interview last week, Joe Biden’s former chief Latin America adviser, Juan González, said that at around the time of last year’s election he had pushed for the US to station two navy destroyers off Venezuela’s coast “and even impose an oil blockade”.

That never happened, but González believed one possible way out of the current crisis might be for the Trump administration to push Maduro into accepting a recall referendum, perhaps in 2027, but threatening “real hardline consequences” such as a blockade if the result was not respected.

“I think it is potentially a viable option where there should be a very credible and aggressive snapback associated with it,” González said, adding: “Imposing an oil blockade would shut down the entire economy.”

“It’s less aggressive [than a land strike] but it’s still considered an act of war,” added González, who was the national security council’s senior director for the western hemisphere during the Biden administration.

“He [Trump] could take unilateral action by blocking oil tankers from leaving or entering the country, and that I think would precipitate Maduro’s departure.”

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Footage shows US forces taking control of oil tanker off Venezuelan coast – video

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Opinions on Donald Trump’s mental state vary widely; some critics label him as “insane” due to his behavior and rhetoric, while others argue he is simply a product of mediocrity and privilege. Ultimately, whether he is considered “crazy” is subjective and depends on individual perspectives.

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Ms. Machado, 58, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for leading a successful electoral challenge to Mr. Maduro last year. He disregarded the election results, declared himself the winner, and cracked down on dissent.

In an audio message published by the Nobel Peace Prize committee on Wednesday, Ms. Machado said she had left Venezuela and was traveling to Oslo to participate in the day’s festivities surrounding the awarding of the prize. But she arrived too late to attend the ceremony, at which her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the Nobel on her behalf.

Mr. Trump’s administration, which accuses Mr. Maduro of leading two drug cartels, has deployed the largest U.S. naval presence in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis, carrying out fatal strikes on boats that it says were trafficking drugs and, on Wednesday, seizing an oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.

Yet the two leaders spoke by phone last month, and Venezuela recently began accepting U.S. deportation flights, raising the possibility that both sides could be edging toward a diplomatic settlement.

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María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s opposition leader, greeted supporters in the Norwegian capital, hours after missing the ceremony at which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.CreditCredit…Jonas Been Henriksen/NTB Scanpix, via Associated Press

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