Calories in Potato Latkes

OyGeeBiv

Hanukkah is coming up soon, and even though I did fine without some traditional Thanksgiving dishes, I absolutely MUST eat at least one potato latke at our family party. PLUS I absolutely need to eat it with sour cream and applesauce.

I googled and came up with a USDA calorie count of 268 calories per 100g of latke. Do they mean cooked? In oil?

Does that sound right?

OyGeeBiv

Anyone?

Tblackdogs

I have no idea but I have an idea. I often buy frozen zucchini cakes and recently bought potato cakes for my daughter. I like to eat them for lunch and I have 4 of them (they're about the size of what you'd think of when you think of silver dollar pancakes). They are 70 calories a piece so for my lunch that's 280 calories plus a tablespoon of sour cream which is 30 calories. I cook them in a non-stick pan using cooking spray. The zucchini ones are heavenly but the potato cakes are pretty good too! Don't know if that helps you at all but it's a suggestion.

OyGeeBiv

Oh, thanks, @Tblackdogs. Great idea, I'll look at the frozen latkes at the market and go from there. The USDA site also had a listing for "medium" latkes, at 99 calories each, so that's not really far off from the ones you mentioned. I guess the USDA isn't counting all the oil they're cooked in. Any other day I'd be fine using cooking spray, but the point of Hanukkah latkes is to fry them in oil, so I'll just have to adjust what else I eat for the day.

I've never heard zucchini cakes, but they sound great, too.

Queenmunchy

If you weigh one and put it in the recipe builder and add maybe 1/4-1/2T of oil for each, it should be pretty on point. Probably even a little over, but you can estimate more from there

OyGeeBiv

Yeah, that's really the problem I'm having...estimating the amount of oil that stays in each one.

alyssagb1

My grandma used to make these for me (she called them potato patties though) made with mashed potatoes, egg and flour. I'd recommend using these or similar items and make your own. Measure the ingredients etc. As for the oil, measure that as well and note how much oil is left in the pan. (I know eyeballing using mfp is the equivalent to saying f*** in church but hey, its better in this case than nothing.) I adored these when I was younger, as well as corn patties (substitute potatoes with corn meal+ jalapeño if you're feeling fiesty lol)


Now I want some..:p

OyGeeBiv

It's going to be close to impossible to figure out how much oil is left, since they drain on paper towels after cooking to get rid of the excess. I could weigh dry paper towels and then weigh them again afterwards...but honestly I'll be too busy/tired from frying latkes to bother. I'm probably making 50 or 60 of them. I think I'll just estimate 1/2 tsp oil in each one. How far off could that be? And it's only for one day, so even if I'm off by a lot it won't be that awful.

alyssagb1

Points well made. I doubt it'd be much more oil than that, if any.