FORAY INTO LEFSE MAKING

Have you ever heard of Lefse? It is a thin crepe like potato pancake. In our family it is considered a treat and appears at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I believe it is actually a food historically eaten by Norwegian peasants. Modern day Norwegians know it as peasant food and don't eat it.

Well I come from good solid Norwegian peasant roots so I grew up eating and loving it. My favorite way to eat it is with butter and sugar. What's not to like, right? I discovered some years ago that there are different ways to eat it. Cindy & I were invited over to someone's home for lefse while we lived in Texas. I was really excited about having this treat. When we sat down to eat the lefse was wrapped around potato and fish. This was lefse but served in a very different way.

So after years of eating it I decided it was time to learn to how to make it.

I asked around, got some favorite recipes and watched as master lefse makers did their thing. I took the challenge. I bought the ingredients and was ready to do it.

Well the pictures help tell of my foray into making lefse. In all honestly this was my second time. My first time was years ago and it wasn't a positive experience. I figured that now things were different - I am wiser and more experienced - what could go wrong? I watched Ken & Ron turn out great lefse with little effort. I have Ken's recipe and participated in one of his sessions.

On Friday I mixed the batch of lefse ingrediants since it needed to be chilled to be easier to handle. That part was easy. In 30 minutes everything was mixed and chilling.

On Saturday I gathered my tools. Now, of course to get a griddle, turning stick and rolling pin especially made for making lefse be prepared to spend mucho buckos. I wasn't and didn't. I gathered my flat gridle I fry eggs on, a spatula and my grooved rolling pin that I got last Christmas in preparation for this very project.

1/3 of mixture chilled and ready to use

You take a third of the chilled potato mix and make into small balls and put them in the fridge until ready to use. Using chilled potato balls makes rolling out much easier.

Then you take one of the chilled balls, place it on a well floured surface (in this case a dish towel I taped on the counter - yet another use for duct tape) and using your well floured grooved rolling pin you carefully roll the ball into a flat, close to round, ready to grill, crepe-like potato pancake called lefse. Simple! Right.

Chilled potato balls

Well floured grooved rolling pin

Lefse rolled out and ready to grill

On the griddle 

Lefse as it should look - age spots and all

I heated the griddle and began rolling out my first creation. It stuck on my  rolling pin. No matter. I had Christmas music playing and I was in a good mood. I tried again. I rolled the gob back up into a ball and began rolling it out . It stuck again and was again ruined. I grabbed a soup can that was on the counter and tried using it since it looked vaguely like a rolling pin.  It didn't work. What else could I try. I squashed the ball with my hand. It would be pretty thick - actually way to thick but at least I would have created my first piece of lefse. Well it didn't stick to my hand so that was good. It was pretty thick and that was bad. So I took my spatula and gently worked at prying it off the dish towel. Well, it stuck to the spatula and the dish and was ruined. By that time the Christmas music was sort of grating on my nerves and I was getting crabby.

I now had out three different spatulas - one long handled metal one I used to grill burgers on the gas grill in the backyard. I was grabbing at anything and everything.

I had started this at about 1:30 and now it was about 4:30 and I had a about 5 grilled, sort of round but not really, on the thick side pieces of lefse and I was frazzled. I had chilled potato balls in the fridge, the smell of burnt potato filling the air, flour over every surface in the kitchen and this was to be my fun afternoon making this delectable treat. I was close to taking this whole mess and flushing it down the garbage disposal and someone turn off that music. Anybody coming into this kitchen was going to be greeted with open hostility.

It was time to take a break. So I shut off now unappreciated music, cleaned up a bit and called it quits - for Saturday. 

Cindy & I sat in the hot tub for a bit  then went to see the Hobbit.

I called Ken in Las Cruces and poured out my heart to him and asked him what I was doing wrong. The answer was right there in front of me - flour. I needed to make sure the rolling pin and the dish towel AND the lefse were well floured. That is a critical point. If any of those things is not well floured it would stick.

Sooooooo. Sunday would be the day. I was going to get it now.

After Church, Bible study & lunch I changed into my fighting clothes, set things up and started again.

This time I poured flour everywhere. I put it in a cake pan so that I could put my rolling pin in it after using it. I saturated the dish towel ducted taped to the kitchen counter. I grabbed a well chilled potato ball, flattened it in the pan of flour and began rolling. It worked. It worked. It worked. Flour was the answer.

In a few hours I was done and successful. I was "the man." Too bad Cindy was napping. I needed someone to whoop and holler and tell me I was not only handsome but a genius and a master lefse king. Actually she said all that later when we went Christmas caroling. 

I love lefse. I wrote down some notes as to what I learned and am ready to do it again - next Thanksgiving. By then I should have rested up and calmed down.