My daughter, Skatje, was having a semi-public discussion with my niece, Rachael, about making lefse, and she shared her recipe. I have stolen it and now post it publicly, because the world — nay, the universe — needs this information. Use it wisely.
8 cups riced potatoes (a 5lb bag should cover it)
3-4 cups flour (depending on wetness of the potatoes; aim for as little flour as you can get away with without being too sticky. Don’t overcook the potatoes or they’re just gonna be a mushy wet mess)
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup heavy cream
1tbsp salt(This is definitely more lefse than the posted recipe is for, but who doesn’t want more lefse?)
But for the past several years I do a vegan version that you would never guess is vegan and everyone seems to be a huge fan of. For that, I substitute the butter for Earth Balance margarine. For the heavy cream, I take a 1/2 measuring cup, fill it a little more than half full of cashew milk and then add margarine until it fills up to the top.
As far as directions: Boil potatoes for around an hour (until they seem that mashable level where you can stick a fork in really easily). Drain, stick in fridge until tolerable temperature to work with. Rice them (pack down the measuring cups for that) and mix in everything but the flour. Refrigerate again until good and proper cold (like overnight). Add the flour until it’s not very sticky. Put back in fridge until cold cold cold.
My current setup for rolling it is great but often you have to work with a less ideal setup. I have the rolling space on the counter in the front (kept well-floured), the grill to my left, and the fridge on my right. I keep the dough in the freezer during it. Just reaching in and grabbing a small handful each time. I can roll out this whole batch in about 45 minutes. Flour the board/table, roll roll roll a bunch, flip, scatter some flour on top, roll roll roll, lift up with stick and shake as much flour off as possible before putting on grill. If you get quick enough, it’ll be time to flip the one you’re rolling at the same time as you need to flip the one that’s on the grill.
But the unideal setup is where you have to roll it out somewhere a good ways away from the fridge. In this case it may be sensible to do it in batches where you take a break to chill the dough back down again. Cold temperature is key for getting it not too sticky to roll and not needing so much flour so that the taste becomes more of a sad flour-y flatbread than delicious soft potato-y lefse.
Tools are important too. You need one of those weird grooved rolling pins. I’ve made a lot of lefse without a cloth rolling board, but can hands down say that that is SO necessarily to get paper thin lefse and overall makes things less of a pain in the ass with it shrinking or sticking to the table underneath. You need some sort of grill/skillet thing that can get up to 500 degrees. If someone tells you to oil said skillet (as this recipe does), that person needs to be cooked until lightly brown on each side.
Lefse is a holiday tradition in my family. My grandmother would make huge quantities every fall, and share them out to everyone. I used to make it for my kids, but it was never as good as my grandmother’s, and I wasn’t consciously aware of a lot of the information above, so my results were inconsistent. Skatje has, through practice and the inheritance of family tradition, become the Zen Master of Lefse, the Lefse Buffy, and everyone should heed her words. Especially the bit about cooking anyone who tries to fry their lefse. Ewww.
I’m not familiar with Lefse. Are they like tortillas made out of potatoes?
My family is more into the Hardanger lefse. A bit longer before you can eat it than with potato lefse, since it has to be moistened after cooking, but we like it.
As for world peace, I’ve met other Norwegian Americans who looked about ready to start a war with me when I told them not all lefse has potatoes in it.
Mister loves lefse, I’ll pass the recipe onto him. I’ll stay with frybread and wojapi.
I’m always fascinated by how quickly “New World” foods like potatoes became so deeply entwined in various “Old World” cuisines, or at least the versions we have over here in the “New World”. (For example, can you imagine an Italian-American restaurant without tomatoes?)
Google says potatoes weren’t introduced to Norway until about *1750*. That means potato-based lefse and Norwegian-Americans both came into existence at essentially the same point in history.
(Now that I write that, though, I guess it makes sense that Norwegian-Americans might think it’s the only kind there’s ever been. It’s just that the “ever” in question is the dawn of the Norwegian-American people, not the dawn of agriculture in Scandinavia.)
A suggestion for an alternative to using margarine: almond oil. I do some middle eastern baking which calls for sesame oil, and I usually have people commenting how buttery it is. And vegans complaining that I used butter.
YOB —
You should ask some older Norwegian-Lutheran women that, the next time you meet some.
Then duck.
Though my husband’s family aren’t Norwegian, they picked up the holiday lefse habit from Norwegian friends. My spawn has actually mastered the dark art of making gluten-free lefse (we’ve both got celiac, we have an excuse!) that doesn’t fall apart. Proper chilling of the dough is indeed essential to the rolling process.
She seems to have left out to important details. How large do you roll them. pie crust size? biscuit size? do you cut them with with a cookie cutter? what? And even more importantly how do you cook them? Do you eat them raw and just use the 500 degree skillet to warm your hands after plying the refrigerated dough?
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Jack Lecau. @4. 265 years is *eons* as far as food modification go. Ramen did not exist until after wwII, in Nova Scotia between 1955 and 1975 french fries completely replaced mash turnips. Ice Cream, soft beverages, hamburgers, french fries, cookies, etc. were entirely different or non-existent, in 1900. And just think of the conventions that you don’t notice but have actually changed in your own life time. The cuts of meat no-one eats any more and the new cuts people do, the flavors of ice cream and the obiquity of sprinkles (yuck), sodas as monolithic, the varieties of fruits and vegetables (the fact that the common varieties of apples of the 40s are *extinct*). Ramen, tritip, tacos al pastor, pasta carbanara, etc. simply did not exist before the 50s. *Nobody* eats oatmeal any more and I predict in 20 years nobody will eat soup either, etc.
You make them of a size to fit your lefse iron, of course! So bigger than a pie crust. You don’t cut them, you just have the skill to roll your ball of dough out to a perfectly circular shape. You then pick up the thin, delicate circles of flattened dough with a special lefse stick, flip it out flat on the hot iron, and wait for the brown freckling to appear.
Everyone knows that!
Sounds like a potato based chapati or roti. The cooking method seems pretty similar too. That picture actually looks exactly like them. I did a double take when I first saw the post. I’ll have to keep this in mind to try sometime.
Huh. I had the idea lefse were some sort of pickled fish. That sounds much more appealing.
We have a traditional types of breads like that in Finland made from barley flour or from potatoes and wheat flour. The are called rieska (perunarieska if potatoes are used and ohrarieska if barley). The best ones I’ve tasted have been in Northern Finland, where it’s more popular than here in the south.
We need a continuum of flat potato foods. At one end is lefse, at the other are latkes, and in the middle is boxty.
Woozy@8:
Your points are all excellent, except these. I know a surprising number of oatmeal eaters (but not me). As for soups, I don’t know what to say except you must not live in the American northeast. So. Much. Soup. Progresso is not going out of business anytime soon that I can see.
I hate soup, and even I have soup a couple of times a year in the form of lobster bisque or creamy potato-and-bacon.
Sounds a lot like aloo parathas. Mmmmmmmm! Do you eat lefse with some channa masala and dahl?
You’re probably thinking of lutefisk, which is another staple of Norwegian American holiday dinners. It’s not actually pickled, but preserved in lye (the name literally means “lye fish”). When it comes time to eat, the fish is “rejuvenated”, which my aunts never fully explained to me, my guess is they wash it with some sort of acid.
It doesn’t really taste like much but has a funky smell. It looks like a very translucent fish filet, but has the consistency of Jell-O. We dump melted butter on it, because what else would we do?
ragdish,
That sounds soooooo yummy.
Maybe. It still seems remarkable just HOW fast and HOW thoroughly things can change, to the extent that we have a hard time even imagining the ordinary diets of our ancestors just a few generations removed.
I mean, ice cream* and ramen are popular, but nobody today thinks that they’ve been around forever. Yet maybe in another 200 years, maybe they will. People will assume Americans *always* ate ice cream. Milking mammoths and churning it in glacier chunks as early as a couple of ice ages ago. Picking noodle bundles and flavor packets from the ramen trees before they went extinct.
* Possibly a bad example. IIRC, the Romans, maybe others, are reputed to have been shipping ice from cold regions to hot ones and making frozen treats at least a couple thousand years ago.
…Waitaminute. There are people who don’t eat oatmeal or soup?
@7 abn0rmal
What do you substitute for the wheat flour? I really want to try to make some gluten-free since my brother-in-law has Celiac’s.
How on Earth do you boil potatoes for more than 20 minutes without them ending up as a sludge?
You don’t need a grooved rolling pin, just a rolling pin sock. That allows you to flour the pin as well as the cloth on the board to prevent sticking.
But if you don’t have either, here’s a trick: Waxed paper. Parchment might work, too, but I haven’t tried it.
Take your dough ball and put it between two sheets of waxed paper. You can then roll the dough out between them. Pull the paper off and you can transfer it to the griddle.
DaveM#19
Probably an artifact of elevation. IIRC, Skatje lives in Colorado next to the mountains. Denver is the mile high city.
Twenty to twenty-five minutes is usually what is needed to boil potatoes here in Chiwaukee (elev. approx. 700 ft).
@frog
“nobody” must be taken with a grain of salt. The fact that you consider 25% eat it once or twice a month and 15% eat it weekly is a “surprisingly large” number just proves my point. 40 years ago it would have been 65% eat it weekly and 15 years before that 85% ate it 4 times a week.
I’m not saying soup is unpopular now but in 20 years I predict a “surprisingly large” number of people will eat it. There’s a reason the young whippersnappers joke about old people loving soup. One’s tastes don’t change just because one turns 70. It’s just that folks under 70 no longer eat soup three times a week like one’s generation always did before.
I’m already considered an old fogey because I like ginger ale and know what a rhubarb pie is and that I actually *like* mincemeat and don’t just tolerate it as somehow a holiday tradition that “nobody” actually likes.
Oh, absolutely! *ALWAYS* surprises me when I think of it. Was reading the history of sushi rice and it’s just *assumed* food technologies keep advancing and modern sushi rice was developed in the 60’s. And then it’s startling how what *I* eat today is produced *completely* different than how it was produced in as recently as my college days.
Anyway. “Traditional family fare” actually means “things my mother tells me she had as a child” and “old family recipes” means “something my grandmother learned to cook when she was in her 20s”.
So potatoes in 1750 is *ancient*.
Oh, oops. I meant an hour on the stove, not just straight boiling. Huge stockpot full of water takes a while to get up to temp. I put it on, set a timer for 45 minutes and then go check on them.
Yeah, straight up boiling them for an entire hour would be… bad. Altitude is also a factor here.
If what is true for pie crusts is true for lefse, then that is the gob’s truth.
It goes against every grain of my upbringing but a cuisinart-like food processor and waxed paper are modern *miracles* to the pie maker. I’ve been making perfect pies a few times a week this last month.
Pity woozile hates rhubarb and mincemeat and likes caramel pecan but that’s another rant…
I did wonder but … hey, you’re the one who knows what lefse is. Which brings up…
Is lefse an american thing? My grandmother had a love affair of all things Norwegian from a year she spent in a Norway fishing village in the 20s and … I never heard of this.
For that, I substitute the butter for Earth Balance margarine.
Subbing butter for margarine makes things NON-vegan. You replaced the butter with the margarine, or you substituted margarine for the butter.
Leutfisk, leutfisk!
Leftse, leftse!
I’m from Ballard,
Ya, sure, you betcha!
Why would you go to the bother of making leftse, when you can just buy it at the Ballard Market?
Looks a lot like the Scottish tattie scones
@ 19 davem
How on Earth do you boil potatoes for more than 20 minutes without them ending up as a sludge?
Note the quantity. With 5 lb ( ≈ 2.3kg in real terms), it probably would take 30 minutes or more just to bring them to a boil so an hour may not be too long.
Ah, I see Skatje has pointed this out plus the altitude issue which I was not aware of.
I have saved the PZ version (?) of the recipe and look forward to trying it.
@ jack lecou
My family is mainly Irish and I got a bit interested in the spread of potatoes around the world and not just the famous Irish case.
I’m a bit surprised it took so long for them to reach Norway; they seem to have had a very impressive effect on much of the rest of Western Europe a century or so earlier.
Of course, I don’t think the Spanish ever invaded Norway and traveling “Spanish” armies seem to have been a major reason for the potato’s early distribution across a goodly part of Western Europe.
McNeill, W. H. (1999). How the potato changed the world’s history. Social Research, 67–83.
At least one paper claims that they helped ‘fuel’ the Industrial Revolution and led to Europe’s world conquest.
Nunn, N., & Qian, N. (2010). The potato’s contribution to population and urbanization: Evidence from an historical experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics.
#10: Chapati and lefse are a bit distinct, though. Lefse is softer and has that potato flavor. Also, the chapatis I’ve had are a bit puffier — the best lefse are rolled out paper thin and stay that way after cooking.
But otherwise — yes, a perfectly common variety of flatbread, like we find in human cultures around the world.
#27: we can buy lefse year round at all the grocery stores in Minnesota, I think. But it’s never as good. I think it’s the preservatives — it has a more artifical flavor and a more rubbery texture — and it tends to be thicker than the good homemade stuff, probably because getting it thin enough creates complications in handling for the mass market.
Skatje @18:
Ack! I disappeared for the weekend. We use the almond flour blend from a company called Gluten Free Mama. We only had to start cooking GF in 2008, so we never got into making our own blends.