In my ongoing campaign to find a gluten-free lefse recipe, I tried making lefse yesterday using Due North Gluten Free Bread Flour, which I discovered at last month’s Norsk Hostfest in Minot, North Dakota. Here is what I learned:
- I substituted Due North’s GF flour for regular flour 1:1. However, when mixing the flour with my potato-butter-cream-sugar-salt mixture, I added one egg and mixed that in. I was told to do that by the Due North owners. The added egg created a sticky dough, so I added slightly more flour than what I normally add with regular flour just so this dough could be handled and rolled.
- Rolling this dough with Due North’s GF flour was very good. Most GF flours make dough that is grainy, and the rolled out lefse rounds are thicker than normal and have an uneven edge with splits and cracks. This makes it impossible to roll a round round. Due North GF flour made a dough that could be rolled thin, and the edge, while not entirely smooth, had fewer irregularities than most rounds made of GF flour.
- Turning the thin rolled-out round and transferring the round to the grill was also very good. The rounds did not fall apart, which often happens with rounds made of most GF flours. In fact, with many rounds made of GF flour, I have had to use two turning sticks to carefully lift one round to the grill. Not so, with Due North’s GF flour. No problem with the thin round hanging together.
- Grilling was fine. My only wish is that the lefse would have been a bit more tender.
- Taste was also fine. Jane Legwold, my wife who is gluten-free but not celiac, said the Due North had a little bit less of a potato taste but was good lefse overall. Butter spread on the lefse brought moisture to the round, she said, and this round made with Due North’s GF flour was more tender than lefse made with other GF flours — and she had no symptoms that she always gets with eating gluten. She added this lefse is not like tender, really good lefse made with regular flour by a really good lefse maker, but nothing is. All in all, thumbs up.
