Author: Jim Leet

Editor’s Note: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of 2021, an estimated 38.4 million adults in the United States had diabetes. This represents approximately 11.6% of the adult population. Guest blogger Jim Leet of Roseburg, Oregon, has diabetes as well as a passion for lefse — and for lefse limericks (look for his limerick that ends this blog). Recently, Leet’s primary care provider put him on what Leet calls the “air and water” diet. Meaning no lefse. To quote Leet: “Yikes!” However, instead of giving up on lefse, Leet has set out on a quest to come up with a lefse recipe that won’t have a negative effect on his health.

Gary Legwold

I’m sure that I’m not the only one of Gary’s followers who deals with diabetes issues. But my primary care provider put me on the “air and water” diet, which brought some of those issues screaming to the forefront. No flour and no starchy veggies – right after I planted a 100-foot row of potatoes. Yikes! No potatoes and no flour means NO LEFSE!!!

So I began analyzing our favorite comfort food for its nutritional makeup and looking for substitutes that can make my lefse still taste and feel like lefse.

Lefse is, of course, almost pure carbohydrate, with a bit of fat. Googling this, I got 80- to 100-gram rounds, which runs about 170 -180 calories. Carbohydrate load averages 24 to 29 grams – noted as two “carb choices” per one-round serving, which is all a diabetic is supposed to be having anyway. That’s a bit limiting when you’ve got fresh hot lefse coming off the grill.

So I am looking at what can be substituted for the flour to either limit the carbs or spread them out. I tried whole wheat flour a few years ago thinking the extra fiber might help nutritionally, but I wasn’t happy with the results. I will need to try that again.

Since Gary has done some work with ingredient substitutes for gluten-intolerant people, I reached out to him. One of his suggestions was to make flour lefse without potatoes – so-called Hardanger lefse. I’ve had that, and its pretty much like a Mexican tortilla. Even the Carb Balance tortillas are fine for their purpose, but that good potato flavor is sorely missed. You just can’t pretend that it is real lefse.

I’m saying that the search has commenced to find an acceptable alternative to white flour in lefse. Since leavening isn’t an issue, that might open up some possibilities. Some pizza crusts are now made from cauliflower, so that deserves a try. Perhaps grinding up and dehydrating cauliflower would work, without interfering with the other lefse flavors. Various neutral bean flours could be a possibility, but they also have significant carbs and potentially could be too pasty for lefse dough. However, the extra fiber could spread out the load. Several nut flours can be substituted 1:1, notably almond flour or meal, chickpea flour, and hazelnut flour (yea – I have two hazelnut trees!). Potato starch, oat flour, and flaxseed meal are other possibilities. The thing is, the no-potato flavor will be different. Any suggestions?

I’m searching, but it may be that we diabetics have to accept that we can’t substitute flours and get lefse just like Grandma made. Maybe we just have to “change our liking.” Hmmm.

I seek feedback from anyone who is in the same boat as I am, anyone who is trying any of these alternatives and having success of any kind.

Please email your ideas and solutions to Gary Legwold at glegwold@lutefisk.com. We can put together your feedback in a follow-up blog.

As a way of ending, I’m of the mind that there is a lefse limerick for just about any situation, including lefse and diabetes.

Lefse’s potatoes and wheat
Blood sugar goes up like the heat
A new flour we need
So we can still feed
On lefse, our favorite treat!

Thanks.

Jim Leet

Sometimes in our youth (think high school and college age) we do things just so we can eventually say we’ve done them. Kind of like building your resume to eventually impress your grandkids. Thus, I decided to make lefse on a canoe trip.

You don’t have to have high-tech equipment to make lefse, and at the time and on that trip I certainly adhered to that principle. Nevertheless, things were kind of primitive. I was on a float down the upper Mississippi River in north central Minnesota. Normal canoe trips involved portages and keeping weight to a minimum, but there I really didn’t have to carry gear or the canoe around anything. Nor was I backpacking, so I went a bit heavier on provisions. While I was heavier on provision, I still didn’t have a proper rolling board, pastry cloth, rolling pin, griddle, or flipping stick. Time to improvise.

Make Do to Make Lefse

Finding the flat rolling surface was easy. I just turned over the canoe and used the flat part of the hull bottom. Rolling pin? Easy — a beer bottle worked, although a wine bottle would have been better. I had a cheap aluminum frying pan and pancake turner, which kind of worked. Still being somewhat primitive, I used a cooking fire instead of a heat-controlled specialty griddle.

Ingredients were easily solved with instant mashed potatoes and pancake flour. Instant mashed potatoes weren’t as good in the middle 60s as they are now, but they worked. And of course, this was an experiment. I don’t recall exactly what I used for shortening in the dough, but it was probably bacon grease. Anyway, I somehow got the dough rolled and into the pan and kind of cooked.

Texture and cosmetics were primitive, but then a judging panel was not present so I ignored those subtleties. As I recall, the lefse was surprisingly tasty — must have been the bacon grease — but then I wasn’t making it for refined tastes. It might also have involved the hunger generated by paddling all day.

My techniques have improved in the last half century or so, but making lefse on a canoe trip is still a fond memory. If I were to make lefse while out camping these days, it would be a bit easier to do it in my motor home. But the biggest challenge today would be to get the canoe into the motor home to roll out the dough!