Category: Lefse

You may have noticed I took a break from blogging and The Lefse & Lutefisk News for the last month. Two reasons:

First, it’s the low lefse season, and all’s quiet on the lefse front. After all, making lefse in a hammock is pretty tricky.

Second, my son, Ben Legwold, his future father-in-law, Kou Vang, and I just finished a 16’ x 20’ deck that attaches to his new house here in the Twin Cities. It was the first deck for all of us, and it turned out great. From time to time my thoughts turned to the similarities between deck building and lefse making, of course, and here are my top five:

1. Deck building and lefse making are best when done with others. The buddy system works. When you tire or get discouraged, your partners can pick you up. Also, your strengths tend to complement their strengths. In lefse making, one may like making dough while the others like rolling and grilling. With deck building, I could get bogged down with overthinking square and level and meeting code. But Ben and Kou would keep us moving with their intuitive style.
2. You can do anything with the right tools. Since I was my son’s age, I have been building up tools for projects I would do at my houses. I am glad I have had them, and I threw all my tools—and a couple of new ones I didn’t know existed—at this deck project. Early on, my dilemma was: Do I pay for tools and risk making a royal mess of things out of ignorance and lack of confidence, or do I just use the money to hire a professional to do it right? Sure, I hired pros when I knew I would be in over my head. But often, I’d buy the tools, usually be the best ones affordable, and let the tools and particulars of the projects teach me. The same is true of lefse-making equipment. Buy the best and give yourself a chance to make the best lefse.
3. What if lefse had to meet code? Think about that. What if you had to take out a permit—which you have to do with deck building—before you made every batch of lefse you intended to share with family or sell to customers at the holidays? And then those batches had to meet a lefse code and pass inspection? Oh, the Perfectionist Support Group meetings would be packed!
4. Surprises and humor await! You can plan your deck building and lefse making to the nth degree, but stuff happens. Your rolling pin breaks, so you roll lefse using a sock-covered tube of caulk. Your deck isn’t square, so you make the ends of one corner meet by setting a second post at that corner. NB: Our deck was square.
5. You must celebrate. Just as it is unthinkable that you not sit and savor lefse with your lefse team when the rolling is done, you must also celebrate your deck again and again. Eat on it, watch sun rises, and discover constellations with family and friends. Lefse and decks invite the best of living.

“What are you snobbish about?”

That was the question posed during a small gathering of friends and family in our living room last spring. We agreed that everyone has an uppity attitude about something. Then we each took a turn admitting our own particular area of assumed superior taste. One confessed to being a martini snob; another to being snobbish about movies.

Because of our sister Mary Jane’s well-known open-heartedness, we knew she would have trouble coming up with a sense of superiority about anything. We unanimously rejected all of her proposed persnicketiness — until she declared herself to be a snob about lefse. With a touch of indignation in her tone, she insisted: “You cannot make real lefse with instant mashed potatoes!”

Scary Lefse?

As a fierce defender of homemade lefse, Mary Jane always showed up for the family’s fall festival of lefse making at sister Nancy’s house. Starting from scratch with russet potatoes, we six siblings — along with some of our spouses, our children, and, eventually, grandchildren — mixed, rolled, and baked lefse. With four electric lefse grills fired up to 500 F, fuses would blow at least once during the daylong lefse-making marathon. The kids called out “Open griddle!” whenever a hot grill stood empty for a moment too long. We ate plenty of lefse while we worked. And we stacked up enough lefse to wrap and save for Thanksgiving dinner.

For Halloween Mary Jane and I had a tradition of wearing costumes to greet trick-or-treating kids at my front door. Most often, we disguised ourselves as witches. But one year Mary Jane showed up at my house dressed in white and wearing an apron and a chef’s hat emblazoned with Uff da. Her face was dusted floury-white and her cheeks were blushing lipstick-red. She was wielding a lefse stick.

“Do you think the kids will know what you are supposed to be?” I said, laughing. “Since when did lefse makers become scary?!”

Lefse for Her Last Birthday

At a family dinner, someone asked each of us to name our all-time favorite, couldn’t-live-without food. Without hesitation, Mary Jane said: “Lefse!”

So I made a batch of lefse for her 58th birthday. Lefse — plus a jar of lingonberry jam, birchwood butter knife, and dishtowel embroidered with Grandma’s lefse recipe — seemed a perfect gift. Sunday, May 7, we Weflen siblings and Mary Jane’s daughter gathered for a backyard picnic to celebrate.

That birthday turned out to be Mary Jane’s last. Though ever-hopeful and full of faith and joy, she was suffering from lung cancer.

Mary Jane died Nov. 3, 2017. Our family did not make lefse for Thanksgiving. But our lefse-making tradition will hold.

Fresh Lefse at the Cemetery

Mary Jane and I belonged to a Norwegian-American scholarship organization called Lakselaget, aka the salmon club of “women who swim against the current.” An American Sign Language interpreter, Mary Jane orchestrated and interpreted a memorable Lakselaget presentation by a deaf professor. He told about his travels to Norway to teach at a folk school for the deaf. At a Lakselaget luncheon this past February, Gary Legwold spoke about lefse and his book Keep on Rolling! I demonstrated how to roll lefse. Mary Jane would have, in her words, “loved it all to pieces.” A slideshow beforehand featured an epitaph and portrait of Mary Jane smiling joyously. So I rolled each round in honor of our No. 1 Lefse-Loving Lady.

On a Saturday night this May, I made lefse. Then Sunday I brought the fresh lefse to Corinthian Cemetery in Farmington, Minnesota. There, our family gathered to remember Mary Jane and her birthday. We picnicked on lefse — rolled up with unsalted butter and brown sugar, just how Mary Jane loved her lefse.

When I recorded the second half-hour show of the cable TV program Merry’s Eclectic Interests (CCX Create), I was uncomfortable with my on-screen label, the Lefse King. But I’ve always been uncomfortable with that title. Heck, there are lots of excellent lefse makers who could call themselves kings and queens, but they don’t because they are reserved Scandinavians who find people that tag themselves with titles to be suspect.

I am also a reserved Scandinavian, but I go with the title because when I registered for a domain name, Lefse King (www.lefseking.com) was available when other lefse names were taken. So I winced and went with it because it had a certain ring to it, and it was easy to market. Still, I call myself the reluctant Lefse King and say in the show that I always learn something from every lefse maker I meet.

In this show, the reluctant Lefse King gives Mary Ellen Zagrabelny, the show’s host, and the viewers a lesson on how to make lefse. I cover equipment options, ingredients in my recipe, techniques, the honoring of heritage, two lefse controversies, and the benefit of “namby-pamby” lefse.

Check out this video, which will be aired in November of this year — lefse’s prime time.

I was nervous as the recording for the TV show was about to begin. How did I look? Would I be witty during the recording, or would the lights and cameras and the moment tie my tongue? And of course, the persistent question with me no matter what I do: Would I be perfect — and when I’m not, would I be OK with “pretty darn good”?

And then I thought of lefse. This recording of two, 30-minute TV shows last spring was about lefse. Lefse is the show no matter what, I told myself, so let lefse carry the day.

That calmed me, and the cameras rolled. Mary Ellen Zagrabelny, host of Merry’s Eclectic Interests on cable (CCX Create), started asking me about my beginnings with lefse and how lefse has been my muse. How did learning to make this simple flatbread feed the writing of two lefse books, the teaching of lefse classes, the developing of the Lefse Trail, and the promoting of all things lefse with sales of related products on LefseKing.com?

Talking Back to the Bad Boy

The interview went well, and the time flew by. It was really fun! But weeks later when I received the link to the edited video, I didn’t open it for days. The final version of the video — or more specifically, me — was not going to be perfect, I knew. I would come up short, once again.

Ah, but I have put up with this voice of perfectionism, the Great Oppressor, for years, and I know enough to talk back to this bad boy. I did so, and then clicked on the link.

And dontcha know, it’s pretty darn good! Check out this video, which will be aired in October of this year — lefse’s prime time.

Gary’s note: The previous blog on purple lefse makes it clear that Canadian Chuck Hays dances to a different drummer than most lefse makers. I like that, and I really like how Chuck brings his individuality to lefse making with these eight “outside the box” tips he uses with this recipe:

3 cups potato

4 tablespoons olive oil

½ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

¼ to 3/8 cup milk, depending on how dry potatoes are

1 ¼ cups flour, or as needed

1. Steam the Vitelotte Noir potatoes whole in their jackets. Scrub them well and put them in a steamer pan over boiling water until they test done. This takes a little longer than boiling them, but they don’t soak up as much water. BTW, those five potatoes pictured above made enough ground spuds for 1 2/3 batches using my recipe. Consider the lefse from the extra 2/3 of a batch to be a bonus blessing from the Lefse Goddess.

2. Don’t mash the unpeeled spuds; that can be an exercise in frustration. Run the hot potatoes through a meat grinder using a small plate (1/8-inch holes), jackets and all.

3. Cool — don’t chill — potatoes. I’ve lately joined the “No Chill” movement. Hey, with purple lefse I’m already going across the grain on tradition, so I might as well go all in. I’ve found cooling but not chilling potatoes makes good lefse and cuts down on the time commitment. Anything that makes me willing to make lefse more often is good.

4. Try olive oil. Doubters may ask about my recipe: “What part of Norway did that olive oil come from?” For many years I was a practicing vegetarian, vegan denomination. I respect that worldview, but I’m really an omnivore. Olive oil let me keep making lefse even when some of the ingredients were off-limits under the rules of the game. I’ve kept using olive oil because I like it, it adds a nice flavour, and the lefse is a little softer. BTW, I used to replace milk with soy milk. It wasn’t bad but definitely a compromise. I’m back to using milk, but it’s good to know soy milk works. Use it if it makes sense to you.

5. Don’t knead. Work the flour in with a pastry cutter. This keeps the dough softer, without allowing for the ultimate gluten development.

6. Don’t use a sock on the rolling pin. Occasionally, I get a piece of potato stuck in the pin, so I stop and pick it out. That’s how I roll. For one round, make a lump of cooled-not-chilled dough about the size of a tangerine, and roll it out on a board covered with a floured cloth. Turn the round two or three times.

7. Use a heat reflector. I place an old piece of countertop on the stove under my griddle. I suspect that the wood keeps heat radiating from the 500F griddle from being conducted away by the metal stove. Because of this, the griddle stays hot without having to cycle the thermostat as much (or at least it seems so to me).

8. Stack your lefse rounds between towels and let the the rounds cool there before packaging. My recipe makes 8 to 10 rounds. That’s enough for two lefse lovers to have two rounds with supper, two with butter and sugar for dessert, and some rounds left for scrambled-egg-and-bacon lefse wraps for breakfast. And yeah, for the most part I’ve learned to make round lefse instead of lefse that looks like the shape of Alberta.

Praise for Purple Lefse

Before closing, I want to circle back to my lefse roots that I mentioned in my first blog. My mother eventually came around to making potato lefse about the time I graduated from high school. I was pretty much out of the house by then, so I didn’t have a “roll model.” I had to go through the “lefse jerky” stage and make lots of “lømpe” before I discovered The Last Word on Lefse and became a convert. Don and Judy Fearn of Rochester, Minnesota, have been remarkably patient with me, kindly coaching me to make lefse “from the inside out” and all the while letting me think I knew it all already.

Those of us who grew up around Scandinavians understand that praise can be a little muted. Sometimes it’s better that way, and sometimes the muted praise isn’t muted at all when you really listen and are able to translate correctly. One of my Norwegian friends rolled a round of my purple lefse with butter and sugar, shrugged, and took a bite. “Yah, y’know,” he said looking me in the eye, “it doesn’t taste purple.”

Pretty high praise!

 

 

When I was a kid in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, I thought I knew what lefse was. In my family, lefse was Vestlandslefse — hard, cracker like, dry. Not a speck of potato in it. When Mom would wet this lefse and let it soften between towels for a few minutes, I ate it and loved it.

Years later as an adult, I went looking for lefse in a grocery store and found Mrs. Olson’s in the cooler. I took it home and tried it.

“Huh? What the heck is this?” I thought.

I called Mom. “Oh, yeah, well there’s our lefse,” she explained, “and then people in the Midwest make it with potatoes.”

So I came to believe that a world with two kinds of lefse was a pretty good place.

Fast forward a few decades, and I make much more potato lefse than Vestlandslefse or Hardanger lefse. And courtesy of Gary Legwold and his lefse books, I know there are many more than just two kinds of lefse.

Not only am I a lefse maker, but I am also a journalism professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, and an organic farmer who has carried on a lifelong love affair with the potato. I believe that making just one kind of lefse doesn’t really account for the incredible diversity in potatoes. We grow heirloom potatoes, so why not experiment?

The Spud

What makes a good lefse potato? It is not waxy, it can be boiled or steamed, and it will be dry — not gummy — when mashed. And of course, it has good potato flavour.

One of our varieties is Vitelotte Noir, a dark purple potato with a really intense potato flavour. Vitelotte Noir is a smallish to medium, usually very knobby spud. It’s genetically very close to some of the historic varieties grown in the Andes. I like to say it has a face only another potato could love.

Inside the skin, we can see the high concentration of the anti-oxidant anthocyanin that makes the potato appear purple and even blue.

My basic lefse recipe is not too out of line, so I’ll put that up first for those who know how to make lefse. But in my next blog, I’ll write about my untraditional techniques, tools (meat grinder), and ingredients (olive oil) I use to make lefse-making less work and the lefse itself more delicious.

3 cups potato

4 tablespoons olive oil

½ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

¼-3/8 cup milk, depending on how dry the potatoes are

1 ¼ cup flour, or as needed

Stir together the first five ingredients, then use a pastry cutter to mix in the flour. After that, it’s the standard lefse-making procedure of rolling out dough on a floured cloth and baking it on a griddle at 500F.

The title is not hyperbole. I am giving you two hot lefse-baking tips — hot, as in temperatures of up to 500 degrees F — that allow you to get full power to your most valuable lefse-making tool, your grill, and to prolong its life.

I have several lefse grills that I use for my lefse classes, but during my last batch of classes I discovered I had two grills that no longer worked because the electric probe controls were shot. They had burned out. If you’ve had your lefse grill for a while, you may have had this problem. So …

Hot Tip #1: Purchase a second probe control.

In the “How to Use Your New Grill” section of the Bethany Heritage Grill instructions, it reads: “It is not recommended that the probe control be used continuously for periods of more than 1 ½ hours at maximum temperature. At that time, allow the probe to cool down for 30 minutes before re-using. Alternate probes may be used to continue baking.”

I had never alternated probes in all my years of making lefse, which probably explains why my probe had burned out. I now have an alternate probe.

Here is how Roxie Svoboda, president of Bethany Housewares, summed it up when I interviewed her for my latest book, Keep On Rolling! Life on the Lefse Trail and Learning to Get a Round: “If you alternate the controls, you’ll have better luck making your grill last longer. Have two controls; we sell just the control separately. Put a different control in every hour, and let the other one cool off. We have people get together as a family and bake for eight hours. The grill is OK; it can handle it. It’s the control that you should change every hour or so.”

Hot Tip #2: Modify your old grill for a new control probe.

I bought new probe controls for my old grills, but the new probe controls didn’t fit snugly into the receptacles of the old grills. The probes didn’t go into the receptacles far enough for the grills to heat up sufficiently to bake lefse. Hmmm. So I emailed Roxie, asking if Bethany carried controls that would fit old models.

She responded that Bethany did not have old controls, but new controls work in older grills “with a slight modification.” Here’s how to modify your old grill for a new probe (see photo opening this blog):

1. Turn over your old grill. You’ll see two screws that secure the aluminum shield wrapping around the receptacle into which the probe control fits.
2. Loosen those screws and slide the shield toward the center of the grill.
3. With the shield in its more central position, re-tighten the screws.

This allows the new probe control to fit deeper into the receptacle and supply full power for a 500-degree grill.

“If this does not solve the problem,” added Roxie, “you may have a grill that has larger prongs [probes] that were produced for a short period about 30 years ago, before we purchased the company.”

In this case, the solution is to replace the larger probes. You need to send the grill and the probe control to Bethany, who will replace the larger probe with a smaller one. The charge is $20 plus shipping. Roxie advised to include a note in the shipping box that has your name, address, phone number, and a brief description of what you would like done.

 

 

I’m on a lefse tour these days, barnstorming with my books and making speeches about lefse and lutefisk to any group that might find entertainment and humor in hearing about these traditional foods. The speech highlights a fun afternoon or evening, and I always look forward to ending my presentation by singing a lefse song I co-wrote with Erik Sherburne from St. Paul. The song is “Keep On Rollin’”, which is a benediction for my latest book Keep On Rolling! Life on the Lefse Trail and Learning to Get a Round and, I can confidently say, is the best lefse song ever recorded on a Tuesday evening in December.

Erik wrote the music, and I wrote the lyrics to this lefse song for voice and piano. It’s a tune that honors the tradition and fun of lefse making as well as the resiliency, faith, and gratitude of lefse makers who just keep on rolling throughout their life. This “family” song is easy to sing and easy to play whenever folks gather to make and eat lefse.

“Keep On Rollin’” is eight pages filled with three verses, a bridge, and a rousing chorus. Many people have purchased the score after they hear me sing the song. Typically, the audience starts singing along in the chorus after the third verse, and the song invariably brings down the house.

People who cannot attend my presentation have asked if there is any way to hear a recording of the song before buying the sheet music. I’m happy to say that yes, now they can. Listen to my recording of “Keep On Rollin’”, with Dorothy Williams at the piano.

With lefse sticks, here’s what you do

Beyond just flipping rounds.

You make them for a chum or two

Now friendship knows no bounds!

 

Wanna make friends fast? Make lefse sticks and give them away.

“Oh, I can’t make lefse sticks,” you protest. “I’m not good working with wood.”

Oh, yes you can! Here’s a simple way to make a sturdy and stylish-looking lefse stick — and you can get the wood free.

This tip came from Nolan Spencer, who I featured in Keep On Rolling! Life on the Lefse Trail and Learning to Get a Round. He recently made the lefse stick pictured above and mailed it to me from his home in Deerwood, Minnesota.

“I’m cheap,” wrote Nolan, “and I make them from 5-gallon paint stir sticks, which I get free of charge at The Home Depot. I jigsaw the ends, plane down the sticks, and finish them on my belt sander. Everyone I teach lefse making to gets one. You’re an exception, Gary. Give it a try, and keep on rolling!”

Will do, Nolan, my lefse friend!