Category: Lefse

I was watching a YouTube video on making lefse. The recipe called for 6 cups of riced potatoes, which is twice the amount of riced potatoes in my basic recipe. OK, not a problem so far. But the video recipe had half the amount of butter and cream as what I use in my 3 cups of riced potatoes. Twice the potatoes but half the good stuff? They were skimping.

Yes, you can make lefse by skimping, and it will look like lefse and sorta taste like lefse. But why? Cost? Concerns about fat in your diet? Ok, you can save money with less butter and cream in your dough. And yes, you can cut back on the butter fat.

But don’t. Just don’t. Lefse is once or twice a year, and you want to go all in on making the best-tasting lefse you can. And when you consider the butter fat content per round, it’s not much at all. If anything, go a little strong with the butter and cream to not only bring out a richness in the flavor, but also to make the lefse tender and moist.

I recently switched to Kemps Simply Crafted Heavy Whipping Cream (pictured). It has 20% saturated fat, more saturated fat than the cream I was using previously. I immediately noticed a difference in the tenderness and taste of my lefse, and I am sticking with this cream. You may not have this brand in your stores, but I highly recommend going with a cream with the highest fat content.

So don’t be a skimper when making lefse. Not with your butter or cream, and by all means go ahead and use a rounded tablespoon of sugar instead of a leveled tablespoon. This is lefse, not less se!

One of the joys of the marketplace is listening to customers. It’s gratifying to hear praise for my books, and it’s a joy to keep learning from other aficionados about the art of making lefse.

At one market years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Rev. Charles Colberg of Minneapolis, who lifted my lefse making to the next level — and I already made very good lefse. The tip: Switch to King Arthur Flour.

This tip was so simple that I pooh-poohed it initially. After all, flour is flour, right? Well, no, as I discovered. There are reasons why King Arthur Flour is twice as expensive as the flour I have been buying. It is never bleached and has a high protein content (gluten) that is carefully calibrated so that you have the same results every time you bake.

I was not put off by the price. I will pay what is asked if it makes my lefse better. And it did. When I rolled lefse for customers in the week before Christmas and for the Christmas Eve family gathering, my dough was velvety but tender. And my rounds were round with edges that were reliably smooth and not ragged. Same recipe I’ve always used but different flour.

Bottom line is I will never go back to another flour. Try King Arthur Flour and see how your lefse improves. Mix it into your dough and let the gluten work for a good 10 minutes. Then roll. Your edges will not look like the coast of Norway. They won’t be jagged, and your round won’t fall apart when moving it to the grill.

For my second lefse book, Keep On Rolling! Life on the Lefse Trail and Learning to Get a Round, I interviewed Bonnie Jacobs (above) of Jacobs Lefse Bakeri and Gifts in Osakis, Minnesota. It was a wonderful day learning about how to make a massive amount of lefse to feed the lefse-loony masses at the holidays. At the end of the interview, I asked for her best lefse-making tip. Without hesitation, she replied: “Do it more than once a year.”

It gets a laugh when I repeat that line in my lefse classes, but it is the best advice. You learn best when doing, and the more you do the better your lefse gets. After learning from your grandmother or in a class, you make lefse making your own the more you do it. You fine-tune the recipe, maybe make a substitution that improves the flavor. You get better at rolling and grilling, which make your lefse better. You become more confident and satisfied that you are making an excellent food and carrying on a fine tradition.

So make lefse, and do it more than once a year.

If there is a product for our times, it is this one. The pandemic has been rough, but I’ve maintained throughout that lefse — and now the new Lefse Hoodie — can smooth things out a bit.

How can a hooded sweatshirt help? Here are four reasons to consider the Lefse Hoodie.

1. Humor — it’s funny. “LEFSE is cheaper than therapy” makes us smile, which is not always easy for Scandinavians in the best of times. Henry Ward Beecher, an American clergyman and abolitionist whose sister was Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote: “A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It’s jolted by every pebble on the road.”
2. Function — it’s warm. There are notions that people lose up to 80% of body heat through their head. The US army manual from 1970 said, no, the percentage is 40% to 45%. However, more recent research says it’s really about 7%-10% lost through the head because the head is about 7% of the body’s surface area. True, the face, head, and chest are more sensitive to changes in temperature than the rest of the body, making it feel as if covering them up does more to prevent heat loss. But the real issue is people don’t want to cover their head because a covering will mess up their hair or hide their face, making them less attractive. Hey, the Lefse Hoodie is so attractive, you won’t mind flipping up the hood and pulling on the drawstring to stay warm. Also, you can keep your hands warm with the front pouch.
3. Fashion — it’s cool. This black hoodie is so cool that Amaya, my 13-year-old granddaughter who is ever so vigilant about rejecting clothing that is not IN, exclaimed immediately when she saw the Lefse Hoodie: “I want this! Oh, Papa, I want this!” Nuff said.
4. Sanity — it’s helpful. Next time you feel you’re about to lose it, slip on the Lefse Hoodie. It’ll help. Seeing the word “therapy” on the hoodie may stimulate you to call your therapist and set up an appointment. All good. In the meantime, you can make some lefse, which certainly helps your mental health. For example, say you have crippling issues with perfectionism. Lefse teaches you humility and acceptance. Or you have shame about not making lefse as good as your mom or sister. Lefse teaches patience, and making lefse builds self-confidence. Or you’re pained by how stingy and uptight you tend to be. Give away some lefse and learn about the benefits of generosity.

Lefse gets you out and with others. You are not isolated, which can make you blue. Lefse makers often make lefse with family or friends, and they have fun. So the Lefse Hoodie fits right in. And even if you do a solo act, you are not alone. You have all those great lefse-making and lefse-eating memories to warm you. Remember this last line from my first book, The Last Word on Lefse: Heartwarming Stories and Recipes Too!: “Never alone and seldom sad, the life of a lefse maker isn’t so bad.”

I’ve known Mary Lou Peterson for years. I visited her home and, as she made very good lefse, interviewed her for my second lefse book, Keep On Rolling! Life on the Lefse Trail and Learning to Get a Round. We stay in touch. That’s how lefse friends roll.

So a few weeks ago she emailed and mentioned casually that she was entering a lefse contest at the Minnesota State Fair. I had not heard of this contest, but I pleaded with Mary Lou to write up her experience for a blog. I mean, this was big time and very few lefse makers — who often take pride in making lefse that’s second only to Grandma’s — have the courage to enter such a contest and then learn their lefse is not the best. What??

Mary Lou is bold by nature, up for most adventures. So here is Mary Lou’s account of her State Fair Lefse Adventure.

I have this to say about the Covid quarantine: It plays with your brain. You get ideas and talk about them to people — who remember what the idea was and KEEP REMINDING you of them. My idea involved lefse.

I’ve been making lefse a long time, and the family brags about it. I’ve passed the talent of rolling a round lefse to my children and grandchildren. Well, I learned of the Creative Activities competition for ethnic breads at the Minnesota State Fair. The entry could be a bread from any country, so Norway’s breads were only a small piece of this division.

I had not competed in any baking contests since I was in 4-H. Back then I traveled to the Minnesota State Fair after winning at the Roseau County Fair. One year I made a potato casserole in a demonstration in front of judges, and a second year I made a Baked Alaska. I decided to enter this year’s State Fair contest because people enjoy my lefse and I have time since I’ve retired. It was time to test my baking ability by submitting four perfectly delicious rounds and then sit back and wait for congrats to arrive.

A quick lefse lesson: It starts with cooking russet potatoes with the skins on for extra flavor. Peel them easily when the potatoes are cooled a bit. You enlist your husband to do the ricing. He might as well be part of this since he eats it.

I cool the potatoes with the margarine, salt and sugar and mix it well. In the meantime, I pull out the grill, lefse stick, special rolling pin, and the board and cover used for rolling. I also have a towel ready to cover the rounds. Most important, I get butter and sugar for testing my lefse (quality control, you know).

I add flour to the potato mixture and work it well. Then I make a ball with the dough and roll it thin until I can read the writing on the board cover through the rolled out round. Using the lefse stick, I move the round to the hot grill and wait. It’s at this time the ricer husband returns to be “the hot-off-the-grill lefse tester”. It passes the test!

Lesson over, now back to the contest! I finished the rest of my batch, cooled it, and selected the four best. I took off for the fairground on Saturday morning. My entry had to be in between 9:30 am and 1 pm. I made the deadline, but the line was down the sidewalk and around the corner of the Creative Activities building! Oh oh — competition!

I handed the four best rounds of lefse ever made to the entry table and went home to wait. Thursday came and results were in. Excitement abounded as I and my husband returned to the State Fair and hurried to see my lefse entry displayed and then to collect my reward.

Sorry to say my opinion of perfect lefse and the judge’s opinion were not the same. No ribbon…

The winning lefse received third place in the competition. Baklava won and potica got second. Quite a variety  to judge! Three plates of lefse were put in the display case for viewing, and mine was one. Oh, well, there is always next year!

Mary Lou Peterson

Yesterday was a sad day. I finished cancelling all my lefse-related speaking gigs and selling events that I had scheduled for late August and the fall. Covid.

Kate, my daughter, just came home from three weeks in the hospital, mostly in intensive care with Covid. She has harrowing tales of not being able to catch her breath for days on end, not eating, not sleeping. Alone. Dark days of wondering if this was to be her time and if so, whom she would seek first in heaven. She says she felt our prayers.

She’s much better, looks great, and has some of her normal energy and all of her humor back. But she still needs an oxygen boost now and then and has hand tremors, which mess up her writing and her plans to return to her work as a chef. But she’ll make it back.

This sobering experience in our family and the Delta variant — which is nearly twice as contagious as previous variants and just as contagious as chickenpox — that is causing case numbers and hospitalizations to increase has led to my decision to not speak at an indoor event in New Ulm, MN, and not be a vendor at Potato Days, one of my favorite outdoor festivals in Barnesville, MN. This will be the second straight year of not selling at Potato Days as well as at the big Scandinavian festival, the Norsk Hostfest in Minot, ND, which cancelled for the second year in a row because of Covid.

Like many, I had high hopes for things opening up. But Kate’s episode, the Delta variant, the varying vaccination rates, the breakthrough cases, etc., have all caused me to decide to miss another lefse season of meeting other lefse lovers, yakking and yukking it up in person (see image above).

Turn the Page

So that was my yesterday, a sad day. Today, while I am again going into a near shutdown mode, I hope this time is shorter than the first. I certainly will not sit out the lefse season. I will still sell a rather large inventory of new lefse-related products on Lefseking.com, mask up and make lefse for sale locally and for overnight shipping, as well as hold online lefse classes again this season.

Talk about making lemonade from lemons! My Zoom classes last year were flat out fun because I could continue to teach people the grand old tradition of making good lefse, and I could teach them anywhere in the world. Indeed, some families used the class as a safe replacement to their annual lefse fest, and one family pulled in family members from here and there in the United States as well as in Afghanistan and Singapore. Very cool!

So let the online lefse classes begin! Let me know and I will teach just you or you and your 11 cousins. The idea is to learn to make lefse and keep on rolling!

The joy of lefse. I’ve made so much of it and for so many years that there are times I forget the simple joy lefse brings to those who eat it and to those who make it.

This is a story about Jean Ostvoll, whose husband would enjoy good lefse on his 60th birthday, thanks to Jean. I knew he’d love the lefse, but I didn’t know how much I would enjoy making it for him and then shipping it to Jean from Minneapolis to Michigan.

I sell lefse made the same day that customers pick up the order. That’s the only way I fill orders. No freezing. This means I have sold only to locals who pick up. That was the case until Jean emailed me:

“Hello, Gary! So — I know you say you won’t ship outside of the Minneapolis area because of shipping costs, but if I were willing to pay overnight FDX would you ship to me in Michigan? My husbands 60th birthday is June 26 and he is always pining for good lefse. He is from Stavanger, but we have been here for 20 years now…and still looking for good lefse. I’d like to surprise him for his birthday! Please let me know….I would be interested in 5 packages of 3.”

Jean Ostvoll, Union Pier, MI

When I had received these requests from lefse lovers in far-flung places, I‘d decline because people don’t want to pay the overnight shipping needed for freshness. Or at least that is what I assumed. But Jean anticipated that and said she’d gladly pay. Okay then! We agreed on the details of getting the lefse to her, and the excitement of giving kicked in. A line came to mind from the Saint Francis Prayer: “For it is in giving that we receive.”

I made the lefse and overnighted it to Michigan. Here is Jean’s account:

For everyone trying to find that something special for the guy who has it all and wants nothing…..the answer is Gary’s handcrafted Lefse.  My Norwegian husband (who is shy and wants to remain anonymous) misses home.  I frequently buy Norwegian food items on line when I see them and think they might approximate the real deal.  I rarely score.  This year was the big 60 for him and I was getting desperate.  Then I read about the Lefse King in The Norwegian American — a birthday gift from another year! I was so psyched — until I read to the bottom of Gary’s site where he says he doesn’t ship because of the high cost of overnight shipping — which I totally get.  Undeterred and knowing our good friends would let me use their FedEx small business account — and associated discount — I negotiated a trial with Gary.  He was game and grilled the lefse the morning of the shipment to ensure maximum freshness. The next morning they arrived, carefully packed, in perfect shape and cool.  We just had a birthday lunch that was a HUGE success — lefse traditional style with butter and cinnamon sugar.  And I’ve already had a request for more variations for “coffee and cake” time this afternoon, lol! My husband even went so far as to say they tasted (almost!) as good as his mother’s back in Stavanger — and he immediately emailed her pictures of them. It was a treat for him and a wonderful moment for us all as we watched him enjoy and reminisce about home. Thank you Gary — and the best money I ever spent on a present!!

Jean Ostvoll

To Jean, I say it was my pleasure. And to anyone else in need of good lefse no matter where you are, click here to make it happen!

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!

Lefse limericks are like potato chips. You can’t eat just one chip, right? And you cannot, it seems, write just one lefse limerick.

This was impressed on me as soon as limericks started rolling in for the first Lefse Limerick Contest announced in last month’s newsletter. Limericks came in bunches, and many contestants were having so much fun writing them that they quickly followed up their first batch with a second batch of wacky lefse limericks.

Judging was difficult — hence the ties — because they were all so full of the spirit of the limerick. Some people stated that this was their first attempt at writing a limerick because writing poetry was not their thing. But they could not resist, and once they did one, well, shoot, they had to do it again and again!

I think the attraction in writing limericks is that, by definition, they are supposed to be edgy, bawdy, and ribald. Not raunchy, but on the edge — and certainly not with a lefse limerick. Many contestants could not go near the edge, and some did not nail the limerick‘s meter, the long-established basic pulse and rhythm of the poem. But our winners did, and here they are:

1st Place

John Ziegenhagen — Minnetonka, MN

John was the clear winner and is, at least to me, a natural with limericks. He willingly went to the edge without crossing the line, and he was prolific, writing at least three that were superior. This was the one I chose as the winner:

There once was a man named Scupper
Who ate beans with his lefse for supper
He walked with such poise
To avoid a big noise
But, boy, his cheeks they did pucker.

2nd Place

Steve Seim — Wheatland, WY

Steve got so excited about the limerick contest that he dashed one off … about lutefisk. Forgivable, since one is more willing to go bawdy with lutefisk than lefse. But he collected himself and wrote this winner:

There once was a guy they called Spud
Who was known around town as a dud
Ate lefse galore
And hoping to score
But Lena had eyes just for Bud.

2nd Place

Jim Leet — Roseburg, OR

Jim beat the end-of-April deadline with four submissions that were all giggles. But this one stood out and earned Jim second place:

The lefse was taken by Sue
Who tucked it inside of her shoe
Her ultimate goal
Was patching her sole
But now she had lunch with her too. 

3rd Place

Heidi Bacon, Red Wing, MN

Heidi had to be a winner because she was the only one bold enough to feature herself in the limerick. At least I think the Heidi in the first line is the Heidi pictured above. Anyway, heeeere’s Heidi!

There once was a Norski named Heidi
Whose kitchen was much less than tidy
When lefse was rolled
The stories were told
Of Grandma whose legend was mighty.

3rd Place

Reid Trulson, Collegeville, PA

Now, c’mon, doesn’t Reid (pictured above) look too distinguished to stoop to writing a lowly limerick? Well, he could not help himself, apparently, but justified his submission by stating that his mission was “to extol the benefits of lefse.” Okay. As you see below, he starts out taking the high road, but dips into an edgy limerick sweet spot at the end.

A diet of lefse is cool
Eliciting no ridicule
It also has use
As a substitute snus
That eliminates troublesome drool.

So there are the winners of the first annual Lefse Limerick Contest. Let’s do it again next year! Winners will receive prizes starting next week. First place wins an heirloom lefse turning stick, second place the score of my lefse song “Keep On Rollin'”, and third place a pair of Go Long Lefse Socks, graduated compression socks from Burlix. Congrats!

I leave you with one more limerick from John Ziegenhagen (told you this guy was good):

There once was a dude who made lefse
He rolled it while driving his Tesla
But he went off the cliff
Lost his life in a jiff
And the lefse burned up — what a Messla!