Why It Works
- Mixing butter and cream into the potatoes while they’re still hot helps the fat absorb evenly, creating a smooth, cohesive base that’s easier to roll out.
- Chilling the potato mixture before adding flour lets the potato starch fully set and firm, yielding a dough that handles well and stays tender.
- Rolling out the dough on a floured cloth keeps it from sticking without adding extra flour in the dough, making lefse that cook up thin, freckled, and flexible.
The first time I tried to make lefse, I quit halfway through.
I thought the American version of the Norwegian flatbread would be an easy dessert for a Midwest-themed dinner party. It’s made from ingredients I almost always have on hand—potatoes, flour, butter, and cream. It’s good with nearly any filling, sweet or savory, including butter (the most traditional choice), Nutella, jam, and cheese. And it keeps for days, so you don’t have to make it à la minute, like a crepe.
But for those of us who didn’t grow up in Norwegian-American households in the upper Midwest, the dough is notoriously hard to handle. That afternoon, I learned just how frustrating it can be.
Hours before the dinner party, as I scraped at the floury mashed-potato mess sticking to my rolling pin, I realized I had to give it up. Annoyed, and with sauerkraut balls to shape, I hurled the dough into the trash, like that would teach it a lesson. We had cake for dessert. Someday, I thought, I’d get back to it.
For my second try, I knew I needed help. So, I called Marika Josephson, the co-founder of Scratch Brewing Company in Ava, Illinois. Marika isn’t just an expert in coaxing the flavors of foraged hickory leaves and black cherry bark into some of the country’s most unique beers. She’s also really into lefse.
As you might guess from her last name, Marika has Norwegian roots. She also has family in the Upper Midwest. “I grew up eating lefse around the holidays,” she told me. “Every Christmas, we’d get a care package from my great-aunts in North Dakota.” Her great-aunt Gladys worked in a lefse factory in Hatton.
As an adult, Marika started making lefse with her daughter, which got her thinking about the history behind her family recipe—inspiring years of research. Since then, she’s published academic articles about the dish, started work on two lefse-related book projects, and rolled out countless rounds of dough.
Serious Eats / Qi Ai
In Norway, lefse can mean many different things, Marika told me. It’s part of a long tradition of hearty flatbreads, made from wheat, oats, and rye. But in America, nine out of ten lefse bakers make the version that some Norwegians call potetkaker, or “potato cakes.”
There’s no simple explanation for the overwhelming preference for the potato variety in the States. Marika has a theory that involves the subject of one of her upcoming books—an influential immigrant baker named Anna Kindlem, who lived in Minnesota from the 1920s until her death in the 1970s. “She made thousands and thousands of rounds of lefse every year, including for some of the biggest and most important Norwegian-American events in the United States,” Marika says. And as Kindlem acknowledged in letters to a newspaper in Norway, her lefse was of the potetkaker variety. She didn’t bring potato-based lefse to the United States, but as Marika wrote in a profile of the baker, she almost certainly helped popularize it.
All that aside, maybe it’s enough to point out that generations of immigrants to the United States and their descendants have sanded the rough edges off Old Country traditions, for one reason or another—think red-sauce Italian, or strip-mall Mexican. It’s no real surprise that the most common variety of lefse in the Midwest today is a soft, sweet, and crowd-pleasing one.
That is, if you make it right. Marika shared a handful of tips, which I tested through weeks of trials. This is what worked for me:
- For the right starch structure, start with russet potatoes, then chill after cooking. Starchy potatoes like russets are relatively high in amylose, which forms a gel during cooking that then firms as it cools. That firmer gel network gives lefse dough the strength it needs to roll thin. Waxy and red potatoes contain more amylopectin, so they make a creamier but weaker dough that tears more easily. Many recipes call for boiling potatoes whole, to protect the starch inside. With russets, you don’t have to worry about it: “They’re so forgiving, it almost doesn’t matter what you do to them,” Marika says.
- Go easy on the flour in the dough… Flour adds gluten, which toughens lefse. Use too much, and your flatbread will be chewy and dry. Struggling with a soft dough is no fun, but it’s the price you pay for mashed-potato-tender rounds.
- …but don’t be shy about using it while you’re rolling. Unlike most bread recipes, which ask you to resist adding extra flour to a wet dough, the lefse process requires regular flouring, no matter how experienced you are. The priority is to roll the dough out as thinly and evenly as possible, and you’re going to need some help with that. If the dough sticks to the rolling pin or tears, you may not be able to repair it (though you’ll still enjoy eating it). Flour preemptively to prevent sticky spots.
- Roll your lefse out on cloth, and consider wrapping your rolling pin in cloth, too. If you’re really serious about lefse, Marika says, you ought to invest in a Bethany pastry board—and, while you’re at it, the company’s lefse “grill” and lefse stick. They’re standard in Norwegian-American households across the Midwest, making the process much easier. You could also invest in a corrugated lefse rolling pin to help prevent sticking.
- If you just want a taste of the tradition, as I did, here’s how to get by without specialized equipment: Lay a thin, tightly woven kitchen towel on the counter. Secure the edges with tape or a few heavy objects—anything that’ll keep the cloth from sliding as you roll. If you want to be extra careful, wrap your rolling pin in another cloth. (Roll it around the pin and tuck the ends between the handles and the barrel.) Dust both cloths lightly with flour and rub it in with your hands. The flour works into the weave, creating a sort of nonstick surface. “It makes a pretty big difference,” Marika says.
- When you transfer your lefse from the counter to the skillet, treat it like it could fall apart in your hands at any time, because it might.
- Roll each round as thin as you possibly can. If your rolling cloth has words or pictures on it, it’ll be a helpful visual aid: Keep rolling until you can read the words or clearly see the pictures through the dough. Lift the dough frequently and flip it occasionally to prevent sticking.
- Cook each lefse immediately. Once rolled, the lefse dough begins to absorb surface moisture again. “Any extra seconds on the surface and it will start to stick,” Marika says. It can feel a little hectic at first, but you’ll get into a rhythm: roll, cook, roll, cook, roll, cook. Each lefse only takes a couple of minutes to cook, which is about the time you need to roll out another round.
Serious Eats / Qi Ai
When I started working on this recipe, I expected to come up with a Serious Eats-style hack that would make lefse easy. And while I picked up a few tricks that make it easier, what I really learned through testing is that the most important ingredient is patience. Even after weeks of practice and recipe fine-tuning, I’m still dealing with sticking, tearing, and the other issues that stress out all but the most experienced lefse cooks—especially those of us without a dedicated pastry board or griddle. My lefse still aren’t perfectly round, which is annoying but not uncommon. (Marika says hers usually aren’t, either.) But they do taste great, whether served with butter and a sprinkling of white sugar, as many Midwesterners prefer, or used as a wrap for cold cuts or hot dogs.
Making lefse work for you takes time and dedication. There’s no getting around that. For families across the Upper Midwest, it’s part of the tradition.
