Behind The Creative
Minnesota Kitchen
POTATO LEFSE By Emily Vikre
My Tante (aunt) Vigdis stood, sleeves rolled up, apron powdered white with flour, and laughed (in Norwegian), “well I guess, Norwegians have to come to Minnesota to learn to be real Norwegians!” We, my family and some of our close neighbors, were teaching my visiting aunt and uncle how to make lefse. You see, in Norway nobody makes their own lefse anymore. It’s a lost art. They buy it in the grocery store, factory made, in a plastic pouch. In the way most people around here would buy tortillas. It’s fine when it’s store bought. But it isn’t really more than fine. It doesn’t beckon to you with a warm, fresh-baked scent of butter wrapped in carbohydrates, coaxing you to keep plucking up just one more piece, you know, while it’s still fresh, to savor in greedy bites as you balance it delicately in your hands. But that is what homemade lefse will do to you. Homemade lefse (particularly when fresh) is hands-down one of the best foods on the face of this earth. Truffles, caviar, foi gras, lobster, you’ve got nothin’ on lefse. It is an inordinately traditional Norwegian potato flatbread. Simple. Soft and supple, 32 MAKE IT MINNESOTA
a bit like a tortilla, but almost lacy thin and seductively buttery. Hot off the griddle, they are absolutely unbelievable. Our favorite – and the most traditional – ways of serving lefse are either wrapped around a hot dog and ketchup (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it! You’ll never look back.) or spread with butter and cinnamon-sugar (brown sugar is equally tempting and adds a lovely caramel accent). Really you could use them to wrap up just about anything, including, it turns out, the phenomenal combo of smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. For the earlier part of my childhood, I was unaware of how good lefse could be. My mother grew up in Norway, and worked on the assumption all lefse was store bought, and that was we always ate. At church basement functions, I assumed the plates of lefse were the same stale-ish packaged variety I was used to, and I didn’t try them. Our neighbors, knowing we were Norwegian, were entirely shocked when they discovered that we had no idea how to make it, but they instantly set to work remedying the situation. We quickly became old hands at the lefse process.