Lefse Lefse (Scandinavian Recipes)

[bholus10]

Step 5:

That should have taken about two hours. Now pull the potatoes out and make sure that they're cold. Not room temperature, but cold, and slightly stiff. Get your flour out and flour up your flat surface. This is to keep the lefse dough from sticking to the counter, which it will probably do anyway a few times. Put the chunk of mashed potatoes down into the middle of the floured area and spread about half a cup of flour over the top of it, like so:

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Step 6:

Now knead it for about ten minutes, gradually incorporating another half cup of flour besides the amount of flour you'll have to add to replace the stuff it picks up from your counter. After it has a whole cup of flour in it, it will feel much doughier and nothing like mashed potatoes anymore. It will look like this:

[bholus10]

Step 7:

Now you need to divide it into eight pieces and ball it up. I do it like this:

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Step 8: But whatever floats your boat, so long as you get eight equally sized little balls of dough out of it. Spread more flour out onto your surface - no, more. Lefse loves getting stuck when you roll it out, it's infuriating. The best way to avoid it is to flip the dough over every time you take a roll on the rolling pin, flick a little more flour under it, and then roll the other side. Always keep your rolling pin well floured, too. You want really thin pieces here, absolutely no thicker than your average flour tortilla, otherwise they won't cook all the way through and will taste a little doughy. They should work out to be about nine inches diameter.

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Step 9:

Once you have all eight pieces rolled out, heat up your frying pan or griddle or whatever and grease it slightly if it isn't non-stick. Non-stick is great for this purpose, though. Flip one of the uncooked lefse into the pan and quickly unfold any creases that might have happened with the spatula. You only turn lefse once, and you do it when you see air bubbles forming under the lefse like I circled in blue here: