Hints for Great Homemade Lefse

LefseLefse.com is busy getting organized for the holiday season. For those of you who are making it yourselves, I have a few time-honored hints to help your success:

• Gather your friends and family and make it an event. Serve crackers and cheese and maybe spiced apple cider or Glogg to lighten the day. Keep your butter and sugar, handy for trying out the less-than-perfect pieces. Make it fun for everyone and include the kids. Yes, you might get some flour on the floor, but you are making memories that last a lifetime and will be handed down from generation to generation. There is nothing better!
• Cook your potatoes the day before and add the sugar, cream, butter, and salt after you rice and/or mix them. Cover the bowl with a cloth and refrigerate this flourless potato dough overnight. Lefse dough handles so much better when its cold. The next day, mix in the flour right before you're ready to start your baking day.
• I form my dough (with flour) into tennis ball sized balls and place them in a 9x13 pan in the refrigerator. Then, after they are cooled, I take out one ball at a time out of the refrigerator (it needs to stay cold), roll it out, and bake it on the griddle. Other LefseLefse readers form it into a long log, cut off chunks, and roll it from there
• Use white potatoes when possible as they generally have less moisture. Then, you don't need so much flour that can toughen the dough.
• Preheat your griddle for 10-15 minutes at 500 degrees so the lefse bubbles will be lightly brown on each side. Then, adjust the temperature to suit your taste. If the griddle isn't working right, consider getting a new electric cord. Also, keep the griddle grease free.
  
• I love my pastry board and cloth and lefse cozy. They're such simple products but make the process much easier. The pastry board and cloth are marked with measurements so you know how big to roll the dough. Before I had the special lefse cozy, I used a dampened towel to cool the lefse sheets. Both the pastry cloth and lefse cozy wash up perfectly and are very long-wearing cotton duck.