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Diners and visitors at Generations in Luverne Tuesday were treated to a lefse demonstration by mealsite coordinator Lynette Hoiland and her husband, Mike, and her mother, Sylvia Niessink.
The potatoes were previously peeled, cooked, mashed and cooled, but the rest of the process was demonstrated, step by step.
The Hoilands mix 3 1/2 to 4 cups of flour with 15 pounds of cooled mashed potatoes, slowly adding the flour until the texture is right.
“How do you know when it’s right?” an observer asked Lynette, who was mixing potatoes and flour with her hands in a large stainless steel bowl.
“I can just tell,” she said. “It starts to get tacky, kind of like play dough, and you can form it into a ball.”
But she confessed the plastic gloves used for the demonstration affected her ability to sense the texture.
When Mike later had trouble rolling out the lefse, they wondered if they had mixed in enough flour. Or perhaps the mashed potatoes hadn’t cooled enough.
One observer mentioned she uses a sock on her rolling pin. Mike pointed out that his roller (his great-grandmother’s) is textured and therefore he prefers to use no sock.
At the far end of the workstation, Sylvia quietly buttered, quartered and rolled a batch of lefse that had been previously made.
“It’s for back-up,” Lynette winked. “Just in case this one doesn’t turn out.”
While the threesome worked, they discussed with nearby observers the finer points of fresh potatoes versus instant (potatoes from a box are sacrilege) and buttered lefse with or without sugar (sugared lefse isn’t real lefse).