I love crackers and bread. If it can hold cheese, I’m on it. So I was excited to find this recipe for Norwegian Flatbread. Yey! It’s bread, it’s in my heritage quest, and the recipe says it’s good with mild cheeses. How can this be bad? The recipe was straight forward: make a dough, roll it out very flat, crisp over high heat and enjoy.
There were a few ingredients in this recipe I’d never worked with before. First, pureed potato. The recipe didn’t say what kind, so I used Russett. Coming out of the food processor was something that was reminiscent of stuff I sprayed off of old dinner trays when I was the dishwasher at a rest home.
Second, rye flour. I did manage to track down rye flour at my local megamart. Maybe that was where I went wrong. Within the bag was a product that looked exactly like the grain we used to feed the cows to lure them into the barn to get milked.
Undaunted, I scraped the potato puree into a bowl, added the rye flour, salt and water. It didn’t really want to come together, but I forced it to. Grr. The recipe didn’t specify what kind of flour to roll the dough out with, so I used AP flour. Maybe i should have used rye flour. I don’t know, but they didn’t want to roll out. They either stuck to the rolling pin or they absorbed a cup of flour. I ended up with a bunch of something flat, foreign, and rather poo-looking.
By this point I was irritated, but determined. I fired up my skillet and went to town crisping the alien crap patties. I waited and waited. And waited. Aged a little bit. Got a gray hair. And still the “flatbread” barely browned, barely crisped and wouldn’t even burn.
kitchenkungfu.net 
lol! This post cracks me up. Sorry the bread didn’t turn out, but your humour is amusing 🙂 I’m not Norwegian but I’m guessing this is a flat bread called Lefse. It definitely looks too dry due to the excess flour you used when rolling it. I’ve been doing some research on Norwegian food and lefse is one of them I’m going to attempt. Some recipes suggest using leftover mash potato from dinner
Glad I could be amusing! 🙂 This was not lefse, but was supposed to be a crunchy cracker. Lefse is soft and much more involved than this recipe. I’ve been warned not to try lefse unsupervised, but maybe I can get someone to teach me some day! There are some good YouTube videos about it, too.
Oh! Sorry about that… I wanted to help you out with your flatbrød experiments, but my comments get “discarded”. Is there a word/letter limit? Or are links not allowed? I had a lot of nice flatbrød griddle images for you… 😦
The short version of my “discarded” comment: Kudos to you for your sane food approach! If you put potatoes in flatbrød it’s no longer flatbrød, but potetbrød. The flatbrød dough is only flour (barley, rye, wheat, or oat – or a mix), water and a pinch of salt. Nothing else. Never. No grease (not even for frying), and no leaving!
– Hlin