Norwegian flat bread fresh from the oven. It’s delicious and easy to make. Photo courtesy of Visit Oslo.
This flat bread is very easy to make at home. It only has two downsides:
1) If you don’t have a cast iron pan over an open wood fireplace, you cook it in a skillet on the stove. This filled our house with smoke.
2) Rolling out the bread with lots of flour is messy. Anyone want to come over and clean our kitchen?
The Norsk Folkemuseum logo. The museum is an experiential hands-on learning center. Plan to stay all day.
My mom, toddler, and I ate this Norwegian flat bread in Norway, at the amazing mostly open-air Norwegian Folk Museum that is a beautiful boat ride away from the harbor in Oslo.
This is my healthier, American version of the recipe for Norwegian flat bread that they give out at the museum. Mine is sweetened with agave.
Ingredients:
1 egg
1/2 cup agave
1/4 cup butter
1 cup buttermilk or yogurt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
4 1/2 cups of flour (I used 2 cups whole spelt flour, 2 cups whole wheat flour, and 1/2 cup barley flour)
Barley flour to roll out the dough
Butter, sugar, and cinnamon to sprinkle on top of the bread
Directions to make Norwegian flat bread:
Melt the butter and remove from heat to cool
Combine the butter with the egg, agave, and buttermilk. Mix well.
Combine the flour and baking soda in a large bowl.
Make a hole in the middle of the flour mixture and pour in the liquid. Stir with a wooden spoon or mix with your hands. The dough should be pliable and easy to roll.
On a floured surface roll a ball of dough into a circle about 1/4 inch thick.
Cook in a dry stainless steel or cast iron skillet over medium heat. Flip with a metal spatula in a minute or two or whenever it smells done (am I the only one who cooks-by-nose? I seem to be able to smell when bread and other baked goods are ready). As the pan retains heat the bread will cook faster on each side.
Top the Norwegian flat bread with salted butter, sugar, and cinnamon, if desired. Cut the hot bread into wedges with a knife or pizza cutter and enjoy!
This wooden church, which dates from about 800, is one of the highlights of the Norsk Folkemuseum
Leone liked looking at the old-fashioned Norwegian toys at the Norsk Folkemuseum where we tasted Norwegian flat bread for the first time
And the bear skeleton. The museum has one of the best collections of Sami artifacts of anywhere in Scandinavia
Preparing the hardangerlefse dough that is used to make Norwegian flat bread
Which is then cooked on an open hearth fire. In this photo a museum employee, dressed like a Norwegian baker of old, checks if it’s time to flip the Norwegian flat bread
Updated: November 22, 2019
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Glad you could go. Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for the recipe.
Flat bread on a cast iron skillet over an open fire! I can’t imagine anything nicer on this nasty rainy morning.
I could TOTALLY be a faux-historic baker making bread over an open fire for museumgoers. Good to know there’s another career out there if being a food writer stops panning out!
I’m with Casey. This recipe sounds good–love the cinnamon and sugar at the end. Have you seen the wife-savers that cooks in the 19th century used to use when cooking over open flames? It swings the pots on and off the flames so you’re not bending over the fire, where of course clothes could come in contact with the flames.
Love the idea of cooking this in a cast iron skillet over an open fire. My only experience – well, not the open fire, but the cast iron – was cooking corn bread in my flat cast iron skillet in the oven. Love that.
What an exciting (and tasty!) trip!
What a tasty Norwegian experience and recipe.