Lasagna
The ancient Romans had "Lagana," layers of pasta and sauce, but it wouldn't have had tomatoes, which were not introduced to the European continent until the 16th Century.
I despise hyperbole. It’s so prevalent in our mass media world, most of us just dismiss it. But it irks me.
Someone had the audacity to post a recipe, World's Best Lasagna after seeing it touted on the ABC program Good Morning America. The rationale for claiming this top planetary ranking was the fact that the recipe had received 8,000 five-star reviews on a popular recipe site over an eleven year period. There are about 8.1 billion people on the Earth right now. Do the math and it’s easy to see the infinitesimally small percentage that qualified this particular recipe worthy of a global title.
I’ll never claim my lasagna is the best. But it’s the best I will offer you.
What you need for a great lasagna is a great meat sauce, or Bolognese Sauce, to be more accurate. But if you can't make the Kitchen Tapestry recipe for Baked Italian Meat Sauce then I offer this more convenient version that uses a bottled Bolognese that I think is one of the better ones on the market, but use whatever you like.
This recipe will make enough for one 9" x 13" casserole dish and I recommend you buy two of those aluminum baking dishes they sell at the grocery store, one of which you should use just for support. The disposable aluminum dish makes for much easier storage and clean-up, particularly if you buy the ones that provide a plastic lid. It's great also if you're planning on leftovers, and unless you're sharing this lasagna amongst 8 to10 hungry people on the first sitting, plan on leftovers.
There is some debate among food historians on the origins of Lasagna given that the root word is not Italian, but Greek. "Laganon" was the Grecian word used to describe the first known pasta. Some say the British invented Lasagna because it first appeared in print in the late 14th century. But most believe that a cookbook of that era would have had few newly inspired recipes, and would have sought merely to capture and record already known recipes in common use at the time. There was certainly nothing new about layers of sauce and pasta. The Romans used the word "Lagana" so its likely lasagna has been around since well before the Middle Ages, and has undergone many iterations to get to what we now hold up as a classic Lasagna. But it isn’t likely the Roman version used cheese and they would never have even heard of tomatoes.
The layered dish we now call Lasagna came about in the city of Bologna in the 19th Century and contained egg pasta dough with spinach, Ragù alla Bolognese Sauce, Béchamel Sauce and grated Parmigiano.
Americans in the 1950s replaced Béchamel with ricotta cheese, mixed with Parmesan cheese and egg yolks, and began adding more cheese in-between the layers of pasta, including mozzarella and provolone. I sometimes use cottage cheese if I can’t find ricotta; either works well with this recipe.
Lasagna
Ingredients
- 5-6 large green onions, trimmed and finely sliced
- 1 medium green bell pepper, cored and finely diced
- 2 tbsp garlic, minced
- 1 lb ground 80/20 beef
- 1 lb ground mild Italian sausage
- 1 24-oz jar Bolognese sauce (like, Rao or Classico)
- 1 14.5-oz can tomato sauce (like, Hunt's)
- 1 14.5 oz can petite diced tomatoes (like, Hunt's)
- 1 5.5 oz can tomato paste (like, Hunt's or Contadina)
- 1-1/2 to 2 cups dry red wine
- 2 tbsp Italian Seasonings
- 2 tbsp dried parsley
- 1 tbsp dried basil
- 1 tbsp dried oregano
- 16 oz ricotta cheese or small-curd cottage cheese (like, Breakstone)
- 2 egg yolks
- 3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese (like, the Kraft green can)
- 1/4 tsp fine sea salt
- 1/4 tsp black pepper
- 12 oz grated mozzarella cheese
- 6-7 slices provolone cheese
- 6 oz fresh grated Parmesan cheese
- 9-10 lasagna noodles
- olive oil for sautéing
- non-stick cooking spray (like, Olive Oil Pam)
Instructions
- In a large stock pot bring salted water to boil and cook the lasagna noodles for 10-13 minutes until they are al dante, but do not over cook.
- Drain well and transfer the pasta to a mixing bowl of cold water until ready to be assembled in the dish.
- Pre-heat the oven to 325°F.
- In a large oven-safe sauce pot with a tight fitting lid or a Dutch oven, sauté the green onions and bell pepper in olive oil over medium high heat until limp, 8-10 minutes.
- Add the garlic, then add the ground beef and Italian sausage, and cook until all the pink color is gone, stirring constantly. Drain off any rendered fat.
- Add the Bolognese sauce, petite diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, Italian seasonings, parsley, basil, oregano and 1-1/2 cups of red wine. Stir well to combine. Add some or all of the additional half-cup of red wine if the sauce is too thick. You want the consistency of a loose salsa.
- Bring the sauce to a simmer on the stove over medium high heat.
- Cover the sauce pot or Dutch oven and place in the middle of your oven. Cook the sauce for at least two hours, but you can go as long as six.
- Remove the sauce pot or Dutch oven from the oven, uncover and allow the sauce to cool for at least thirty minutes.
- In a mixing bowl, combine the cottage cheese (or ricotta cheese), egg yolks, grated Parmesan (and I strongly recommend the Kraft green can for this), salt and pepper, and stir well to combine.
- Set up an assembly station with the following in this order: the pasta; a couple of clean, dish towels folded in half and topped with paper towels; your aluminum casserole dish sprayed with the non-stick cooking spray; the pot of meat sauce; the cottage cheese mixture and the other three cheeses.
- Using a slotted kitchen spoon, start by putting enough meat sauce to cover the bottom of the casserole dish. Allow the slotted spoon time to drain away some of the liquid before spooning into the dish.
- Lay out each lasagna noodle one at a time on the towels and using another paper towel, blot the noodle so it is reasonably dry. Three lasagna noodles side-by-side will neatly cover the bottom of the dish with the meat sauce, but you may have to cut off an inch to an inch and a half of the length of the noodle so it rests flat.
- Spoon out 1/2 of the cottage cheese mixture and spread more or less evenly over the layer of pasta. Top with 1/2 of the mozzarella cheese.
- Then, lay out another layer of pasta; top with meat sauce; top with the remaining cottage cheese mixture, and then lay out the slices of provolone cheese.
- Lay out the final layer of pasta; top with the meat sauce; top with the remaining mozzarella cheese and the freshly grated Parmesan cheese.
- Cover and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours but you can even leave it overnight until ready to cook. Refrigerating the lasagna gives it time to firm up and the flavors to amalgamate.
- When you're ready to cook, uncover and place it in a pre-heated 350°F oven for 1-1/2 hours until the top is brown and bubbly.
- Allow the lasagna to cool for 10-15 minutes before cutting into squares and serving along side a simple, Italian salad and a slice or two of garlic bread.
Notes
- Cook an extra Lasagna noodle or two just in case one breaks or you need to fill in some gaps while making the dish.
- The longer you allow the meat sauce to bake in the oven, the richer it will become and if you have the time, refrigerate it overnight before assembling the Lasagna. Cold meat sauce is a little easier to work with and allowing the sauce to cool and rest overnight will add than much more depth to the flavor to the dish.
