Christmas time, time to cook all around the world. Time to share smiles, stories and tasty courses with people at the table. Italian gastronomy and traditional regional cuisine are very famous and widely appreciated. Not to forget, Italy is also home to Galateo. Today we want to share with all of you a delicious recipe: lasagna. You can find on the web hundreds of recipes to make lasagne. Most of them are mistaken or imprecisions. Maybe you will have a good result, but often it would be far away from what we Italians mean when we think about this delicious dish made of baked pasta. So, let’s see how to make lasagna as a local.
Historic hints
Lasagna is a very popular dish and you can find tons of recipes, in Italia itself (Neapolitan lasagna is pretty different, for example). We will see how to cook the bolognese recipe.
But before we go into all that, there are a couple of info that most of people do not know about it.
The name comes from Ancient Greek (Laganon)
The first recipe is from Britain (yes, it is true -1390’s)
The perfected version we all know is from Italy!
After this little secret, cut to the chase and let’s get serious.
How to make lasagna: the recipe for a perfect main dish
First of all, Lasagna needs a fundamental element: bolognese sauce. It is a meat-based sauce. Lasagna is traditionally made with overlapped egg pasta sheets. But remember, this sauce is also delicious with tagliatelle or short pastas as well as spaghetti.
This is not a difficult recipe to make, you only need time and patience. It would be perfect to prepare all cooked ingredients in advance and then assemble the lasagna 1 hour before lunch or dinner.
If you want to learn how to make lasagna follow our recipe and you won’t regret it!
Ingredients (serving 4)
- medium carrot (1)
- large onion (1)
- 1 celery stalk
- 300 gr of beef meat, minced
- 200 gr of sausage meat, minced
- 1/2 glass of red wine
- olive oil
- 400 gr of tomato sauce
- 500 ml of milk
- 50 gr of butter
- 50 gr of flour
- 6 fresh lasagna sheets
- 4 table spoon of parmesan cheese, grated
- salt
- bechamel
- Pepper
- bay leaf
- broth
Preparation:
First you need to make the Bolognese sauce.
Ragù (Bolognese ragù) sauce:
Heat the butter and oil in a large saucepan. Add carrot, onion and celery peeled and chopped. Stir for around 5 minutes until the mixture is colored.
Add the two types of meat, earlier minced, crumble it into the vegetables with a fork and stir until the color is brown. Season with salt and pepper. Pour the wine and mix until the alcoholic part is evaporated. Add the milk, and cook until it evaporates. Add the tomato sauce, a glass of broth (or water) and two bay leaves. Turn the heat down and cook (low heat) for at least 2 hours without lid. Stir occasionally. If the sauce start to dry out, add broth.
The sauce can be made in advance and kept in the fridge (2-3 days).
After the red sauce, you need to prepare a white sauce, the besciamella.
Béchamel
Melt butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat. Add flour and stir constantly bubbling a bit, until the mixture becomes like a cream. Pour in very hot milk and whisk vigorously until you have a smooth white sauce. Bring the sauce to a boil, add salt and pepper, reduce heat and cook, stirring for 5 minutes.
Cooking pasta
You can use lasagna sheets without precooking, if they are fresh. If you have the dry ones cook them in boiling water according to the instructions of the package.
Our tip: pull your pasta out from the boiling water a couple of minutes before the recommended cooking time.
Assembly
Butter a large baking dish, preferably a rectangular one and preheat the oven to 200°C.
Spread three spoonful of meat sauce over the bottom of an ovenproof dish. Arrange a layer of lasagne sheets, add meat sauce and then béchamel. Repeat the process (sheets, ragù and béchamel) two more time, top with grated Parmesan and dot with butter. Do not make more than about 6 layers of pasta.
Bake the lasagne for 20 minutes until brown on top. Let it stand for 5 minutes before serving directly from the baking dish.
Enjoy!