Everything I know about Lasagna

by Chef Ben Kelly | Nov 16, 2018 | Cooking Tips, Pasta

Loved by people and fat orange cats alike, lasagna is one of those dishes that everyone makes. Everyone has there own version, myself included. But like everything, there good and bad versions. So, today I want to take the opportunity to talk about how an okay lasagna can be made into a great one. Today is all about…

Everything I know about lasagna

Sauce

In my opinion, the most important piece of the lasagna pie is the sauce. As the sauce is where the biggest part of the flavour comes from in a lasagna it better be damn good. Now, it doesn’t necessarily need to be a meat sauce or even a tomato sauce. There are plenty of really good white sauce based lasagnas out there. So keep that in mind.

I want to break down the three main sauce options.

Meat Sauce

Probably the most common sauce for lasagna is meat sauce. A classic bolognese sauce with just a touch of heat, well-balanced acidity and sweetness, and ready to rumble. It doesn’t get much better than that. The problem is that with sauces of all stripes people tend to overdo it with flavours and ingredients.

Having a twenty ingredient sauce is all well and good, but that’s twenty things that can go wrong. Twenty flavours that can clash. More often than not, the best cooking comes from restraint. The best chef’s in the world know it’s not so much about what you add to a recipe, it’s what you don’t add that matters.

For me, the best meat sauces are the simplest ones. Ground meat (beef and pork), maybe a little red wine, a touch of garlic, a few chilli flakes, some stock, tomato, onion, salt and pepper, maybe a touch of sugar, and the tiniest little pinch of oregano. That’s it. That’s all you need.

But the key is time. It’s giving the meat time to brown properly so you get that deep rich meat flavour. Giving the onions time to caramelize a bit to add sweetness to the sauce. It’s reducing the wine and the stock to concentrate their flavours. And, it’s about giving the sauce time to simmer so all the flavours come together and the sauce gets the right consistency. It’s all about time.

Tomato Sauce

The principles of meat sauce hold true for tomato sauce as well. It’s about time and restraint. For a more in-depth look at tomato sauce check out this post I wrote a few days ago all about how to make tomato sauce.

White Sauce

White sauce or bechamel along with tomato sauce make up two of the five traditional mother sauces. Essentially, the base of French and European cooking. Knowing how to make this sauce properly allows you to make hundreds and hundreds of dishes. In fact, you probably already know how to make this and might not even know it. Don’t believe me?

White lasagna, mac and cheese, most chowders, some cream soups, cheese sauces, moussaka, mornay sauce, white sauce for salmon, and many many others things are made with bechamel.

So, how do you make a really good bechamel? Well, just like meat sauce, and tomato sauce, with restraint and time.

A really good bechamel sauce has around eight ingredients in it. Those are milk, flour, butter, onion, bay leaf, nutmeg, salt and pepper. There may also be a touch, just a drop of lemon juice to brighten it. The way it’s made is by first combining the flour and butter in a pot over medium heat to make a roux. To this, the milk (whole milk) is added along with the onion, bay leaf, and a pinch of nutmeg.

These ingredients are all cooked together over a medium-low heat for twenty minutes or so, being whisked pretty regularly. Essentially, you want to cook the sauce until you can’t taste flour anymore and it has the desired consistency. You then season the sauce to taste with salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Finally, you strain the sauce to remove all the onion, and bay leaf.

That is how you make a really good bechamel.

This sauce generally is used for seafood lasagna or often for a vegetarian like a butternut squash. You could also make a very delicious chicken and bechamel lasagna.

If you have never had a lasagna made with a white sauce before, I highly recommend you try it.

Pasta

It should go without saying that when making a pasta dish that pasta should be good. This is especially true when it comes to lasagna. The better quality pasta you use the more structure your lasagna will have.

In the supermarket today your options are almost limitless when it comes to brands and types of pasta. You can get traditionally dried lasagna noodles that you have to boil first. You can get noodles that go in the lasagna dried and come out perfectly cooked, you can even get fresh pasta sheets in more grocery stores that can be used to make lasagna. Of course, you can always make your own pasta too.

Really, the big thing with pasta is not cheap out on it. Even the most expensive pasta is still pretty cheap so spend the extra dollar and pay for quality.

Experiment with a few different types of pasta and brands and see what you like best. At the end of the day, you are the one eating the lasagna so pick a pasta you like.

Cheese

There are many different kinds of cheese that you can put in a lasagna. From parmesan and mozza to ricotta and provolone, even cottage cheese the options are limitless. It will likely come as no surprise that I prefer simplicity. I generally use both parmesan and mozzarella, but I also love ricotta and provolone as well. It’s up to you. What I will say, is just like the pasta, don’t cheap out on the cheese.

That shaker of sawdust-like parmesan is not going to give you the best flavour. I know a lot of people love that stuff but it is the bane of my existence. Spring for a wedge of real Parmigiano Reggiano and really good mozza. It is absolutely worth it.

Like everyone else, I like to put cheese between each layer. I think that goes without saying. I also like to sprinkle a little bit of dried oregano between each layer. Not too much, just a pinch will do it.

Center

A lot of people out there make lasagna with consistent layers, which is fine. I prefer to make the center layer different than the rest. Sometimes I will put a layer of either ricotta or cottage cheese mixed with spinach and egg or just the cheese itself. Sometimes I like a layer of bechamel. Maybe even a layer of zucchini or eggplant.

This center layer gives a bit of a break from the same old flavours in the other layers. It also adds a nice visual touch once the lasagna is cut.

Conclusion

Lasagna is a delicious pasta dish. Even bad lasagna is still pretty good. Hopefully, the information in the post will help you make an even better lasagna than you are used to.

If you think I missed something or, if you have a tip of your own, I would love to hear about it in the comments.

5 Pasta Sauces You Need To Master

by Chef Ben Kelly | Aug 13, 2018 | Pasta, Recipes

I have never met anyone who didn’t like pasta. There are so many different shapes and so many different sauces; it would be impossible not to find something you could love. The problem is that it’s easy to get stuck just making the same pasta sauce over and over again. The thing is, with so much variety out there, there’s no need to get stuck in a repeating cycle. Below is a list of 5 pasta sauces you need to master. Some you may have heard of. Some you might not of.

All of the pasta sauces on the list have around five ingredients, and they take very little time to put together. So, let’s get into it.

Here are…

5 Pasta Sauces You Need To Master

Tomato (Marinara)

There are few things in the world of gastronomy that are as perfect as a classic tomato sauce. Tomatoes, onion, olive oil, salt & pepper, sugar, and basil combine to make something so simple, so unassuming, and so delicious that it boggles the mind.

So how do you make it? Start by dicing an onion. Heat a generous amount of olive oil in a medium pot and add the onion to it. You don’t want the heat to be too high, a medium temperature will be fine. The idea here is that you want to cook the onions until they are slightly caramelized. It’s going to take about ten minutes and you will have to stir them every few minutes or so.

While the onions are cooking open a can of whole tomatoes. If you can get San Marzano Tomatoes, which are imported from Italy, that would be best. Open the can, pour the tomatoes into a bowl and crush them with your hand. You don’t need to completely puree them but you don’t want any big chunks either.

Once the onions are slightly caramelized add the tomatoes and a bit of salt and pepper. Heat the tomatoes, give the sauce a taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper and sugar as needed. You don’t want the sauce to be sweet. That’s not what the sugar is for. The sugar is there to take some of the acidity out of the tomatoes. The more you caramelize your onions, the less sugar you may need. Also, the tartness of the tomatoes depends on what time of year they were harvested. If it was sunny that day. How much water they had. So, don’t just blindly add sugar. Taste and then add only as needed.

After the sauce is seasoned, simmer it for ten minutes and then take it off the heat. Chop up one to two tablespoons of fresh basil and add it to the sauce. From here you can puree the sauce or just leave it as is.

This sauce is great to have with a stuffed pasta like ravioli, or tortellini. It’s great to use in the layers of a lasagna. It’s fantastic in a seafood linguine with a bit of white wine and chilli. Or it’s great just on its own over spaghetti with parmesan. There is so much you can do with such a simple sauce that you need to master this one A.S.A.P.

Pesto

Pesto is one of those sauces that people often buy at the grocery store because they don’t know how easy it is to make. The ingredients are fresh basil, parmesan, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, and salt. That’s it. Take all of these ingredients, but them in a blender and you have pesto. Honestly, that’s it.

If you want to store the pesto for a week or two in the fridge, blanch the basil by dropping it in boiling water for thirty seconds and then into ice water to cool it. Dry the basil off as best you can with paper towels before adding it to the other ingredients. This blanching will help the basil retain its green colour and will prevent your pesto from going black as it sits.

If you have one big bunch of basil, use two cloves of garlic, a quarter to a half cup of good olive oil, two to three tablespoons of parmesan cheese, one to two tablespoons of pine nuts, and a good pinch of salt. Puree this, add more oil if needed and it’s good to go.

The pinenuts freak people out because they are really, really expensive. Luckily, you can buy them from the bulk section. So, only get the amount you need. If all you need is two tablespoons only buy that much.

This sauce, like the tomato sauce, is very versatile and goes well with so many things. Have with pasta. Toss it with sausages and roasted peppers. You can add it to mayonnaise to jazz up your sandwiches. It’s so good and quick to make.

Aglio e olio

Pronounced Ag-li-ol-ee-o this sauce is made of three ingredients. Olive oil, garlic, and chilli flakes.

Heat a generous amount of olive oil (three to four tablespoons) over medium heat, slice two cloves of garlic as thin as you can and add that to the oil. Cook until the garlic softens. You may need to turn the heat down if the garlic starts to colour. After four or five minutes add half a teaspoon of dried chilli flakes. Toss cooked spaghetti into the sauce and season with salt and pepper as needed.

This is one of those unassuming sauces. Big flavours out of very little.

Brown Butter

Brown butter is butter that is cooked just until the milk solids begin to caramelized or brown. To the browned butter you can add chopped herbs like rosemary and thyme. You can add lemon juice, capers, and olives. Or the most classic pairing of all, brown butter and sage. This sauce goes really well with fish or seafood. And the sage and brown butter go really well with pasta stuffed with squash. So good.

To make brown butter put a quarter cup of butter in a pan at heat over medium. The butter will melt and then it will start to foam, you will notice after a few minutes brown bits around the edges of the pan. Swirl the butter and watch closely because the butter will brown quickly at this point. There is a fine line between brown butter and burnt butter, and you don’t want to cross it. The colour should be a caramel brown and it should smell nutty.

Once the butter has browned you need to shock by adding something cold like lemon juice, a touch of wine, or even some capers or olives. You want to drop the temperature of the butter as quickly as possible to prevent it from burning.

Now, pour it over haddock, or salmon, or toss it some squash stuffed pasta.

Carbonara

Classic Carbonara is an egg, some bacon (traditionally guanciale which is jowl bacon), parmesan, and pepper. That’s it.

Put one egg in a bowl and add two to three tablespoons of grated parmesan cheese, and a quarter teaspoon of black pepper. Whisk this egg and cheese mixture together. Add the hot bacon and hot linguine. Stir until the pasta is completely coated and the sauce thickens.

The heat from the bacon and the pasta cooks the egg as the parmesan melts it creates a creamy sauce.

You can also add a small handful of chopped parsley to finish it.

This is a dish that only takes as long to cook as it takes to make some bacon and some pasta. It is one of those dishes that confuses people with its simplicity. People try to overcomplicate this dish and make it much more difficult than it is. It is perfect just the way it is. Don’t believe me? Try it for yourself.

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