Lasagne

It’s very simple: I hate the taste of cooked ricotta. And I really, really, really hate it in Lasagne. If you like it because that’s your comfort food and that’s what you’re used to eating, then so be it. But if you want your lasagne to be all the things that it should be – deliciously dense, evenly layered, slightly crispy on the top and gooey in the middle – with a SATIN, VELVETY FINISH, then you need to go for a béchamel instead of ricotta. If you prefer the curdy, granular texture of ricotta, it’s probably not your fault, you were conditioned by a thousand ricotta lasagnes when you were a kid. But you really should try this just once, to know what you’re missing (and the way it really should be).

The only ingredients here are pasta, Bolognese, Béchamel, and Parmiggiano. (Yes – for expediency’s sake I’m calling our tomato-ground meat ragu “Bolognese”. If you have a problem with that please go here to register your concern.) I also add mozzarella on top but that’s up to you. I make a few tweaks to the two sauces to make them specific to lasagne. Can you make a lasagne with any old Bolognese that’s lying around? Of course. But if you’re like me, you don’t have any Bolognese lying around, because if you make it you eat it. So I usually make a batch specifically for the lasagne I’m about to prepare and thus it is useful to think about what exactly the lasagne requires.

Tomatoes are a curious and shape-shifting ingredient. The fruit that masquerades as a vegetable, tomatoes have long been understood to be the exemplary balance between sweet and acidic, but they are also rich in umami – more so, in fact, than any other plant product we consume, with the exception of seaweed. On the tomato flavor spectrum, you have the deep, robust, sugary, umami end associated with tomato paste, dried tomatoes, slow-cooked beef, high-heat roasts, caramelized sugars, etc. and on the other end you have the bright, fresh, acidic tang. Generally, the former is associated with cooked tomatoes and the latter with raw – for instance, the point of braising meats in tomatoes is to draw out and celebrate their sugars, the point of a coulis or gazpacho is to delight in their tang – but even within the Bolognese spectrum, you can have sauces that highlight one end of the spectrum or the other, depending on how it’s cooked and what your tomatoes are like.

Another paradoxical aspect to tomatoes: their versatility and deliciousness make them a prime candidate for industrial exploitation; their shape and fragility do not. Tomatoes traditionally have cells that rupture easily when ripe (heirloom tomatoes still do) which is bad for shipping so, two things: 1) industrial tomato manufacturers pick, pack, and ship tomatoes long before they are ripe, fooling them (and you) into appearing so by chemically triggering the “reddening” process; 2) tomatoes have been bred to have thick-walled cells, to be harder, and to bruise less easily. This is far less prevalent now than it was in the dark ages of food processing, so the sugar which both my grandmother and Clemenza considered secrets to their sauce often isn’t necessary anymore. Tomatoes do contain plenty of their own sugar – more than most vegetables, but less than most fruit – and provided you’ve got a reputable source, it should be enough to balance out the acidity in a sauce. You can also play with the spectrum by the type of tomato you use: ground, crushed, or pureed tomatoes will serve a deep rich sauce well, whereas chopped, whole, or fresh tomatoes will work better for brighter, acidic sauces. Making tomato sauces from fresh tomatoes, by the way, is delightful, but I generally never do.

A successful Bolognese will not always be optimal Bolognese for lasagne: it must be rich and meaty (high in umami), it must as smooth as possible (that is, a base of tomato paste, crushed, or ground tomatoes, not large chunks of onions, carrots, meat, etc), and it must not be too oily. In fact, the more excess fat that can be drained from the Bolognese before the lasagne is baked the better – there is plenty of fat in this recipe, believe me – since when it is baking, excess fat tends to separate out of the sauce and form in small pools. This is unsightly, frankly, and a bit gross, and might need to be drained with a spoon. A good rule of thumb across the board is that fats generally taste better when they’re emulsified, held in suspension, or otherwise evenly distributed; large pockets – be they liquid or solid – are not always desirable. (Yes, there are some notable exceptions.)

In any case, to achieve the ideal Bolognese for lasagne, follow the recipe with a particular preoccupation for the following:

• Start with a minimal amount of olive oil – perhaps half what you normally would use.
• Break up the meat so there are no unreasonably large chunks. No need to be overly dogmatic about this – the desired result is the consistency of small pebbles, not sand.
• Drain the meat of excess fat before adding the onions and garlic (add a touch of olive oil back in if necessary)
• Use ground or pureed tomatoes
• Add 4 oz beef demi glace to the finished product

Now for the béchamel. Let’s start at the beginning: a Béchamel is essentially a white sauce made by creating a paste called a blonde roux and adding milk. When the milk comes to a boil and the roux has been incorporated, the sauce thickens. Why use it? A béchamel is, in many cases, a way of adding a creaminess to a dish. It is not as fatty as heavy cream (and tends, therefore, to be a slightly more neutral addition) but you can control the density of the sauce by the thickness of the paste you start with, so its addition is often as much about texture and body as anything else. It can be used as a connective agent within a dish, creating both physical connections between other ingredients, as well as flavorful ones. Finally, it is an especially exquisite way to suspend cheese in a liquid form in order to make it spreadable. All three of these uses are epitomized in a lasagne. (AND WHAT THE FUCK DOES RICOTTA EVER DO? NOTHING.)

Traditionally, a béchamel uses onion, bay leaf, and cloves to give it its aromatic character, but I find the last two of those ingredients gross and the first somewhat unnecessary in a lasagne. Certainly it is simple to add an onion, and you should feel free; I generally do not. (If you’d like to do it the traditional way, cut a slit in a quarter of an onion to create a bay leaf-holder; insert the bay leaf and then stick 3 cloves into the onion. Submerge the piece into the béchamel as it cooks and discard it when it’s done – don’t chop the onion up and add it to the roux.) You can read endlessly about a sauce béchamel online and I don’t think I have much to add on the subject beyond what I already have. It’s quite simple to do, and once you’ve done it a couple dozen times, you should be able to never fuck it up. Possible fuck ups include scorching the bottom, not cooking the flour taste out of the flour, and not being able to incorporate the roux into the milk. If you experience the first fuckup, supposedly you can add a potato to the whole thing and rescue it. If you experience either of the latter two, why not just throw it out and start over? We’re talking about three dollars worth of milk and butter, and a negligible amount of flour…just take a mulligan.

Note: Sifting your flour is a wonderful way to avoid unincorporated lumps, as is a miracle product called Wondra. I used to use it exclusively for this kind of thing – it is somehow granulated and made specifically for sauces and gravies. Using Wondra will virtually eliminate any possibility of encountering fuckup # 3. It will also save you time, frustration, and possibly, if you’re using a whisk, a sore wrist. If this offends your taste for some stupid reason and you do not want to use Wondra, you would do well to sift your flour before using it. (But trust me, Grandmas in Louisiana use Wondra.)

Here’s my recipe for no-fuckup béchamel:

Ingredients:

• 4 TB Butter
• 4 TB Wondra
• 2.5 Cups hot milk (steaming but not boiling)
• Salt and pepper

Start by putting your milk on the fire. Use very low heat and whenever you see tiny bubbles forming around the edge and steam rising from the milk, shut off the heat. You really do not want this to boil or it will break. While that’s going, begin the roux by melting the butter over medium heat in a new sauce pan. (You will most likely be using a whisk, so don’t use a non-stick pan unless you’ve got the proper whisk.) You don’t want the butter to brown at all, so make sure that it is melting evenly and not too fast. When the last spec has just melted and it is foamy, add the Wondra. Stir with a wooden spoon or spatula until the butter and flour have formed a paste. There should be no flour or butter that isn’t incorporated. It will be a relatively thin paste – you can experiment if you like with thicker or thinner rouxs, oil instead of butter, etc as these will all affect the thickness and character of the final sauce, and you can learn to adjust or improvise based on that. In the meantime, the proper ratio for a roux – any roux – is equal parts fat and flour.

Cook the roux by stirring constantly for about 1 minute. The idea here is to cook the raw flour taste out of the roux without giving it any color. Your heat should be medium-low throughout. This is what is meant by a blonde roux – some rouxs get cooked for 30 minutes or more for sauces, soups, or stews that have a richer flavor and texture, and the result is a rich, nutty base. When the blonde roux is done, add the hot milk, whisking it in as you go. You can add half the milk, whisk it together till it is homogenous, then add the other half. Turn up the heat slightly but DO NOT make it too high. This is the danger period where you might scorch the bottom, and the béchamel will not thicken. Whisk constantly, breaking up and chunks of roux that you see. When the sauce comes to a boil, it will instantly thicken, and you can then judge it’s thickness and texture. Add more milk if it is too thick and boil it down if it is too thin. Add salt and pepper. It is sometimes desirable (or necessary) at this point to pass the béchamel through a fine-mesh strainer. That’s up to you – I rarely do it – but if you’ve got a good sauce with a bunch of gooey chunks of roux that you just can’t get incorporated, you probably should. You really don’t want to bite down into a little pocket of dough in your finished dish.

For the lasagne, add:

• ½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
• 4 oz grated parmiggiano reggiano

Stir to incorporate while hot.

Note: if you let the béchamel sit, a skin will form on top. Skin is gross, unless it’s crispy chicken or pork skin (and even then, come on…it’s skin) so make sure you get rid of it or incorporate it before putting it in your lasagne!

So finally, the lasagne recipe:

• 1 batch Bolognese
• 1 batch béchamel
• 6 oz grated parmiggiano
• Enough Pasta (fresh is best and easily available, so there’s no excuse; no-boil is perfectly fine; if you use regular dried pasta and boil it first, only do so half way, then put it in cold water so you can work with it, but don’t let it soak there for too long. You do NOT want this pasta dish, like any other, to be mushy.)
• 1 ball of mozzarella, cut into 1/8”-thick rounds, or grated

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375.

Start by making sure all your ingredients are ready to go: the cheeses are grated/sliced, the sauces are easily available in bowls or pots, etc. Place your lasagne pan in the middle of your work surface and put everything else around it, if you want to be really organized, in the following order: pasta, béchamel, parmiggiano, Bolognese.

Start by adding a thin layer of Bolognese to the bottom of the pan – very thin, just enough to vaguely coat it. Then add a layer of pasta. Using a spoon and/or a rubber spatula, add decent coat of béchamel to the pasta, then cover liberally with parmiggano. Add a thin layer of Bolognese (a little tends to go a long way, but use your judgment). Repeat until you run out of Bolognese – on the top, cover completely with mozzarella and then sprinkle completely with parmiggiano.

Bake about 20-30 minutes, until the top is bubbly and crispy. Let stand at least 10 minutes before serving.