4 Levels of Lasagna: Amateur to Food Scientist | Epicurious

Hi, I'm John, and I'm a level one chef. Hi, I'm Khadijah, and I'm a level two chef. I'm Frank, and I've been a chef for 23 years. This lasagna recipe is a variation that my mom used to make for us. Super simple, very dumbed down, because I didn't know how to do it. I grew up in a Caribbean household, but as I grew up, I started putting my own spin on these Caribbean dishes. I like things really spicy. For my lasagna, I like to make a meat sauce. Anytime you have a crowd over, you should make this lasagna. It feeds a lot of people. So first, I'm gonna make my meat sauce, which is the base of the dish. I just take the ground beef, just gonna work it through the pan until it gets nice and browned throughout. My parents don't like red meat, so I use ground turkey for my turkey lasagna. Turkey and mushroom lasagna, you add the mushrooms handful by handful. You don't want the mushrooms to end up soggy. You just want it to brown. I start out with pancetta. Pancetta is basically cured pork belly. It's salty, it has a lot of fat in it, and it adds this nice depth and richness to our tomato sauce. This'll basically kind of melt into the sauce, and I'm not using ground beef here. I use short ribs. I use short ribs for a lot of things. We're gonna season up our short ribs really well. Plenty of salt, plenty of pepper, and I really don't use much seasonings with my ground beef. I kind of like the taste once it's cooked. This is gonna go back in the sauce, but right now, I just want to focus on getting my meat brown. This tough piece of meat needs some time to break down. While my meat is browning, I'm gonna cut my aromatics. I like to use carrots and onions. You don't want it to be too big, or else when you take a bite of a lasagna, you just have like a chunk of onion in the middle of your mouth. Onions tend to melt into the sauce. We'll see little bits and pieces of carrots, but I'm not too worried about that. It's a rustic sauce. It's gonna be chunky. I just put garlic in almost everything. Of course you gotta have garlic. It's Italian food. It's funny because I come from an Italian-American family. My grandmother did not like garlic at all, so she would cook the garlic, and then take it out, and as kids, we'd eat it. Brown the mushrooms. We have some nice browning. I'm gonna add some basil leaves to my sauce, and I always use my stems when I make tomato sauce. I am adding some smoked paprika. Season as you go. I'm gonna add a little pepper right now, and I'm gonna add some salt. My grandma used to say, who grew up from Brooklyn, that you don't need to add too much salt because we lived by the beach, so there was salt in the air. Don't know if that's actually true. So I'm gonna add my ground turkey, maybe give it a couple of stirs so everything can be heated evenly. My parents say that you can over-stir, so I trust them, but lo and behold, I just keep on babysitting everything, and just like stir, stir, stir. I have a problem. I use some red wine, some acid red chili flakes. Some chicken stock. Beef stock or beef broth. I know that some people like to drain out the fat. I keep them in there. I like the way it tastes. I can stand to use a few pounds. So now that my meat's fully brown, I'm gonna go ahead and add some marinara sauce. This is from a jar because I don't have time to make my own homemade red sauce. So I put a can of bi-roasted tomatoes in the blender. Can-crushed tomatoes are a staple for tomato sauce. They're a little sweeter. I try to get a sauce that has a little seasoning in it, that way I don't have to add too much other seasonings. This is where I add the spices and absolutely destroy people's taste buds with it. This is berbere, it's an Ethiopian spice mix. It makes everything spicy and it makes me happy. And then you also want to add honey to not kill anyone after you just blew them up with a bunch of spices. Don't forget the bay leaf. Bay leaves usually give it a nice flavor, but it's always a pain fishing out. Accidentally left a bay leaf in the lasagna once. That was a horrible experience. I'm gonna put it in the oven and leave it there for about an hour, hour and a half until the meat is fork tender. I'm gonna put this aside for when we start building our lasagna. Voila! We let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Ah, okay, this smells amazing. I'm happy, Dija's happy. We want to add the remaining smoked paprika, the berbere, and the fish and meat sauce towards the end. I hate this part because I hate taking out the bay leaves. Okay, oh, wait, it's right there. Ah-ha, ah-ha-ha, ah-ha, I don't have to fish for it. This is the Dunn's. Now we have our finished sauce. It's rich, it's reduced a little, the meat is falling apart. So now I'm gonna make the creamy layer of my lasagna because, of course, all lasagna needs cheese. I have a beautiful bowl of whole milk ricotta cheese here. I added in some grated cheese, some salt, a little bit of fresh ground black pepper, and some Italian seasoning because I feel like life needs Italian seasoning. I also like to add some mozzarella, na-na-na-na-na. Careful not to grate your own fingers because that would be painful. I like to have this herby kind of taste in the middle, so we're gonna add basil. Now we're gonna add two eggs. This helps bind everything, and then you start to stir it a bit or stir it a lot. We're gonna make my bechamel now. Traditionally, this is what you would use. Especially in Northern Italy, we're gonna add some flour. I'm gonna add a little garlic now, too, for flavoring. Whisk my warm milk into the flour mixture with some salt and pepper. This is sacrilege to a lot of French people, using black pepper in a white sauce. So I'm gonna add my cheese. I have some really nice Parmesan cheese here. The cheese and the cream kind of melt together, and it makes this beautiful kind of creamy layer in our lasagna, and that's it. That is our bechamel. We're gonna start making my pasta. We want to make sure that we salt this water. You need to season your pasta water. These are some lasagna pasta sheets. I use these no-boil lasagna noodles. That's really tricky to say. I use these no-boil lasagna noodles because they're really easy, they're nice and thick, and the taste is still there, I think, so. There's a lot of pastas in the market that are no-boil pastas. They're perfectly acceptable for this, but for my lasagna, I'm gonna make fresh pasta. Everyone thinks pasta's this complicated thing. It's not. I have flour, eggs, a little bit of salt, and a fork. Doing it the granny-style method. I said pasta was easy. It's messy, though. More flour on my hands, and start to bring it together. I'm just gonna cut a piece off. We're gonna start to roll it out, and it gets really nice and smooth. If you don't cook the pasta, and you put it in with the sauce, it tends to be mushy. You want to cook the pasta, it gets firmer, and it holds together better. You're setting the proteins in the pasta. All of them are out. We're about to use these to now layer our lasagna. Which is actually my favorite part. It's kind of like making a cake because of all the different layers, and I just think it's really, really fun. And I like to start with a base of just plain marinara sauce. A very thin layer of the sauce. The bechamel keeps the pasta from sticking the bottom, and then I'll put a layer of pasta. It creates a nice, flat layer for then my ricotta mixture. A nice little creamy layer. A little more bechamel. We spread it out all the way to the edges. And it's really just like making a cake. That's why it's so much fun. See, I'm kind of spreading my frosting. I'm gonna add some of my meat sauce. Looks great. And you don't want to overload it. Then you layer it with another layer of the turkey and mushroom. And then on top of that, you add the mozzarella, and then you add the parmesan. Then you add another pasta layer. A little of the parmesan, and a little bit of the pecorino. I just use these baby spinach leaves, and then the next layer is our meat sauce that we put aside. I think the fresh basil gives a little kick. And then we just keep on adding our sheets. All right, so that's one full set of layers. And now it's basically repeat. We do this until we get to the top of the pan. And that's how you assemble lasagna. Just got some tin foil here. Makes it cook. Foil is there just to help the lasagna get started getting hot, and to keep it from drying out too much. So now the last step is to bake this bad boy off. Gonna put it in the oven at 350 degrees for one hour. For the last five minutes, I remove the tin foil, turn the heat all the way up to get the cheese nice and crispy. We're gonna bake this in the oven at 375 degrees, 30 minutes covered, and 15 minutes uncovered. We're gonna bake it for about an hour, and about 15 minutes in, we'll take the foil off and let it get crispy and bubbly on top. And here's my beautiful lasagna. Super excited to try it because it looks exactly like it should. Gonna cut off a nice little slice there. It's nice and cheesy. My lasagna's out of the oven. Stop for a sec. Wait. Do not cut it right away. It's gonna be wet and sloppy. Give it a little time to rest. Oh, gorgeous. It all stayed intact. I'm very happy. Oh, the cheese pull, the cheese pull! Ha ha ha! Maybe I'll cut a piece from the center and leave the crispy part for my wife. So you can see the finished product. Nice layers of pasta. Just a little bit of juiciness to it. It's not falling apart. It's holding together. I'm gonna sprinkle it with a little extra helping of grated cheese just to give it a little extra kick. Garnish this with some basil. And I'm gonna finish it with some pecorino cheese here. And this is my lasagna. Here's my lasagna. And that's my lasagna. Ready to dig into this lasagna. Get some of that extra sauce on there. It's so good. It came out exactly how I wanted it to. Really good. It turned out perfectly. Nice and meaty. The pasta's super tender. Absolutely delicious. This is a great lasagna. You guys should try this. I'm gonna have some more. We saw three chefs layer up three different styles of lasagna. Let's take a look at each layer and see how they compare. All of our chefs created homemade sauces using different varieties of prepared tomato products. John used jarred marinara sauce, Khadijah used canned fire-roasted tomatoes, and Frank used canned whole tomatoes. John's jarred marinara sauce is pre-blended and will produce a smooth sauce. Nothing too crazy here. Khadijah and Frank made their sauce with diced and whole tomatoes, which contain calcium chloride. Calcium chloride improves the cellular structure of both canned and fresh tomatoes. This is added to help the tomatoes maintain their shape during storage and cooking. This will make Frank's sauce chunkier and more rustic. While Khadijah used canned tomatoes with calcium chloride, she blended the tomatoes before adding them to her sauce. The mechanical manipulation grinds the tomato pieces into a smooth texture. All of our chefs incorporated meat into their sauce recipes. John used ground beef, Khadijah used ground turkey, and Frank used pancetta and short ribs. Both Frank and John chose higher-fat meats, which will add more flavor to their sauce compared to the lower-fat ground turkey Khadijah used. This is because fat is a carrier of flavor compounds. Since most of the aromatic compounds are fat-soluble, they will disperse throughout the sauce. As you can see, the meat's developing a lot of its own natural oils and juices. Khadijah chose a lower-fat meat to use in her sauce, but the addition of fresh herbs and dried spices will add a layer of bold and deep flavors to the sauce. Our chefs used a combination of high-moisture and low-moisture cheeses in their fillings. Combining these cheeses will provide textural and flavor complexities. For the high-moisture cheese, John and Khadijah used ricotta and added other flavors into the mixture. John used seasoned ricotta and Pecorino Romano, giving the mild ricotta a sharp and nutty flavor profile. Khadijah mixed her ricotta cheese with mozzarella, Parmesan, eggs, and basil. Oh, wow. Yeah, that is some strong basil, ah! During baking, the egg proteins will denature and then coagulate. The coagulated egg and cheese mixture will solidify into a distinct layer. Frank used a cheesy bechamel sauce instead of ricotta cheese. This is a little more classic. This adds moisture and creaminess, as well as a tangy and salty flavor from the Parmesan. Our chefs used three varieties of lasagna noodles. John used oven-ready lasagna noodles, Khadijah used dried lasagna noodles, and Frank made homemade lasagna sheets. The oven-ready noodles that John used are commercially parboiled and dehydrated. The starch in the noodles has been pre-gelatinized, which means that the starch molecules absorb water and heat and swell irreversibly during production. The oven-ready sheets are designed to be layered in their dehydrated state. The sauce that John spreads over these noodles was sufficient to rehydrate them. Khadijah used dried pasta sheets that have not been pre-gelatinized. She parboiled them before assembling the lasagna. This will gelatinize the starch before baking. Frank made homemade pasta with a high concentration of eggs. He also parboiled his pasta before assembly. Frank's pasta has a higher moisture content than dried pasta. This gives it a shorter cook time and a softer consistency than John and Khadijah's pasta. To avoid overcooking the pasta, Frank rolled it to a moderate thickness to maintain their structure in the assembled lasagna. When layering the lasagna, there has to be enough sauce to cover the lasagna sheets completely. All of our chefs started with a layer of sauce on the bottom to prevent the pasta from sticking to the pan. The sauce plays an important role in hydrating lasagna sheets and ensuring a completely cooked final product. Because Khadijah and Frank parboiled their pasta, they require less sauce in their dish than John needs for his oven-ready dehydrated noodles. All chefs covered their dishes with foil for most of the baking and remove the foil partway through the cooking process. The covered dish will produce steam in the headspace between the top layer of the lasagna and the foil, keeping in the moisture. This is especially important for John's oven-ready pasta to ensure complete hydration. Frank baked his lasagna covered for only 15 minutes and then removed the foil for the rest of the bake time. Because Frank used both a bechamel and tomato-based sauce, more moisture needs to escape to ensure the final product is not too liquidy. When the foil is removed, the surface of the lasagna browns with more direct exposure to heat. When the lasagna is finished cooking, it's best to let the dish rest before slicing. It's a beautiful classic lasagna. Like, really, everyone should try this. It's so frickin' good. Bake some of these tips into the layers of your next lasagna. You can choose some of these techniques and ingredients from level one, two, or three to make lasagna your way.