Lasagne: A New Year's Tradition

Last year on New Year's Day, my girlfriend decided to learn how to cook. Rather, she decided to get me to teach her how to cook.  She had never really been taught by anyone, whereas I had had two foodie parents constantly passing their wisdom down to me from an early age, so it was a nice idea for me to try and pass some of that knowledge on to her. To start with, I figured we'd begin with something that's relatively simple to make, but covers a wide range of different skills. And seeing how at that stage she didn't know how to dice an onion, we had our work cut out for us. The great thing about a lasagne is that it covers so many basic skills that you use on a regular basis: preparing veg, browning meat, making a good ragu, making a roux, and then layering it all together. She seemed a bit skeptical at first, but once I broke the whole thing down into small tasks, it felt like far less daunting an endeavour.

I'll be honest with you right now. It took us hours.

But it would be unfair to lump that entirely at the feet of my better looking half. No, lasagne is one of those dishes that can take you all day if you let it. The trick is to split it in half: the sauce and the construction, and it suddenly becomes much, much simpler.

Last year's model

As coincidence would have it, we never made lasagne again in 2011. I know, you're probably thinking you know why that was the case. But when New Year's Day 2012 was suddenly on the horizon, we were actually excited to revisit our new little tradition, because hey, who doesn't like lasagne? This time, we made the ragu the day before, and then on New Year's Day we built it. Not only did it take a fraction of the time, but I am hugely, hugely proud to report that my girlfriend's skills in the kitchen had improved immeasurably over the course of the year. Her knife skills still scare the living hell out of me, but there was no comparison at all in terms of her confidence and mobility around the kitchen and it was honestly a lot of fun having something akin to a sous-chef that can read your mind. It actually makes my life so much easier because when those moments come where you only have two hands, she is always in the right place at the right time to offer another pair (except when she's hungover, in which case I am on my own). And in the case of this particular blog post, she even took some of the photos (I was covered in cheese at the time), so this was in every possible sense a joint effort.

So on to the lasagne itself. Aside from the occasional madman claiming lasagne is actually English and people putting crazy things like butternut squash into it, lasagne is a pretty widely recognised recipe. It's the ultimate comfort food, a multi-layered duvet of meat, pasta and cheese, all baked into a luscious, crispy, gooey sandwich of awesome. In hindsight, I think it's actually the perfect meal for new year's day, when you basically don't want to see or do anything, just eat and mong out on the sofa. It's like Christmas but without all the drama (if you're lucky).

Whenever I start putting together a recipe, I like to do a bit of research to see what ideas people have for little twists or variants on dishes. Most great chefs will always keep a couple of secrets to themselves, but thanks to the wonder of the internet there are pretty good odds that nearly everything that has been tried in a recipe is now documented somewhere on a digital napkin. There are all sorts of interesting additions, from spinach and fennel to cinnamon and pork belly. I would consider myself a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to lasagne, and I already have my recipe for Winter Sausage Ragu which I based this off of, so it was really the white sauce I was curious about. Normally I would whip up a bechamel sauce from scratch, but I came across a couple of people who swore by ricotta cheese, mixed with egg and a couple of other cheeses. You can probably guess by now that I'm not one of those people to turn down an opportunity to use three cheeses when one would probably do, so this was a perfect way to add a new element to the dish. And while the ragu is based off of italian sausages, I added beef and pork mince to really kick things up a notch. Diets be damned.

Our New Year's Day Lasagne

Ingredients:

This is what you want when you're ready to build!

Six Italian sausages, skins removed
250g lean beef mince (or veal, if you're feeling fancy)
250g pork mince
1 onion, finely diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 pint of milk
2-3 cups of red wine
2 tins of plum Tomatoes
500ml passata
3 tablespoons tomato puree
450ml chicken stock
2 tablespoons white sugar
A handful of chopped fresh basil
A handful of chopped fresh parsley
1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon of fennel seeds
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon salt
450g mozzarella cheese, freshly grated (don't buy the pre-grated stuff, it's practically fake)
600g ricotta cheese
1 cup of freshly grated parmesan
1 egg
Lasagne pasa sheets

These ingredients will make more ragu than you probably need for an entire lasagne, so either keep it in the fridge for another meal, or freeze it and whip it out for an awesome bolognese on a rainy day.

First thing's first, grab the biggest saucepan you've got and brown the sausages until they are totally cooked through. Remove the sausage meat and keep in a large bowl. Then brown the beef and pork mince together in the same pan, again until browned and cooked through. Remove the meat and leave in the same bowl as the sausage meat. Now gently fry the onion and garlic in the same pan, adding a little bit of olive oil if it's needed. Once the onions have sweated off nicely and the garlic is covered, add all of the meat back in. Now add in a pinch of nutmeg and pour in a cup or two of milk, enough so that it just comes up to the top of the meat. Simmer the milk gently until nearly all of it has cooked off, then add the red wine. Do the same with the red wine, and cook it off until nearly all the liquid has evaporated.

 

Now add the chicken stock, passata, plum tomatoes, tomato puree, sugar, fennel seeds, basil, parsley, oregano and salt. Mix everything together, bring it to a gentle boil and then turn the heat down to the lowest setting. If the sauce occasionally bubbles you're on target, if it's spitting violently then it's too hot. Leave it uncovered for 3 hours or so, checking on it every half hour or so to give it a stir. You want the sauce to reduce to a luscious, rich consistency, and adjust the seasoning to taste. Keep tasting it, and eventually it'll be perfect.

Once the sauce is done, you can either store it, or go straight on to building the lasagne. Personally, I think there's some weird voodoo that makes ragu taste better the day after you cook it, so I keep it in the fridge for a day. When you're ready to build your lasagne, soak 10-12 lasagne pasta sheets in hot water. While the pasta is soaking, mix the ricotta cheese with one egg, the nutmeg and chopped parsley until nice and smooth. Set your oven to 180 degrees C / 350 degrees F. Grate the mozzarella into one bowl, the parmesan into another, and have the meat sauce warmed up and ready to go. Now you're ready to build this beast.

Spread two or three cups of meat sauce into a baking dish. Drain the lasagne sheets, and cover the meat sauce with a layer of pasta. Spread half of the ricotta cheese mixture on top of the pasta sheets, then sprinkle a third of the mozzarella and parmesan. Spread another couple of cups of meat sauce on top of the cheese, then cover with another layer of pasta sheets. Spread the rest of the ricotta cheese over the pasta sheets, and sprinkle with some more mozzarella and parmesan. Now finally spread over the rest of the meat sauce to cover the whole thing, and top with any remaining cheese. 

Cover the baking dish tightly with tinfoil, and bake in the oven for 25 minutes. After 25 minutes, remove the foil and bake for another 25 minutes. Once the surface is golden and bubbling with molten cheese, take it out and let it rest for five minutes or so. Cut yourself a big slice, grab some lightly dressed salad, and tuck in.