Well, yesterday I’ve cooked an entire lasagna from scratch for 6 people. (First time doing it)
I loved the final result. Light pasta, soft meat, full of flavors.
The whole process was so exhausting that I didn’t take photos of all steps (😔 sorry).
Lessons learned:
– split the process in 2 days.
– let the ragu dry a little more
– pay more attention to the Bechamel (it got a few lumps 😐)
– use less eggs (or at least less whites) when doing green dough
– do less pasta dough (I think I’ve used 3/5 from the recipe)
The recipes:
Ragu: soffritto (onions, carrots, celery), mince (half cow, half pork), red wine, tomato sauce, salt, pepper, bay leaf.
Bechamel: 100g flour, 100g butter, 1lt of milk, salt, pepper, nutmeg.
Pasta dough: 500g AA flour, 100g Semolina flour, 6 eggs, 100g spinach. (But this was too much liquid…I’ll try 4 eggs and 2 yolks next time)
The assemble: first layer (straight into the tray) ragu, middle layers…ragu, Bechamel, Grana Padano. Last layer… bechamel and Grana Padano.
by sholderbuffalo
8 Comments
It looks like you didn’t pre-boil the pasta before layering it. Is that right? I have done that with dried pasta but never with fresh pasta.
The whole thing looks good!
Looks good! What did you use to roll the dough out so evenly?
Grate the sofrito. Yes, this is the way.
This looks really good.
I’m surprised that was too much egg for the amount of flour. What size eggs did you use? I find that 6 large eggs (as opposed to extra large) is the perfect amount for 500g of flour. Maybe there was some added moisture from the blanched spinach? What was it about the dough that made you feel like it should have had less egg?
This is a beautiful story in picture.
Definitely a solid first try!
Seeing the last shot of the ragù I said to myself – that’s got at least a couple hours of cooking ahead. I cook mine in the oven, low and slow, getting all caramelized and thicc. I’ve cooked some overnight, but that is probably an overkill, but a couple more hours in an oven definitely would definitely make the difference.
Looks very good everything but I’d recommend you to fry the meat first alone, then add the soffritto. You aren’t gonna get a good caramelisation and flavour on the meat like this, you need to brown it, not just cook it.
so much work was put into this masterpiece