3 Chefs Make Lasagna 3 Ways: Traditional, Modern, & Experimental | Bon Appétit

last thing we're going to add to this is um can you sorry go thank you you got it [Music] all three of our lasagnas should be saucy it's gotta have layers needs a pasta element and i think the top needs to be crispy today i'm gonna be making traditional lasagna and i'm actually drawing from our very own ba's best lasagna recipe which is developed by none other than chris morocco when i think of lasagna i think of those classic alternating layers and that's exactly what i'm going for i'll be making a modern lasagna i think this is a modern take because of the way i am kind of forming the lasagna the layers are sort of vertical as opposed to horizontal visually i think this is going to stand out from the traditional version i will be tackling the experimental version so a lot of the elements that i'm going to be using in my lasagna are things that i've not seen used in lasagna before all i'm hoping is that somebody is able to take a look at what i've made and say oh yeah i get it that looks like lasagna to me pasta's role in lasagna is really the same as pasta's role in any other pasta dish can't have lasagna without it it is the base that's going to carry all of your cheeses and your sauce it's really there to provide support and allow you to kind of build up in the casserole so that it's not just you know soup on a plate today i'm going to be using fresh pasta the real benefit to me i think is the flavor and texture unparalleled because these are fresh and pre-sliced i don't need to cook them you generally need something that's a little soupier or saucier when you're using raw pasta because the noodles will absorb more of it as it cooks if the whole point of this was to showcase how amazing a traditional lasagna can be it's got to be fresh pasta i'm going to use the dry flat pasta sheets my layers are going to be vertical so i need something sturdy to hold everything up and make sure that they don't like collapse on each other the difference between fresh and dry pasta is that texture wise it has more bite to it a fresh pasta is fresh and that's why it's softer i don't think you're going to get the same amount of chew that you would get from a dry pasta it should taste like the sea i like to separate each sheet after they're done boiling i'm going to shock them in ice water because i want to immediately stop the cooking process i tested this recipe one time at home and i used just a regular store brand pasta i'm using a fancier brand of pasta today so i hope that i get the same texture it's raw okay what happened with the store-bought pasta was that it was like this one it was hot but then when it cooled it relaxed and it was more malleable and that didn't happen with this so this is going back they all need to go back i cannot bend this even when it's cold it'll break the ice water made the pasta too hard so this time i'm just using cold water no ice i am finally happy with the texture of my pasta they are ready i feel like i'm on record as having said that lasagna needs to have pasta in it in order to be considered a lasagna and i do not have that in my experimental approach so i've really broken my own rules here i decided to make a cracker instead of pasta but i decided to make a cracker that's as much like pasta as you can get i'm leaning on a style of cracker called carta de musica which is very very very thin so we're gonna make a dough using semolina flour it's effectively pasta dough right but instead of boiling it we're gonna bake it i was inspired by free form approaches to napoleons that i've seen a napoleon it's like a very classic pastry that's layers of puff pastry and pastry cream and sometimes with a little bit of finishing icing i was taken with the notion of building a lasagna free form on a plate and there wasn't really a great way in my mind to achieve that kind of lightness using a boiled noodle i want to roll it through a pasta machine to very very thin sheets it's just making it so that the dough is going to want to be like perfectly flat and even which means your cook time whether it was in water or whether it was in the oven oh god i gotta fold i wasn't paying attention we're falling apart i am cutting our cracker at three and a half inch intervals we're gonna dock these this is to control how much they bubble so this is a tester it's tender the flavor is good it's gonna give us like our tender yet super crunchy stackable element that's gonna look and kind of you know stand in for pasta sorry you're fine you're fine did i not mention that i would be baking like individual crackers in your oven you chose this life sorry look at that color's looking good i think we're going to be able to get a nice stack four or so high which will get us some height on the plate feel good about that right i'm going to be making a bolognese for my sauce so bolognese is a type of ragu or meat sauce i'm using a mix of pork and beef what i'm going to do is start by forming all the meat that i'm going to use into meatballs i'm going to sear those off get them nice and brown as opposed to trying to get a large amount of loose ground meat to brown we're going to cook the meatballs kind of spaced apart and that way we sort of really ensure that they're going to brown rather than steam and turn kind of gray and drab which is like not what we want so this looks very nice to me you can see it's beautifully browned on all of its infinite sides i'm gonna get these guys out onto a clean cheat tray and then i'm gonna go in with my second batch and repeat the exact same thing i'm gonna be making a spicy vegetarian tomato sauce spicy red sauce is not that unusual but i haven't seen it in lasagna which is why i thought this would be a great idea so i have a 12 inch skillet here i'm gonna use this to make my sauce and then i'm going to use the same skillet to cook our lasagna in my sauce is going to have some crushed san marzano tomatoes onion garlic we're going to saute that in olive oil there's a little bit of cumin and some red pepper flakes for a little kick it's not going to be in your face spicy it's a way of adding more flavor to the tomato sauce there's no meat which is why i'm using kind of crushed chunkier tomatoes so like that's going to add that texture to it oh i can taste some of the cumin a little bit of kick to it watch out chris i heard watch out chris what am i watching out for exactly the spice oh yeah the heat there's like rachel levels of heat you know and then there's like regular people levels of heat you just you know you gotta like know like where to where to sort of distinguish between the two heat like actual chili heat is something you do not see in a lot of lasagna i don't think you can have like a really intensely spicy sauce like you need a balance you need a counter point the sauce is done super quick super flavorful doesn't have to simmer for hours we want this to have quite a bit of moisture because that's how the pasta is going to cook so my sauce is actually going to be a mushroom terrine so a terrine is a gently baked cured meat preparation however in my case i'm going to be using cooked mushrooms i would not consider a tarina sauce i like don't quite understand even how that works hear me out one of the things i really like about ragu bolognese is that the meat over the course of hours breaks down until it practically melts in your mouth i wanted a similar effect with mushroom so the base of the mushroom terrine is resting on a foundation of cooked mushroom duck cell mushroom duck cell is just a finely chopped mixture of mushrooms that is cooked down with other aromatics i'm going to be using combination of maitaki and cremini mushrooms cremini mushrooms give you a lot of bulk without necessarily tons of flavor whereas maitake mushrooms have incredibly intense fill your mouth mushroom flavor already there's so much flavor there like it takes hours to get to that point where that ragu is gonna be ready we have one duck cell mixture that's like relatively finely chopped i'm gonna do some more mushrooms that are going to be like actually like quite roughly chopped but i do want to have some bigger more recognizable pieces of mushroom in that matrix i'm going to put some of this other shallot in with our big pieces of seared mushroom it's just there to back up the mushroom so we need some water to soak our porcini mushrooms in portini has a lot of concentration and when it's dried and then reconstituted with water you get like a mushroom tea from it we want to hold on to that there's a lot of flavor there the actual dried porcini itself we're going to combine with heavy cream and blend in the food processor heavy cream is going to bring a lot of fat to this mixture we're gonna go three whole eggs small amount of ground meat it's gonna be a little bit of insurance that the terrain is gonna hold together so we need to chop our prosciutto a cured pork product is gonna give you tons and tons of flavor a little bread crumbs going to help keep the terrine together cayenne in a small quantity is just going to kind of lift the flavor a little bit moderate amount of nutmeg is a component that you often find in traditional bechamel so this is our sauteed pieces of cremini and maitaki that i'm now going to fold into the terrine mixture our next stage is we're going to start building some flavor the onion's going to bring some sweetness it's really going to anchor the flavors the celery has that super herbaceous note then the carrot is super sweet we're also going to be adding some garlic some pancetta too it's just going to help amplify that meat flavor and add just a little bit more richness the pancetta which had all that fat all of that has released into the pot and so we have a really nice base for sweating all of our vegetables and now you can see immediately once i have the veggies all of that brown stuff at the bottom is lifting up which is great news because it means that all that flavor we spent so long working so hard to build on the bottom of the pot is now being scraped up into our sauce base i would say tomato paste is one of the most important ingredients it's essentially super super concentrated tomato flavor i'm going to add white wine going to act as our deglazing agent in go my crushed tomatoes every layer that we add to this sauce we're reducing it down to its most intensely flavorful elements i have a cup of chicken stock and a cup of milk adding that really extra layer of creaminess so i'm just going to bring this whole thing to a simmer and then it's going to go in the oven my oven's at 225 now you just want to penetrate it with really gentle heat so that it is really kind of melting by the end of it melty not dried we're going to check on that in maybe an hour this is a terrine which refers to the mold so i just want this to be a really even layer so that i can slice through it and not have to do like any trimming water baths suck you are literally guaranteed to burn yourself with hot water at some stage of the process the point of a water bath is that you are cooking things at very gentle heat so it's a way of cooking things very slowly gently and evenly okay let's see you can see that the liquid in the pot has reduced down significantly we're just gonna go in and break apart the meat until this basically becomes a chunky meat sauce it's really striking to me how you get both the deep flavor of the tomato paste and that bright acidic sweetness of the fresh crushed tomatoes so this is perfect i'm going to lift the terrain itself out of that pan of water it should indeed look like not that much happen we're gonna let this cool and also press it which is gonna compact it just slightly and then let it cool completely before we slice it i think vegetables and lasagna can make for an uneasy partnership in certain cases but i think they can add tons of flavor and texture while there is a small amount of vegetables in my sauce i'm not going to be doing a separate vegetable layer what i'm going for and you'll see this when i build the lasagna itself is super homogenous layers having a vegetable in there would kind of throw that off totally fine we'll just leave it out for my veggie option i'm gonna do sliced zucchini it is super mild it wouldn't overpower my lasagna but it would add a good amount of chewiness to it like we had with the lasagna sheet you want it to be malleable and not too thick because we're gonna roll it up like that zucchini has a lot of water content so the salt is going to draw out some of that moisture depending on how spicy her tomato sauce is you may want a more kind of like neutral vegetable flavor in there just to kind of offset it i'm going to let this hang out for 10 to 15 minutes and that's going to draw out even more moisture i'm going to be shingling and cooking chocolate mushrooms to use as a garnish i even want to try activating them together activa is this substance called transglutaminase which binds proteins together so i'm just doing like a super thin layer over these as an experiment to see if we can get this to hold together the intention is for this to be a single sheet of mushroom that kind of rests on top so that's option a okay option b if that doesn't go according to plan is going to be to cook those coins of mushroom free form and then arrange them over the top of the lasagna to serve it it's almost like a mushroom chip you know this is just a possible garnish nothing's like hinging on this but i think like we've got something that's like workable at this stage like these have bonded together it's now like functioning as one unit but will it do so after we cook it the mushroom you know shingle let's call it is so far more or less holding together ah yeah see it's kind of coming apart the only chance it has at this point of holding together is to cool we're going to set it aside we're going to also set aside the free-form mushroom garnish is it even going to work we'll have to see there's something really quintessential and delicious i'm so distracted by these winter washers [Laughter] oh wow that's weird veggies can come and go meat can come and go like all that stuff can come and go but like cheese you cannot have lasagna without cheese you just can't it's not only delivering texture it's also just delivering that creamy super rich flavor that i feel like we all know and love from lasagna for my cheese layer i'm gonna make a bechamel sauce with parmesan it's essentially milk that has been thickened with a mixture of butter and flour that are cooked together in what's known as a roux and then we'll add some grated cheese and some seasonings i am delighted that christina is employing a traditional bechamel that for me defines lasagna even more so than any kind of tomatoey sauce or any particular kind of noodle i like to start by adding the milk kind of gradually and this just helps minimize any lumps you might have in the finished sauce so while my milk is coming to a simmer i'm going to grate my cheese i am using a nice big hunk of parmesan there's something really lovely about having parm be your only cheese flavor because it's so aggressively nutty and fragrant and salty and you can see the cheese is also making it immediately thicker i want it to have the consistency of something like queso i want it to be smooth and thick really glossy and most of all i want it to taste really good so at this point all we need to do is season it pinch of nutmeg little pinch of cayenne really good amount of black pepper some salt so let me give this a taste now that's very yummy i'm gonna add the tiniest bit more salt okay that is done oh very nice very nice okay the last thing i'm going to do is wrap this with some plastic wrap so that the bechamel doesn't form a skin and then we're just going to let it sit until we're ready to build our lasagna for my cheese i'm going to be doing a spinach ricotta mix with lots of parmesan so i have some ricotta a little bit of parmesan cheese which is going to add like that salty bite to everything and then the blanched spinach gets folded into this mixture and then finish it off with some mozzarella when i was talking to chris he made that super clear too he's not a fan of ricotta-based lasagna ricotta for me can take on a little bit of like a spongy kind of grainy texture when it's baked this is not going to be grainy to make it a little bit more airy and creamy and lighter i am whipping it in a food processor and i'm also adding milk which is going to give that really silky smooth texture those extra little steps down to the ricotta is really what makes it modern is that your ricotta yes ma'am cool no judgments for her context ricotta makes a certain amount of sense because of the way she needs to assemble her pinwheels i don't think you'd be able to do that with bechamel right and be trying to eat a soup sandwich that made so much of a difference we're gonna fold in to spin it i'm using a little bit of nutmeg in my kind of ricotta cream mixture because in like a traditional classic bechamel sauce there is nutmeg and i wanted to pull in some of those elements all right i think this looks pretty great for my sort of cheese element broadly speaking i'm going to be doing a mushroom sabayon i'm also going to be making parmesan creme patisserie so savayon is kind of a world apart from cheese right but it's going to give you something creamy it's going to give you something similar from the standpoint of the mouthfeel i just want the flavor to go way in the direction of mushroom so we're going to start with the mushroom sabayon a savayon is a cooked egg yolk mixture that becomes very light and very foamy i'm going to take egg yolks just enough sugar to give it some stability and structure i'm gonna do two tablespoons of the dry marsala i'm gonna put in our mushroom seasoning that i reconstituted with porcini liquid and then an extra tablespoon of porcini soaking liquid that mixture is then going to be whisked over a hot water bath so that it heats up very gently as it incorporates air as i whisk it with a hand mixer see how it's like it's foamy but it holds its shape it's actually got some structure to it will it keep that structure i don't know something just weird happening like the egginess with the sweetness and then the mushroom and the marsala the marsala is giving this like introducing this like fruit element that's like maybe not working so we're going to go again on this all right i think that's about as far as i want to go this is the one with marsala this is the one just with mushroom i'd really love to be able to pipe this mixture so to that end we're going to try to thicken part of it with gelatin i just want to distribute it really evenly it's a little sweet but it's mushroomy it's foamy it's beauty it's grace let's just keep moving i see the parmesan creme patisserie as kind of a stand-in for bechamel it's not trying to do anything radically different from what bechamel would do but just rather function better in this assembly in this context so this is a starch bound savory custard lightened with whipped cream so i've got milk i'm gonna put some nutmeg in not too much i'm gonna heat this up the yolks are gonna give richness they give flavor they give color so i've got cornstarch and i've got flour and i'm gonna whisk them this is called tempering the eggs it's working the milk in in very small additions so that they gradually heat up and they don't cook and scramble with starch-bound custards you want to bring them to a boil because that's what activates the starch fully i think parm is like the ideal cheese for this it's salty it's intense so we're doing a little pinch of cayenne again not to make this spicy just to brighten the flavor a little bit but this is gonna have a gluey consistency the way it is right now whereas if we lighten it with the whipped cream it should kind of net out in a really pleasantly light creamy more like melt-in-your-mouth kind of way it gives you the flavors and the sensation of like bechamel but without being super cloying i think we're done with the bechamel situation i think we're ready to put this thing together i'm going to be making six layers i'm going to be doing a thin layer of bolognese on the bottom of the pan you want something on the bottom layer that's not pasta you don't really want it to be the pasta because it's going to want to stick next we're going to do a layer of pasta then on top we're going to do our bechamel we're just trying to make sure the pasta has some insurance against drying out then i'm going to do bolognese pasta vegetable bolognese pasta until we reach just up to the top of the pan when i think of lasagna i think of those classic alternating layers and that's exactly what i'm going for should i talk about how i chose the wrong pan in an ideal world your five or six layers of pasta would come all the way up to the top of the pan it will be totally fine it's just much less dramatic because it looks like i just stopped after i made half a pan of lasagna so the last thing i'm going to do before we get this in the oven is wrap it in foil i want to preserve all of the moisture oh my god okay all right so that is going in it's at 3 25 we're gonna check it in about an hour and um take the foil off and finish baking it i'm ready to assemble my lasagna we're gonna do like a layer of pasta then some zucchini so i'm gonna do two on each sheet and then next i'm gonna do this ricotta i am using mozzarella as well because that's going to add some of the ooey gooey cheesiness to the lasagna it's also going to add some stretch and pull so carefully roll away from you you don't have to make it too tight for starters i like to place this fold kind of towards the outside because that's going to support it and not let it open up on you for the skillet i want to make sure that there's a layer of tomato sauce on the bottom so that the pasta doesn't get burnt the crispy crunchy burnt bits of lasagna are my favorite part and in my version everyone's gonna get a little bit of that i'm making sure that all of the pasta is covered in sauce because i want enough moisture to make sure that it's cooking all the way through she's beautiful she's my child and she's ready to go in the oven oh my god i don't understand how you're supposed to get things in and out of this oven very nice very nice i am going to crank up the temperature to 425 and then once that reaches temp the lasagna is going to go back in uncovered until the bechamel air on top is really brown and crisp how do people do this oh my god yeah assembly is frankly going to be a bit tricky part of it is i really want to try to get some clean slices of the terrine that i'm then going to crisp in a skillet so that you almost get this like double concentrated mushroom flavor we'll have cooked it once on the way to becoming a terrine and then we will be cooking slices of the turin again to intensify their flavor and texture still further okay okay okay woof all right let's pour it over here wow wow wow wow wow okay so this is done all right there we go nice and layered love that all right that'll be our piece [Music] looks so good oops that was a save there i'm so glad i didn't drop that i think this looks so good i'm very happy with it there's also some like crusty chopped tomato bits on the side which i love and as this lasagna sits you know the sauce is going to thicken a little bit oh the cumin is really coming through okay so my modern version of this lasagna is ready i think it looks perfect it turned out really good i can't wait for chris and christina to taste this and tell me what the pink [Music] so i'm gonna do like three pieces of turin i think and in two layers this layer is only going to repeat one time so this is our mushroom savion i keep coming back to this idea of wanting the lasagna to kind of play with your expectations a little bit like i want it to kind of read as somewhere between sweet and savory i want it to look a little bit like a napoleon i want it to stand high off the plate i need a lot of things to work here in order to pull this off okay well yeah there it is [Music] behold ba's best lasagna by chris morocco took all freaking day but shall we dig in yeah i mean the layers are perfect such good definition yeah such clean slice kind of can't believe the amount of browning you got across the top of the bechamel this takes me back to what 20 16 17. yeah it's delicious it's so cozy and comforting the flavors are just completely melded in this beautiful way this feels extremely traditional to me i love that even though you use fresh pasta there's still enough bite i'm so happy with this i mean obviously like i'm my heart is gonna you know leap when it sees this interpretation because like that's exactly what i want from lasagna and that's why i made the recipe that way i feel like i just got an a yeah a plus plus oh here it is my modern take on lasagna it feels like you made perfectly individual sized pieces of lasagna you skip the part in traditional lasagna where you're cutting through a big pan of something because each one is sort of its own little layered universe i'm eating like the very inside the way you should eat a cinnabon but it's like demonic here [Laughter] the heat definitely shines through but it's not excessive considering like this is like a totally vegetarian lasagna correct yes you know and i think like when you take like that meaty element out you have to bring something that has like a certain depth and weight to it and like the heat is taking it there the flavor is really satisfying and i had never had spicy lasagna before the way that the zucchini and the spinach offer that kind of clean flavor that cuts through the spice it tempers it a bit and then you have the creaminess of the ricotta it just all works i would say like maybe if there's one thing i achieved it was like it is maybe experimental i wasn't trying to make something that's just like weird for its own sake don't give yourself such a hard time i think it looks very appealing in fact if you serve this to me at a restaurant i would say it's a wonderful dessert course right thank you for the meal poi right no i know so the intention was like you'd be able to push a knife or like a fork through it no sound see that's like is that what you wanted that's what i wanted like you needed to be able to eat this oh you can see the leaves so well oh my gosh that looks really good these mushroom chips are really good by the way the cracker sort of held up i mean it's softened i like that it's soft in the center and you get some of the crust on the side i think your creme pat is really good it's really good whipped cream was very smart i think too and i love the pate i think it's never what i would expect to eat for dinner if you told me where you're having lasagna for dinner but it's also something i could never come have come up with in my dreams so i think that's i think that's pretty well worth commending would would you call this lasagna it's crackers but they're tasty should we wait yeah did you see he like didn't even know you were there um

Channel: Bon Appétit

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Keywords: ba test kitchen, best lasagna recipe, bon app test kitchen, bon appetit, bon appetit dinner for 3, bon appetit lasagna, bon appetit recipe, dinner for 3, dinner lasagna, easy lasagna, easy lasagna recipe, expensive lasagna, expert lasagna, food, homemade lasagna, homemade lasagna recipe, how to make lasagna, italian lasagna, lasagna, lasagna dinner, lasagna recipe, lasagna recipes, make lasagna, modern lasagna recipe, new lasagna recipe

Id: eSEJS1tdQ_c

Length: 32min 1sec (1921 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021