Do you have to boil lasagna noodles before baking?

this video is sponsored by squarespace yeah you do not have to pre-cook any kind of pasta for lasagna even dried pasta like this you can just layer them right into the pan with your other ingredients they will cook in the moisture of your sauce with dried noodles that comes out surprisingly good but of course just because you do not have to do something doesn't mean you do not want to you might still want to parboil your pasta even though it is kind of a pain i think it is particularly worthwhile with homemade fresh pasta but i think the reason people have such divergent opinions about this is because pretty much anything that you could do works and the resulting differences in the finished product are more subtle than you would expect or at least more subtle than i'd expect i'm gonna show you a whole bunch of test bakes that i did and i'm gonna try to describe how they tasted my sauce is just some fried off onions tomato paste browned a little in the pan and this brand of crushed tomatoes super good a little wine lots of herbs and spices simmer for at least an hour my cheese layer is grated mozzarella into a bunch of ricotta a bunch of grated parmesan eggs peppers salt mix it all up these are the standard italian-american lasagna fillings i'd say though we would often put ground beef in the sauce now in a way the most obvious choice of noodle here would be these fresh pasta sheets specifically formulated and shaped to go directly into a lasagna pan with no pre-cooking you can see they're more like semi-fresh they're stiffer and less sticky than real homemade fresh pasta my sense from watching tv is that brits and other europeans have had these for a long time i did not start seeing these in mainstream us supermarkets until a few years ago and it's usually in the refrigerator cases around the deli section and what could be easier right if you can get these it's a great weeknight dinner i'm just kind of underwhelmed by the taste and texture they come out a little gummy i'm not a huge fan let's go to dried pasta standard dry lasagna noodles this is the way my dad taught me to make lasagna i imagine how his italian mother taught him you par boil partially boil the noodles pretty much just until they are pliable maybe half or two thirds of the cooking time that they give on the package you then pull them out to ice water to stop the cooking if you don't shock them like this they tend to be way too soft in the end plus they'd stick together as they cooled all laid out on a towel and use another towel to dry off the top sides and then if you want you can trim them so they'll perfectly fit whatever size pan you're using and you don't have to throw those trimmings away fry them up in a pan with some butter fresh herbs top with some cheese very nice i usually start with a little sauce to keep the bottom layer of pasta from sticking or drying then for all these tests i'm doing one cup of sauce or cheese for each layer and building four total layers i'm just trying to keep everything standard to isolate the boiling variable top with some reserved mozzarella cover with foil for baking let's build an identical lasagna now with dry noodles the first problem that you're going to run into is that they aren't pliable so they have to perfectly fit the pan that you plan to bake them in if you don't you have to like snip off the end or break off the end which is kind of tricky to do without just like totally shattering this thing the best method that i came up with was to position one finger behind the line that i want to break across and then push outward still not great bend the noodle over your guide finger and that's better there same deal as before a cup of filling between each layer but here's an important caveat par boiling serves another important function which is to season the inside of the noodle you would normally boil it in salted water if your noodles were not made with much salt inside them and if you're not par boiling them then you have to over season your other elements they shouldn't be disgustingly salty but they should definitely taste a little too salty in isolation they are donating seasoning to all of this bland bulk that we are layering in i imagine that sealing with foil will be even more important here to trap the water the noodles need speaking of which i want to try a third lasagna where we put in some extra water the amount of water equivalent to the water that would have been absorbed if we had parboiled the pasta which for my lasagna here is approximately 144 grams apparently i'll measure out a little more than that because you're going to lose some to evaporation i probably could have just poured this water directly over the fully assembled lasagna before i baked it but to be safe i'll pour it directly onto each pasta layer as i build in little doses just to be sure that it's evenly distributed all three test lasagnas go into the oven at 400 fahrenheit 200c i'll uncover after about 40 minutes and give them a second dose of mozzarella on top 10 minutes later i'll flip on the top element the broiler to brown the cheese and then here we are par boiled raw with extra water raw with no extra water the difference is visually apparent the dry one looks drier though not in a bad way i don't think time to taste parboil noodles that feels like the lasagna i grew up with the pasta isn't exactly al dente but it isn't mushy either really nice here's raw noodles baked with extra water the noodles are noticeably firmer but not in a bad way raw noodles with no extra water here i am surprised by how little textural difference there is compared to the one we did with extra water the texture is virtually identical between them they're both pleasantly firm one difference that i did notice was a slightly more concentrated flavor in the dry lasagna which is hardly surprising the extra water that we added into this one diluted the flavor a little bit so next time i'll use salt water to me the real test of lasagna is how it tastes the next day because baked pasta dishes are almost always better reheated i try to make lasagna the day before i want to eat it so i can reheat it for 20 minutes in the oven and then boom this is the lasagna that we cooked totally dry the fact that the noodles were noticeably firmer yesterday means that they have held up better into today the noodle always softens a little bit with the reheating so i kind of think that was perfect one problem is the bottom layer of noodle is really dry and tough i can't cut through it with my fork i reckon there's some things we could do to prevent that problem though maybe bake it in a different kind of pan lower the temperature maybe bake it in a water bath we'll get back to that time now to repeat the experiment with real homemade fresh egg pasta eggs a glug of olive oil and flour whisk until you can whisk no more get in with your hands and knead until you can knead no more knead in basically as much flour as it'll take you want it smooth elastic and only slightly sticky cover and let rest in the fridge for a while so the flour can rehydrate time to roll and i think i'm going to be up late on this one good lord this is a hard job to do without a second person to help you feed it through for lasagna i go down to the second thinnest setting i'll trim these into the perfect size for my pan and store them on the ancestral fresh pasta storage system a clothes drying rack and not my finest work but hey it's going to be covered up in a lasagna so whatever just blast through them 12 noodles go into boiling water when you boil dry pasta you're making it softer when you boil fresh pasta you're making it firmer especially egg pasta you are setting that protein structure when all the noodles have visibly puffed up a bit and lightened in color out they come to the ice water get them all cooled down and separated from each other lay those out on a towel to dry it is so late i am so tired i love fresh pasta but it does not love me back i'll build my lasagnas exactly as before with a cup of filling in between all four layers time to repeat with the raw noodles look at how much smaller they are in there egg pasta puffs up so much when you boil it that one's all done and how much water did these absorb when boiled about the same proportion as the dry pasta a little math and i will supplement this one with a roughly equivalent amount of water salty water this time i learned my lesson for what it's worth i don't think that i would ever actually make lasagna like that if i wanted it a little bit wetter i would just not boil so much water out of my tomato sauce i'll bake these exactly as i did before could have gotten some better color on those but boiled raw with extra water raw and dry look at how much taller the boiled one is compared to the dry one though the boiled one shrank down as it cooled i guess that was steam puffing it up and that is very delicious the boiled fresh pasta homemade egg noodles man there is nothing like them now check out the raw noodles with extra water what a nice clean cut we got there same deal with the raw and dry one if i was cooking for instagram then clearly i would use the raw fresh egg noodles but because i'm cooking for my mouth nah the fact that those fresh raw noodles cut so smoothly is reflected in their texture they are a little brittle they're a little mealy the boiled fresh noodles were harder to cut because they are more elastic which i think is the way pasta should be now look if your family has been making lasagna with raw fresh egg noodles for generations and you love it please don't think that i'm trying to tell you you're wrong i mean this is just what i like i'm just here to tell you there definitely is a noticeable difference between boiled fresh noodles and lasagna and raw fresh noodles in lasagna though again there's hardly any difference at all between the one cooked with extra water and the one cooked dry that is interesting i just didn't really like either of them again there's just that kind of mealy texture those noodles also felt a little leathery to me in some spots and a little bit gummy in others not a fan if i'm going to go through the herculean effort of making fresh pasta from scratch for my lasagna i'm gonna do it the way i want it and the way that i want it is boiled and if you are bothered by that messy cut do the trick that i'm pretty sure a lot of restaurants use which is to chill the lasagna overnight it's now very firm and you can get a very clean cut on it reheat it covered for about 15 minutes uncover and then you can freshen up the appearance with a little more cheese on top melt and broil until brown and there you go a ton of work but i don't think lasagna gets much better than that however the fact that raw dry lasagna noodles got me such good results makes me wonder if i couldn't come up with a weeknight lasagna recipe that i would really really like i'll get back to you on that but i can tell you right now that you can make a delicious website on a weeknight with squarespace their beautiful easily customized templates are the raw pasta on which you build your lasagna straight out of the box and unlike lasagna you can put a squarespace site in your pocket check out how great the templates look on mobile a website is a place to tell the world about what you do and what you have to offer that could be anything from food blogging or podcasting to building a full restaurant menu with an open table block for reservations you can make something like this in the time that it takes to make lasagna easily and you can start for free at squarespace.com but when you need to pay for something like a custom domain or to take your site live think of old man ragusia and use my link and code in the description you'll save 10 percent thank you squarespace and thank you lasagna i owe much of my present career success to you we've had some good times you and i

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 418,001

Rating: 4.9533739 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ukf3BVHcASc

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/studmuffffffin]

Videos like this make me wish there was a cooking mythbusters channel. I know Adam goes into it and j kenji sometimes writes stuff about it, but it’d be a fun idea for someone with better camera and editing knowledge than me.

[u/thebigj0hn]

Does anyone else hear a fart sound at 5:13??

[u/Gregsquatch]

This was interesting, I never knew you didn't have to parboil the noodles.

[u/fascfoo]

I've tried it both ways and def prefer parboiling.