- Hey, everybody, I'm Chef
Tom with All Things Barbecue, and today I'm gonna be
making everyone's favorite Italian comfort food, lasagna. (splashing) (dripping) Our lasagna's gonna have
three main components. The first one is the noodles,
the second the red sauce, and then the bechamel. Now, we're gonna get started
by making the noodles, 'cause that's gonna take a little while. We're working with our double aught flour. This is what we'd use for pizza normally, because it's really great for stretching. So we'll put down about 10 ounces of that. And I'm just gonna mound this right here on our work surface. And we'll create a little well right here. This is where our eggs are gonna go. We're gonna use four eggs. The only other thing I'm gonna need is about a teaspoon of salt. All right, we're gonna get started just by whisking these guys up. And then slowly we'll
begin to work our flour into the egg mixture. And as we work around in a circle, we just take on a little bit of this flour every time we come by, and this egg mixture
starts to take on a form. All right, so check this out. It almost looks super runny
like undercooked scrambled eggs, but it's holding a shape now. So what I wanna do at this
point is abandon the fork. We're gonna move over to our bench knife and start working the rest of this flour into the egg mixture. And if we kinda chop it up,
it exposes those wet areas and allows the flour to attach. All right, so we've taken
on most of the flour. At this point, it's
time to start kneading. All right, so we're just
gonna gather this all up, start to press it together. It'll be a little bit sticky, and this would be when you
might want a little extra flour, a little bench flour. All right, so adding just
the slightest bit of flour at a time, we get this to
where we can actually work it, and it becomes this pasta dough ball. And at this point, we're just going to work this gluten a
little bit, develop that out so this will stretch really nice for us here in a little bit. All right, so we're just folding
this over and working it. As it gets sticky, you could
add a little bit of flour. We'll do this for just a minute or two. And once it feels like that gluten's really gotten stretched out. I mean, look how much it shrinks up. You move it, and it
shrinks up immediately. And you see how it's starting to tear? That tells us that it's
worked to its limit, so now we've gotta leave it to rest. So I'm gonna throw this
in some plastic wrap, put this ball of dough into the fridge. When we come back to it,
we'll be ready to roll it out. While our pasta dough rests, why don't we go ahead and
whip up our red sauce? Our sauce is going to
start with a mirepoix base, so that's two parts
onion to one part carrot and one part celery. I'm gonna get these diced up, and then we're actually gonna
throw 'em in a food processor and get 'em processed down really fine. Since this is going
into the food processor, I really don't have to worry too much about how nice my dice looks. Kinda do a rough chop on this. Then I'm gonna add to our mirepoix just some sliced cloves of garlic. (food processor pulses) (food processor pulses) So this is a really fine consistency, which is going to allow it to just melt into our sauce as it cooks. This red sauce is gonna feature
three different meats today. In fact, you're gonna see a
lot of threes in this recipe. You'll notice there's
three parts to the recipe. There's there ingredients
in our pasta dough. We're using three different
meats in our red sauce. And you're gonna see
that there's basically three ingredients in the bechamel
that we'll make later on. But back to that meat. We're gonna start with one
pound of 80/20 ground beef. We're also going to have a half pound of hot Italian sausage. And to really up the ante, we're adding a half pound of pancetta, which is essentially Italian bacon. A lot of times you'll
find pancetta prepackaged and sliced really thin, but what I wanna do today
is get this into cubes. Dice it down so that we
have nice crispy cubes of pork in our sauce. So you wanna do is just
go up to the deli counter, tell 'em you want 'em to
cut a chunk off of that, and then you can dice it at home. We've got our skillet preheated. It's nice and hot. And I'm gonna throw
this cubed pancetta down to begin to render and get crispy. You see that the fat is rendering out and filling out the bottom of the pan. And you can also see on the outside, we've got some beautiful brown coloring. And at this point, what
I wanna do is add in that pureed mirepoix, as well as our other two meats. And the beautiful thing
that's gonna happen next is all of the fat inside
these meats is going to begin to work itself out. We're gonna cook all of these
wonderful mirepoix flavors into the meat, into that fat, and it's gonna create a lot of flavor and a really supple mouth feel. Our meats are all browned. Just listen to that sizzle. (meat sizzles) Smells amazing. Now it's time to start
adding some of our liquid. The first of the liquids
we're going to be adding, I'll let you guess how
many liquids there are. There's three. The first one is white wine. I'm gonna go with about
a half cup of white wine. And this is going to cook all the way down until we can't tell it's there anymore, and then we're going
to add our next liquid. We're currently concentrating
all of that wine flavor. And the wine's got a little acidity to it. This is gonna help balance
everything out, right? So far we've got all of these
fatty flavors and textures. We're gonna add a little wine
to really balance things. It's gonna be a little bit
of back and forth like that until we're done with this sauce. All right, liquid number
two, some whole milk. Here we are again with
that back and forth. A little fat, a little acid. And, again, we wanna let this cook down until you almost can't
even tell it's there. The milk has reduced
almost all the way down. The next thing that we're gonna
be adding is the tomatoes. What we have here are some whole peeled organic tomatoes from California. The San Marzano tomato
would be a perfect tomato for this occasion as well. We're just gonna throw 'em in there whole, and then as they begin to cook down, we'll smash them, we'll
break them up a little bit. And for now, we can
leave these to cook down and for this sauce to
reduce a little bit further. We've given the tomatoes about 10 minutes, maybe 15 over a medium-low heat to reduce, make a little bit of room
for our final liquid, which is chicken stock. And this is just going to
add a little more depth of flavor to the sauce. And at this point I want
this thing to simmer probably for another 30 minutes. It's gonna reduce and thicken up. All those flavors are gonna meld together. So, for now, I'm gonna set
this aside on another burner, and we're gonna get to
work on our bechamel. A lot of us grew up eating lasagna that had ricotta cheese in it
and mozzarella cheese in it, and it wasn't until later in
life that I discovered bechamel and just how much that
could improve a lasagna. Now, bechamel is one of
those really basic sauces that any chef out there learns and a lot of you home cooks
absolutely know already, and it's essentially a gravy. So we're gonna start
with butter and flour, we're going to create a roux,
and then add some milk to it. And then from there, a French bechamel would a lot
of times have nutmeg in it. If you added a cheese, that
changes the element completely. But today what we're gonna
do is keep it pretty simple with the seasonings. We're gonna add some Italian
seasonings to our bechamel, and that's going to be
one of the other layers that we create in this lasagna. So we start this off with four tablespoons of unsalted butter. We get it melted down. As soon as it's melted
down, we can add our flour. We'll have about six tablespoons of flour. This actually equals out
at two ounces by weight of each item. We want a fairly light
roux for our bechamel. We're not gonna go too dark. We're just gonna try and
cook that flour flavor out of the mixture. My milk is not cold at this point. This works a lot better if you warm it up a little bit first. We're gonna add about
a half cup at a time, maybe a little bit more. Once those lumps go
away and it thickens up, need to add a little bit more. Looking to add about
four cups of milk total. With all of the milk incorporated, we're just gonna run this over medium heat until it's thickened, but in the meantime we
can add some seasonings. I'm gonna use some
Cattleman's Grill Italiano so we can really incorporate some of those Italian herbs and spices. Plus, I really like the way
it makes the bechamel look. It's gonna be peppered with
all of these different colors that come from these herbs and spices. And all it takes is a few minutes for this to really thicken
up, and this is ready to go. So let's move on to rolling out our pasta, and then we can get everything assembled and onto the smoker. Here's our pasta dough
that I had in the fridge. It's relaxed now. It's ready to be stretched
and worked once again. So we're gonna divide this up and start actually rolling it out and then passing it
through the pasta roller. Now, part of this process
is responding to the dough and knowing that when
it pulls back too much, it means it needs to rest
for a little bit longer. So I'm gonna get a few of these
pieces rolled out like this and ready to go through the pasta roller, but we're gonna let 'em
rest for just a few minutes before we do that. So we'll start passing this
through on the widest setting. And we'll go through a
couple of passes that way. Then we can work our way down. One more notch. We keep this floured so it
doesn't stick to anything. And, again, we're watching
for when it's pulling back to give it a break from the stretching. Currently it's not
pulling bach much at all. So we can continue to work our
way down to the next number, going a couple passes at each number. And here's something fun you can do if you wanna incorporate
a little extra color and flavor into your pasta. Lay out some basil leaves on the surface, and then fold the pasta over the leaves. Now we'll back up our pasta roller, so we can go to a thicker stage once again and then pass this through, and we'll sandwich these
leaves into the pasta. And this has gotten to the
point where I want to divide it to continue to pass it through
and get it even thinner. Next thing we wanna do is
take these sheets of pasta and cut them so that they'll
fit into our casserole dish that we're baking our lasagna in. So, from here, you can square
up the edges if you like so that it presents a little better. And I'll just use this
piece as my template for all the other pieces that we have. If you've got some pieces that are a little short
like this one, no big deal. I mean, this is all
going inside the lasagna. Nobody's really gonna notice that your pieces are a
little bit different in size. What they are gonna notice
is just how delicious this homemade fresh pasta tastes. These noodles do need a little bit of time in some boiling water, simmering water. Probably less than a minute. It doesn't take long to cook fresh pasta. And we want them fairly al dente. They need some bite to 'em, because they are gonna cook
for a longer period of time once they get into the smoker. First things first, we're
gonna do a very generous amount of salt into our water, and then we'll get a couple of sheets of noodles in here at a time. All right, so these are softened. I mean, probably 45 seconds to a minute. Gonna gently remove them from the water and place them on an oiled sheet pan. We don't want these to get gummy. We don't want 'em to stick to one another, so we're gonna use a little olive oil to make sure that that doesn't happen. All right, guys, we got all
our components ready to go. It's time to layer up this lasagna and get it into the smoker. To finish off our red sauce, I'm just gonna add a
little bit of parsley, and that'll really waken up as
this heats up in the smoker. Catch that aroma and
that flavor in the end. Look how beautifully thick this is. It tastes fantastic, guys. All right, layer one. We're gonna start with our bechamel sauce right on the bottom, and that's so that we
don't burn our noodles to the bottom of the pan. What we're looking for
is just a thin even layer that covers the entire surface. Now we can layer in some of our noodles. Hit it with some red sauce. A nice hearty layer. And then I've got a blend
of two cheeses I wanna use. I'm blending together two
parts parmigiano-reggiano and one part sharp provolone. All right, now we're just gonna
keep repeating this process. We've got our top layer of pasta here, and we're just gonna finish
it off with our ragu. I don't know how you guys
like to do this out at home, but I'm gonna get every last bit of this delicious red sauce that I can. We talked about the couple of cheeses that we're using today, and you guys might be used
to doing some other stuff. I know it's pretty common
to see ricotta in lasagna, pretty common to see mozzarella. I tell you one thing
about fresh mozzarella is that it has tons of moisture in it. So while it's really delicious, you can get a really soggy dish in the end when you use a cheese like that. These two cheeses are
a little bit more dry, so they'll melt, but
they won't add too much extra moisture to the dish. That looks like we had
just the right amount of cheese today. And this beautiful thing is
ready to go into the smoker. All right, we're gonna throw this bad boy on the second shelf of our Yoder
Smokers YS640 Pellet Grill. And we're running this
cooker at 400 degrees today. I'm gonna come back in about
half an hour to check on it, and we'll let you guys take a peek when we get some nice color and everything starts moving along. 30 minutes in it was looking pretty good, but we wanted a little bit more crust on the top and the outside, so we gave it another 15
minutes 45 minutes in. The temperature is past 165 degrees, so it's plenty hot inside. This thing's looking
good; let's pull it off. (inhales) Mm. That sharp provolone's popping out at me. It smells so good. Well, we let this cool
off for just a little bit so we could slice into it and it'll all hold
together a little better. And I've been waiting all
day long to taste this, so I'm gonna go ahead and dig in now. Whoo, look at that. Layer upon layer. Man, that looks fantastic. You know what's great is if
you let this really cool off, you can slice these into individual pieces and then put 'em back in the cooker, cover 'em with some
more cheese if you want, and let 'em get crispy all the way around. I don't have the patience for that, guys. I gotta taste this. I gotta know what it's like. Get a little bit of
everything in that bite. Mm. Man, homemade is the way to go. I've never had a lasagna
that good at a restaurant. Getting layer upon layer. Creaminess, all the meatiness. Man, that red sauce is just fantastic. And check out these noodles, man. These noodles are just so tender. That's what happens when
we make those from scratch. Thanks so much for watching. If you guys enjoyed the video, please click that Subscribe button. And if you have any questions or comments or if there's anything
you'd like to see me cook, let me know in the comment
section down below. For more recipes, tips, and techniques, head over to thesauce.atbbq.com. All Things Barbecue, where
barbecue legends are made.
