How to Make Lasagna | Kenji's Cooking Show

hey everyone it's kenji and i'm putting together a lasagna because it's the middle of the summer and lasagna is super appropriate right now um no i'm doing it because i actually had a lot of stuff um that seemed to go well into lasagna i had a bunch of sausage left over in the fridge some like raw italian sausage that was on the verge of going bad so i turned it into a sausage and tomato ragu that i have over here so essentially all i did was well let me get let me get started with lasagna first i'm going to show you the way i i generally assemble a lasagna and this is definitely not um you know the real traditional lasagna bolognese which is made with um typically made with a spinach flavored pasta um a green pasta and a uh ragu bolognese and a um bechamel this is a this is sort of an american american hybrid lasagna made with the uh italian-american sausage ragu um some ricotta that i that i made from milk that was about to go sour and and i'll probably do a bechamel as well so these are these um oven ready um maria there's a few different companies that makes them i actually find the burrito ones to be just fine although normally the burrito pasta is not great but um their oven ready lasagna is fine i prefer using this oh by the way i'm talking quietly because my daughter's asleep um i prefer the oven ready lasagna to the sort of wavy um you know dry ones that you have to parboil because first of all it's easier secondly it is um a lot more a lot more similar to real fresh pasta so if i'm not going to make fresh pasta which i sometimes do for lasagna i'm going to use this oven ready stuff the trick is that it's not actually oven ready what happens is if you try and put your if you try and put your sauce and your and your and this and layer it with this oven ready stuff and just throw it in the oven and bake um it does soften up but it also ends up absorbing a lot of the liquid from your sauce so your sauce comes out kind of dry so the trick is to soak in and this is a trick actually i learned when i was working at a cook's illustrated i don't know like 15 years ago the trick is to soak it in sort of lukewarm water while you prepare your other ingredients that way it absorbs water and then it cooks later on in the pasta so i also have this sausage ragu in here which is um essentially i took i had some italian sausage that was about to go off i had some ground beef left over from some hamburgers that was also about to go off so i cooked that down with olive oil browned it broke it up and then i added a diced onion diced carrot some minced garlic and then a big splash of red wine dry red wine and then finally a can of um of whole peeled uh italian san marzano tomatoes all right so for our bechamel we're gonna start with some butter it's like two tablespoons of butter two and a half tablespoons of butter and then i apologize for the mess we're reorganizing the whole kitchen so there's a bunch of stuff out um yeah i apologize for that but i don't apologize too much so for this one you want a pan you know relatively low heat it's preheating this over relatively low heat for a while um because you want a nice even heat on this pan you don't want any hot and cool spots because you don't want that butter to accidentally burn in places and you really want your flour to cook gently so bechamela italian is the same as a bechamel in french or you know white sauce in english butter equal parts butter and flour so about so in this case that's about two and a half tablespoons of butter two and a half tablespoons of flour and we're going to cook this whisk it all together and cook it just until basically like the raw flour flavor goes away you're going to you can sort of smell it like there's a kind of aroma that raw flour has that as it as it cooks away it um i don't know it starts to smell cooked so you don't want to take this to like sort of you don't want to really brown at all um i mean unless you do but most of the time most people don't want their vegetables to brown they just want you just want the flour to not taste raw anymore and so we're cooking that a little bit and then we get our milk so the basic ratio for a you know a you know classic sort of bechamel bechamela is a tablespoon of butter tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk um and in grams that's um you know some measurement of butter to some measurement of flour to a different measurement of milk you can do the conversions yourself but you know spoons to cups that's about what it is it doesn't really matter too much you can kind of always adjust it at the end all right oh the last while that cooks a little bit the last element i have for this is this ricotta which [Music] it's actually more of sort of a farmer's cheese because i made it um so what i had was milk this everything in here is stuff that was about to go bad what i had was milk um that was starting to go close to sour i'm starting to get a little bit sour so it was at that point where when you pour it into your coffee it starts to curdle a little bit but it's not curdled in the container that milk when it's when it's at that point don't throw it out and don't use it for your coffee what you should do is make ricotta out of it so what i all you basically all you have to do is um put it in a saucepan and heat it up very gently while stirring um and you want to get it to like around like i mean you'll see it happening you'll see the curds starting to form and by around like 160 to 170 degrees the curds um have formed sort of a layer on top and um and you can see that there's whey you know the clear whey has separated out um and then you just drain it in a fine mesh strainer you can save the whey and use it as the liquid in a loaf of bread or pizza dough if you'd like or you can just get rid of the way but the curds um you drain them and that's your that's your bechamel um i'm gonna to that bechamel uh sorry that's your ricotta this ricotta i'm gonna actually just thin it out tiny bit you can thin it out with heavy cream i'm gonna thin this out with just a touch of yogurt because i like that flavor i'll do yogurt and by the way italian you know a bolognese um lasagna does not have ricotta in it typically this is sort of an american italian-american edition um but very commonly in the u.s you're going to see ricotta and lasagna so i'm going to use it and then a little bit of milk just to there we go and give it a nice kind of saucy consistency in a bowl uh when you're making the lasagna i always find that you want everything a little bit looser than you think it should be because as it bakes the lasagna even when you pre-soak the lasagna the lasagna noodles are going to soak up liquid um and of course the moisture is gonna get driven off as uh as it bakes all right so this flour mixture is just about done i'm gonna get a measuring cup not because i really care about precise measurements but mainly because i want something with a thin spout so that i can slowly pour my milk in but i'm gonna do about two cups here the key to getting a smooth bechamel is really slow additions of milk so it can go a little bit hotter here so if you add it too fast the flour clumps up so you want to make sure that you know you add it like a couple tablespoons at a time and wait until it whisk it until it becomes like a sort of homogeneous texture before you add any more milk that way you guarantee that it doesn't clump on you it'll start out real thick like mashed potatoes there are a few sort of classic italian well two major classic italian lasagnas um you know if you go to italy and you ask for lasagna without any qualifiers it is pretty much assumed that you're talking about lasagna bolognese which is a fresh spinach pasta it doesn't have to be spinach but usually a fresh spinach pasta so a green pasta that's layered with ragubo enese and bechamel but there's also lasagna napolitana which is a lasagna that's made with um regular wheat noodles flour noodles that are layered with a tomato sauce mozzarella sausage little meatballs and hard-boiled eggs comes from southern italy from well from napoli so um lasagna napolitana i think it's i think it's eating that like holidays around there in the u.s when you say lasagna it's funny you know like so in the us i would say the lasagna i was familiar with growing up was either tomato sauce or meat sauce and by you know when we say meat sauce we don't mean a real ragouble and they say we mean like usually like a hamburger that's you know ground meat that's simmered uh sorry ground meat that's browned in a in a saucepan then a can of tomato sauce dumped on it but that would be your meat sauce layered with ricotta and lots of mozzarella cheese um it would either be that or just plain tomato sauce and ricotta with mozzarella cheese um although when we first moved to california we had some neighbors some good friends of ours who invited us to their house for lasagna and what they called lasagna was um they were from chicago what they called lasagna was what i would call baked ziti so it was like you know tubular pasta um baked with sort of like all the elements of it of an italian-american lasagna so with ricotta and mozzarella and meat sauce um and they called that lasagna and i don't know it was delicious definitely not what i would think it was lasagna but you know what like what i call regular uh ragu bolognese on this channel is definitely not what an italian would call regular naysay so who am i to judge when someone else uses a term that i don't quite understand all right so you saw i add i've been adding that in in slow additions and give this a nice pinch of salt oh the other thing that i put into this um um this sausage ragu is that i had a bunch of parmesan rinds and a couple parmesan rind so i stuck those in there too just for flavor um so yeah when you when you finish off your your block of parmesan like grate it all off and you have that hard crust at the end um simmer it and uh you can simmer it in sauce you can simmer it in soup add some really nice flavor to there i'm telling you this whole thing is like leftovers and odds and ends all right so this is gonna whisk this as it thickens up i'm going to move these yeah they're softening up nicely so move them around a little bit to make sure they're not stuck to each other they seem okay that's all right um oh the other thing i need here [Applause] that big that big there's my element okay we're gonna grate some nutmeg into here on the microplane i'd say probably about a quarter teaspoon freshly grated if you're using the pre-ground stuff i would probably use a half teaspoon because it's um not going to be as flavorful um and i'm going to leave this bechamel basically as is i'm not going to add any cheese or anything to that although you certainly can if you want actually you know maybe i will add a little bit of cheese i've got this um oh my god i got queso oaxaca queso in here too much of it so i'm gonna so when you're adding cheese to your bachelor what you want to do is you want to let it so your bechamel will thicken the flour doesn't fully thicken until it really sort of comes to a simmer and you'll see it start to thicken up i mean you can see it here it gets thicker and thicker as it heats up and by the time it comes to a full simmer that's when it's basically at its absolute thickest and once it hits that point you can add cheese so you could add you know like a mountain of sort of grated parmesan or pecorino you could add mozzarella i mean really any cheese that you want will work although you know if you're going to be layering this with meat sauce something like that generally you i would stick to either something like a parmesan or or more or a sort of neutral cheese like a mozzarella i wouldn't go into like you know blue cheese territory which you certainly can do you can do that if you want all right we're getting nice and thick now yeah all right i think this is gonna be delicious okay now you can see it's sort of bubbling around the edges um that's about that's about as as far as i need to go before i can start adding my cheese um i'll probably add i don't know half a cup of this shredded stuff a few ounces okay and then you turn the heat down to low you don't want to overcook that cheese because it could it could potentially turn it sort of stringy although in a bechamel cheese will melt pretty nicely because there's so much um so much starch in there and so much viscosity that it makes emulsifying um even sort of the stringiest of cheeses relatively easy to do but really you can let sort of once once it comes up there just hit it to the lowest possible heat and let mainly the residual heat of the pan and the sauce melt your cheese for you that way you don't really run any risk of it clumping up and turning stringy all right let's taste it that tastes good okay now we're ready to assemble okay i'm gonna drain out this pasta okay clutter right here today okay get this onto a cutting board all right so let's start with a little bit of some sauce at the bottom not too much layers of noodles two and three now some more sauce okay get some of this uh ricotta mixture some more sauce or some bechamel now we just repeat that so the ordering i do and i don't know that this is like canon or whatever but the ordering that i do is sauce you know sort of the tomatoey or meat based sauce on the bottom and then after that every layer i do noodles sauce um dairy whatever the dairy element may be so it could be you know if i feel like i'm making it with like you know sometimes i make it with no bechamel like i'll make it with just uh grated cheese in which case i would do sauce and grated cheese or sauce than ricotta but it's always um yeah bottom is just sauce then layers of sauce noodle sauce dairy and then you always finish the top layer with just bechamel but actually you know what i don't even always do that sometimes i sometimes i like to add a little bit of the tomatoey sauce at the top as well okay and that last layer we just want to make sure all the noodles are kind of coated in bechamel so that they don't i mean even if they're not it's actually not that big a deal they just kind of crisp up and brown which is fine because crispy brown lasagna is delicious um but there you go all right now um i'm not gonna we're not gonna eat this until tomorrow so i'm gonna actually wrap it up put it in the fridge um and tomorrow i'll be back to bake it so i'll be back in about 18 hours or so um so i had this in foil overnight in the fridge that's it actually that's what we can reuse now i have an oven preheated to 375 um and this is going to go in there uncovered for about 45 minutes okay so i'm gonna get that going set a timer for 45 minutes and i will be back oh about 45 minutes that's looking good all right let me grab my towel that lasagna perfect for a hot summer day hmm i love the way it gets brown and puffy all right so i would recommend waiting about 15 minutes before you cut into this to allow it a little bit of time to sort of set i would recommend that which is why i'm just going to cut straight in i'm dividing this in half because i'm giving my neighbors half of it all right let me grab a little i'm gonna grab the corner piece for me to taste right now oh oh really hot see those nice layers yes shabbat you see them all right i'm going to set this little piece aside for you because i know you're going to want it and i want it to cool down before i give it to you and that one for jamon hmm this is man lasagna is good you know i don't know if any of you noticed excuse this giant garbage bag here full of stuff we're throwing out from the kitchen um if you've noticed how bad of a car of a comic strip garfield is um but the one thing he gets right is that lasagna is good are you going all right yes sit were you already sitting good girl all right okay let me pull this lasagna over to the door so i can get a beauty shot of it in the nice lighting over there you can all marvel and it's it's glory look at that thing that that looks good to me i would eat that in fact i am gonna need that this is gonna be our dinner all right see you later guys gals and non-binary pals next time [Music] you

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 714,582

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Id: uCHKFwTYwjY

Length: 24min 4sec (1444 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020