How to Make the Best Hearty Beef Lasagna

[Music] a traditional meaty lasagna also known as a lasagna bolognese can be a serious undertaking complete with homemade noodles and not one but two sauces a creamy bechamel and a long simmered bolognese and it is the ultimate lasagna it's delicious but it takes all day so the question for christy is can you keep the flavor but speed it up a bit yes yes can it doesn't usually happen but we're going to do it today all right so we're gonna start with our noodles okay i have about four quarts of water here that i brought to a boil i'm gonna add a tablespoon of salt and now i'm going to add my noodles when you think about saving time you think about using no boil noodles those are not no boil noodles they are not these are traditional curly lasagna noodles you're actually adding a little extra time to this lasagna we are but we're saving so much time everywhere else so we thought it was worth it to spend the time to get that extra sturdy chew and texture of traditional noodles we'll let the noodles cook for about six to eight minutes until they're nice and al dente and let's get started on our meat sauce star ingredient yes what we found with a lot of meat sauces is that as they cook the meat gets kind of dry and kind of pebbly so our solution was to start with a panod like we do with meatloaf or meatballs so i have two slices of hearty white sandwich bread that i've torn up into little pieces and i'm going to add a quarter cup of milk i'm just going to mash this until i get a nice paste all right so we have our panade good-looking panade why thank you i pride myself on my panade so i'm going to add this to my meat now this is a meaty sauce it's one and a half pounds of 90 lean ground beef usually we go for fattier cuts saying they have more flavor why ninety percent here because we wanted to be able to control the fat in here um it's going to bake in that casserole dish and there's nowhere for it to go by using the leaner grind we could keep that greasiness in check make sense i'm going to add a little salt and pepper half a teaspoon of pepper and three quarters of a teaspoon of salt i'm going in take off the jewelry time to go in you can try to do this with with a spatula but which is kind of therapeutic to get your hands in there and switch the meat around i am going to wash my meat hands and then we'll come back and we'll check on the noodles all right so julia i just checked my noodles they're ready to go so now i've already sprayed this rimmed baking sheet with a little vegetable oil spray because we don't want them sticking together so i'm just going to toss them gently let these cool and start working on the sauce using the same pot yeah i like it see easy and quick i'm going to start the sauce with some extra virgin olive oil i have one tablespoon i'm going to heat this over medium heat just until it shimmers which shouldn't take too long because that pot is pretty hot it is quite the hot pot so we want this lasagna to be very meat forward but we will add some onion this is one onion chopped fine we're just gonna cook these until they've softened we don't really need to go all the way to full browning so that's just gonna take about five minutes we have soft onions here they smell good you know what's gonna make it smell better what's up garlic ah you're right i've got six cloves that i've minced and a teaspoon of dried oregano and a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes as soon as we can start to smell it about 30 seconds can you smell that all right yeah it smells delicious so now it is time to add our beef mixture now we're not going to cook this for very long i'm just going to break it up because we just want this to cook until it's no longer pink so i'm just going to cook this for about four minutes do you see any pink meat i see no pink there is no pink now we'll add the last element which is 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes that's also not a lot of tomatoes so this isn't really a big tomatoey lasagna it's really all about the meat it is about the meat so i'm just gonna make sure that i scrape up any good brown bits that got stuck to the pan while the meat was cooking now i just want to bring this to a simmer and then i'll reduce the heat to medium-low and let it cook for five minutes just long enough to let the flavors melt our meat sauce is done oh nice that was fast five minutes love it so now we're going to start on our white sauce that's not a bechamel it's not a vegetable no again we're trying to save a little time um and other recipes try to save time too often they'll use ricotta but ricotta tends to get kind of grainy when it really does at higher temperatures we've found that cottage cheese works really well it's a bigger curd and it holds up to those high temperatures without getting grainy smart so that's what we're starting with i have a cup of cottage cheese in here i'm also going to add four ounces of pecorino romano this is actually about two cups once you've grated it and then we'll also add a cup of heavy cream because we need it to be saucy and add some flavors of course a little bit of garlic it's two cloves that we've minced and i'm adding a teaspoon of cornstarch and that's going to help bind everything and it's also going to help thicken it a little bit and then a little salt and pepper i have a quarter teaspoon each i'm just going to whisk this that was the easiest bechamel i've ever made it is very easy okay now we're going to head over to the construction zone right because you have a lot of components here putting them together looks like it might take a little bit of time it's like an erector set now the first step is we use some vegetable oil spray spray the whole bottom so the noodles won't stick i'm going to take three noodles now look these perfectly fit nicely unfortunately that's not always the yeah this doesn't always happen at my house right and we're looking for sturdy not shoddy construction so if you find that the noodles don't fit all the way to the end we took two noodles and cut them in half ah cut to spit yes i like it that way you have noodles the whole length of the dish and everything is a lot sturdier okay i'm gonna take some of my meat sauce all right about one and a half cups and we'll pour this oh i'm getting so excited me too and then i'll take half a cup of my sauce and this i'm just kind of dollop it's not going to be a totally smooth coverage that's right because when it hits the oven it's going to melt and make the sauce and if there wasn't enough cheese here i'm adding a half cup of the moss now this isn't the pre-shredded stuff this stuff looks a bit stickier which is pretty important to buy block mozzarella and shred it yourself that pre-shredded stuff doesn't melt the same so now we'll start the second layer all right and like i said it didn't fit your pan and you were using a half sheet say at this end on the second layer you want to make sure you put the half sheet oh alternating the cut to fit so it's an even construction yes yeah you might have missed your calling you should maybe wear a hard hat we're going to finish this one and then do two more layers so we have four layers and then we'll talk about the topping all right we have finished four complete layers and that dish is full it is full that's a lasagna it's hearty so now we have the last layer of noodles and if you were using half sheets of noodles you wouldn't add it to this top layer all right and you're also not going to add any meat sauce well that's good because there's none left we worked it out that way that's smart because if we add a meat sauce to the top it keeps it a little wet and if it's wet on top then it's not going to brown ah and the brown cheesy top the best part exactly instead we're going to add the rest of the white sauce so just kind of get it spread pretty evenly now we have the rest of our mozzarella it should be about a cup left and we'll sprinkle that over the top now we're going to add a little bit more of that pecorino just another quarter cup because this is an aged cheese it's a little dryer right so brown's better it's going to brown beautifully so there we go now notice that i have this sitting on a rimmed baking sheet right because this is very full yes it is and we don't want it to overflow i'm also going to cover it with some foil i did spray this with vegetable oil spray so we're going to put this in a 375 degree oven middle rack for about an hour we're gonna go in halfway take the cover off oh that's the smell right there the smell of success look at those spotty brown bits but that looks lava hot i mean it is so hot so we have to wait half an hour that's going to give the cheese and the sauce a chance to kind of set up so we can cut those nice squares i think it's set now awesome time to eat yes absolutely the whole making of lasagna the hardest part is getting the first slice out looking pretty this is like operation now using the double spatula technique look at that you nailed it all right i'm going in okay man that's good the cheese sauce it really thickened nicely it did and it's just kind of gooey yeah and it didn't break it doesn't have any of that graininess you get with ricotta no it's very creamy and very beefy finally a lasagna that tastes like beef kristy this is the perfect lasagna thank you julia thank you for a streamlined meaty lasagna start by boiling traditional noodles then drain them and let them cool on a greased baking sheet instead of making a long simmered bolognese make a quick meaty tomato sauce with a panad 90 beef and some crushed tomatoes skip the bechamel and make a no cook white sauce with cottage cheese pecorino and heavy cream assemble the lasagna in a very sturdy fashion in a greased dish bake for an hour and let cool for about half an hour before eating and there you have it from cook's country the ultimate hearty beef lasagna so good thanks for watching cook's country from america's test kitchen so what'd you think leave a comment and let us know which recipes you're excited to make or just say hi now you can find links to today's recipes and reviews in the video description and don't forget to subscribe to our channel see you later alligator

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 249,164

Keywords: hearty beef lasagna cooks country recipe, beef lasagna, how to make lasagna, lasagna recipe, america's test kitchen, cooking, americas test kitchen, cooks country, cook's country, comfort food, pasta, pasta recipes

Id: -wbzguIvaLk

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 29 2019