I got it! I'm like a Roomba! Welcome to "Mythical Kitchen," where a dream is a food your heart makes. All right, so Wendy's CEO has said that the Baconator was invented with 18 to 34 year olds in mind. And when my 42 year old
boss, Rhett McLaughlin, ate this Wendy's Baconator
lasagna, he said- Let me tell you. I've never felt more like
a 34 year old than I do, than I do right now. And I want everybody out there to make this lasagna. I want this lasagna to bridge
the gap between generations with cheesy, bacony inclusivity. Goodness of inclusisionses. Inclusisiones. If you're following along at home, we've broken the recipe
down into three easy steps, and you can snag the
time codes right there. We also got a full written
rescription down in the decipe? But you can also find
a full written recipe down in the description below. You can also check out the
latest episode of our podcast, "A Hot Dog is a Sandwich." That just dropped yesterday. Tune in every Wednesday,
wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get cooking. All right, so now we're making
the fresh lasagna noodles for the Baconator lasagna. Now let's diagram out
this dish, all right? So the Baconator is a very classic flavor. It is a ton of beef. It's a ton of bacon. It's not like a ton of buns
'cause it's kinda just like one. And then there's American cheese on it. So literally we're going with the flavors of beef and bacon and American cheese. So now we have to infuse
fresh lasagna noodles with American cheese,
which to my knowledge, has anyone done this before? Trevor, well, yeah, Trevor, you did it, but you did it on "Will
It Lasagna?" 'cause you... Also I'm not dead. Trevor did the food for "Will
It Lasagna?" 'cause like, I don't know, things are busy. And also like we've give
people opportunities to shine. And a bunch people in
the YouTube comments, one person said I got in a car crash. I got DMs from people that were like, "Oh my God, are you okay? I heard." Anyways, we're infusing
these lasagna noodles with American cheese, which
I am very excited about. That's a little bit of cheddar powder that's going into the flour. And now we're gonna whisk up eggs. We have a couple slices of American cheese that have been melted
down with milk right there that's gonna provide
some additional moisture. Some people on fresh pasta,
they go just egg and flour. I actually like going with
a mixture of egg and water. And then, you know what? You know what? I'm gonna be a little crazy today. I'm gonna add the milky American
cheese liquid, which is... What a strange color. And I'm gonna add that to our egg mixture. Get all of our liquid in one place. And then we're gonna do the classic handmade pasta well method. Anyways, so what we're
doing is we're taking a fork and we're just gonna build
a well in the middle. You want the walls to hold
like the walls at Helm's Keep? Helm's Deep. God! Oh, I almost made a correct
"Lord of the Rings" reference. I love me some Viggo though. Anyways, what we're gonna do
is we're gonna take our egg and our cheesy mixture, we're just gonna pour it in the middle, and then we're gonna use a fork to gradually incorporate
the flour from outside in. But you honestly can just throw
this into a food processor and you will get the same result. Apologies to all the Italian grandmas. The show's big with Italian grandmas. They're the ones that buy all the hats. This well is holding up
pretty well as I destroy it. Sound the Horn of
Gondor. It's a reference. There we go. You know what? I liked the movies, but I'm
watching it for the hot elves. Like I like that one
sexy chick with the bow. Orlando Bloom. She's hot. You know. He's so hot. You thought you were
gonna get lasagna lessons. Nope, we're talking sexy elves today. All right, sorta start mashing at it. Get your hands in there. There we go. And so you're looking for this to kind of become a shaggy dough. Too dry, and your pasta won't go through the pasta maker without cracking. As you knead it, you'll see it'll probably
feel a little bit wetter, and then you can just add some more flour. Kind of keep smashing it with the heel of your hand right there. This isn't a palm heel strike. This is more of a palm heel mash. This is like after you get
your enemy on the ground, you kinda just like mash the heels of your palm in their face. That's one of favorite things about MMA, is a lot of it just looks like
how a toddler would fight. Just kinda get on top and just , which I respect. Actually, though, if I
were to get into a fight, first move: get butt naked. I get butt naked, I flop on my back, I raise my legs, and I say,
"Get in my guard, bro," and no one knows what to do. This dough's looking pretty good. You're gonna palm heel mash it. Give it a couple strikes just to be sure. Then I'm gonna
wrap it up in plastic wrap and get this into the fridge, and then the dough is
sort of going to set up. The flour is gonna get
all nice and hydrated. The American cheese. Yo, we put a bunch of
American cheese in here. That's pretty crazy. And then we are good to roll it out and get it into our pasta maker. We wanna get very thin lasagna sheets to be able to make our lasagna, which is French for whale's womb. We have our dough out of the fridge. You see it's got wow,
what a gorgeous color. And, no, this is not similar
to the Cheez-It pasta dough that we made five months ago. Stop saying that. So this is pasta dough, and we have one of my many
nemeses in the kitchen. I have an incredibly
combative relationship with all of my kitchen appliances, which is why I try and use
toddler combat on them. What I'm gonna do with the dough is I'm just gonna pinch
off a little nubbin, and then I'm gonna form it into a square, and then we're gonna
start feeding the square into the pasta dough, and we're gonna gradually roll it out until it's a lasagna noodle. Making lasagna by hand, it's
like a really fun process, but it is like really an all-day process. If you wanna do it proper, we're showing you how to do it proper, but there are shortcuts. Honestly, if you just buy
pre-made lasagna noodles, you can get the stuff that
you ain't even gotta cook. So we're gonna take the fresh dough, and we're gonna start feeding
it through the pasta maker. So you wanna start with
your pasta maker on thicker, and then gradually get thinner. There we go. We're gonna run it through
twice on this thickness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so now I'm gonna
increase the thinness or decrease the thickness. Boom, science! Every time I hear the word thickness, I just think of "Disturbed." Always feed your pasta in
vertically. There we go. Don't put Your fingers in the holes. All right, here we go. This is the thickness I'm looking for. I can see my fingers
through the lasagna noodles, which is really freaking awesome. If you wanna square off
your lasagna noodles, you absolutely can. I might do this just so
it fits in the pan better. Working with a 13X9 lasagna pan. But, honestly, with the overlapping edges, you don't need to go super crazy with trying to get 'em straight like that. And I'm just gonna keep
doing this like 35 times. Thinking about that sexy elf chick. Now we're making the base
sauce for the lasagna. I'm calling this a Baconator
Bolognese, a Bolognese-inator. I take a lot of bacon. We got like, I don't know,
it was like a whole pack. 12 ounce of bacon in there. Woo hoo hoo! We're gonna get it rendering in a pan. Anytime you're cooking with bacon, I always like to start with the bacon because then you're rendering
the fat out of the bacon. You don't have to add any supplemental oil because you're getting all that bacon fat. And after that bacon fat starts rendering, we're gonna add some beef
and then other things. We're really trying to marry the flavors of Baconator and Bolognese here. What you could do, I thought
this was a conspiracy theory, that Wendy's uses old burgers
in their chili, but it's not. Wendy's chili is made from old burgers, which is actually really cool because they're decreasing
any amount of food waste, and it's all up to health
codes 'cause they're kept at a certain temperature
throughout the day. You could take about five Baconators, chop 'em up, and make
a Bolognese from that in the style of Wendy's chili, just like the Sardinian grandmothers. Dude, Sardinian grandmothers
invented Wendy's chili, don't you know? Baconator has a really
simple flavor profile. There's not a ton going on into it, but there are certain things. Ketchup and mayonnaise
is a big part of it. I have not put mayonnaise
into a lasagna before, and I don't intend to
do it today, shockingly. But as far as the ketchup goes, I feel like we can sort
of get that profile, so I'm making this a little bit sweeter than you would think. And we also have all that
salty bacon going in there, so it's really gonna counter. So we're gonna add a little bit of sugar with that tomato paste to really kinda give
it that ketchupy aroma. And also I feel like if I
added ketchup to my Bolognese, which to be clear, I want to do, I feel like the Sardinian grandmothers would stop buying the hats. This bacon is looking nice and rendered. We got a lot of liquid fat in that pot. So what I'm gonna do now
is I'm taking some beef! It's what for beef. So we
got our beef going there. I'm using a pretty lean beef because we have all
that fat from the bacon. We don't want this to be too greasy. So we're just gonna start getting that beef browning in there. And as always, whenever
you add meat to a pot, I like to season it with salt because that is just gonna
make it more saltier. So I'm just gonna add garlic and onion. That's something very classic
in a lot of Bolognese, right? You're gonna get a lot
of those Italian flavors. And I'm just gonna. No, no, no. I got it. I got it! I'm like a Roomba. So now we got our onions and
our garlic working in there. Now we're gonna start seasoning it up. Add in any green flecks you want. Most of the green flecks in your pantry kind of tastes the same, right? If it's oregano, if it's
parsley, if it's basil. It doesn't matter; green flecks
make your food taste better. So this is probably what, marjoram? Bro, I do love marjoram. But that literally can be anything. And I'm gonna add some thyme in there. And you're gonna get that going. A little bit of black pepper. And then tomato paste is great 'cause you're just adding
concentrated tomatoes in there, and that's actually going
to decrease the moisture. 'Cause if you think about it, you're just adding to the
ratio of tomato pulp to water. And then we are going
to pour in our tomatoes in the microwave. Typically a Bolognese doesn't
have this much tomato in it. Typically a Bolognese is not modeled after a Wendy's hamburger. Okay, we got that going. And then I'm gonna add a
little bit chicken stock. This is basically just
to offset for the amount that this is going to reduce because we do want this
to be relatively thick. We're not gonna cook our lasagna noodles, which means we do need some
moisture in that sauce, but I'm basically adding
the chicken stock there because I'm gonna let this
reduce for about three hours, and so that chicken stock that we added is going to bolster it. And instead of adding water
when that evaporates out, you're just gonna get that, pow! Punch of umami right in there. Umami's one of those
words that you don't say. Say flavor. Flavor, it's gonna taste good. Umami. Umami. So I know
what you're thinking. "Josh, you have been talking
about Sardinia all day, but isn't the most famous
Sardinian lasagna made with pani carasau, colloquially
known as paper bread?" That is correct, but we are modeling this after lasagna Bolognese,
which does not have ricarta. Ricarta. Ain't got no ricarta cheese. But we are modeling this
after lasagna Bolognese, of course in the city of
Bologna, that has bechamel, instead of the American lasagna
which typically has ricotta. But, again, shout out. We'll make the pani carasau later. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna start making our bechamel, and we're gonna do an American
cheese-infused bechamel to really sell all that Baconator flavor. So what we're doing, we're just gonna melt
butter down right now. We got the pan on about medium heat, and I'm gonna add my flour to it. We're creating what's called a roux. Fast forward if you've
seen me do this before! I like white creamy sauces! Let me live! When the foam starts, you
know that is when the flour is actually cooking into the butter 'cause you can not cook the flour enough. And then you end up with just like a kinda chalky, crappy bechamel. So now I'm gonna add about half that milk. I like to add a little bit of milk to really let it come together, and then you can kinda see it thickening, and then you gradually add it later on. All the way up. When I make bechamel, is what I typically do is I
start with a silicone spatula. That way, I can scrape
out all of the flour from the crevasses, and
then I'll switch to a whisk so I can really break up that flour, try and get any lumps out of it. But you do wanna make the base sauce a little bit thinner on this because you're adding
all this American cheese, which does not contain plastic; it merely acts as plastic
inside of a recipe and really kind of gums it up
and gets it nice and thick. But really, adding American cheese to a cream sauce like this, especially something
that's going into something as rich as the lasagna, it's gonna add this beautiful
silken texture to it. We gotta let this get hot for a second. So you can just sit there if you want or like get a handful of pretzels. Go to the fridge, look at it, realize nothing's
changed, not get anything, then come back to the computer. That's what I do. Okay, hey, welcome back. So this is getting a little
bit thick and creamy. And then, in theory, if
you're making a cheese sauce, I would add the cheese gradually. That way, you don't risk
the cheese breaking, the protein separating
from the fats, all that. But there's just so many delicious binding chemicals in the air. Shout out soy lecithin and guar gum. You can really just take it like a brick and just kinda dump it in there. And then when you're stir it around, it'll become a sauce,
which is very exciting. I'm as excited by this cheese sauce than I am that sexy, sexy elf chick in "Lord of the Rings,"
Legolant, Legolant. We're gonna add a little bit of black pepper to that
just to season it up, and then dump in a fair amount of salt. Bechamel loves salt because it's just a lot of fat and cream. And we're gonna let this
cool down a little bit 'cause right now it'll just
kind of flow over the lasagna. We want it to kinda like
really bunch up a little bit. Roomba! So right now we're gonna start
constructing our lasagna. So what I like to do is I like to take a layer of both our sauces. Again, no ricotta cheese in here because we're doing Bolognese-style but with our hearts in Sardinia. We're gonna spread out a little bit of this bacon Bolognese. That is looking really fantastic in there. The bacon fat really mixes
with all that tomato pulp and just creates this awesome
thick, thick, thick boy sauce. So now we're just gonna
be alternating sauces in a nice drizzle dazzle. I love when the creaminess of the bechamel sort of interacts with the Bolognese. And the bechamel, after
some of that moisture leaves the system and gets
absorbed by the pasta, it's really going to create this just kind of like nice glue. And so now we gotta layer the sauce. Now I'm gonna take these lasagna noodles, and then we're just gonna
start shingling these down. And you get, another layer of news. All right, so I'm just
gonna two lasagna layers. You don't want too much
overlap in the middle because that's gonna sort
of start to build up. So we're gonna get that into the sauce, and then you can add more sauce on top. Yeah, Nicole! Nicole is waving
her hands, "No, no, no!" And I say, "Yes, yes, yes." Really spread it out. We wanna go pretty thin on the layers because we want some real
nice, defined structure. Nicole, do you have something to say, Miss Sighing over there? Yeah, I'm gonna load up
this layer with bechamel. And then we're gonna take a
bunch of these strips of bacon. We want this really mimic a Baconator, so we're gonna add just a fair amount of fresh bacon strips right in there. That way, you're gonna get some of that, the whole texture of bacon. And you got the bacon that's
really braised in the sauce. Get a nice long cook on
a bacon. There we go. One for me. One for you. Not, mm, mm. That's what that little green goblin says in "Lord of the Rings." He goes, "Mm, take ring
to Mount Doom, you must." Little weirdo. As Nicole and I once
discussed in our podcast, "A Hot Dog is a Sandwich," out Wednesdays wherever
you get your podcasts, in the infinity lasagna paradox episode, lasagna must be at least three layers, but I prefer to go at
least four on this, right? Like one extra little
effort, more dollopy. How do I cook anything with the lack of patients that I have? All right, so make sure you're getting all the corners covered. And then I'm gonna take a little bit of, we have a blend of mozzarella
and cheddar right here. I'm just gonna put this on that layer. The cheese is just gonna act
as a little bit of a glue. We don't want it to be too,
too, too prominent in there. And more of these, more lasagna noodles. And I stick boys. More sauce. Uh oh, gotta start
rationing the sauce now. There we go. There we go. Now we got this. Dump all this here. We got one more layer, but I'm just gonna do red sauce on top because we want this to stay as the glue. One more layer of lasagna noodles. I'm gonna take the last of that Bolognese, and I'm gonna spread
that all over the top. I wanna make sure you get
complete coverage here 'cause this is gonna be like
the last line of defense, much like those big-ass elephants. They got like little ghouls on top, and they're like, "Must
get the little guy." And then we're gonna take
the rest of our cheese and scatter that neatly about. That is lovely. Now we can, for crying out loud, finally put this in the oven. So I'm actually gonna
cover this with tinfoil. I'm just gonna do that for
like the first half an hour, and then for the last 15 minutes, I'm gonna take it out and
cook it and broil the cheese. We're trying to get
some steam action there. I have my lasagna sheet on a baking pan because lasagna is famous
for drippage in Sardinia. So pop it on a sheet pan.
Nice, easy little fix. And we're gonna throw it in there. Yeah! Now you have time to watch the fourth "Lord
of the Rings" movie. This is freaking fantastic. I love a nice well-browned lasagna. You see, there's just grease
coming from every pore of this. I suppose I'm just gonna take
a slice out of it right now. V, you like the corner
piece or the middle piece? Middle.
Like directly in the middle? Are you a sociopath? I'm not doing that. I do that with pumpkin pie. I just slurp the filling
out of the middle. The first slice of lasagna is always hardest to get out. I never know how to do it. So I'm just gonna try it
on three and kinda mash it. One, two, go! Where are we at? Oh, yes. Yes, ma'am. Oh, wow. This is fantastic. You see, there's so much of that bechamel that is just like becoming glue and held these pasta layers together. You really smell the cheese that's been infused with the pasta. This is absolutely freaking
incredible. I gotta try a bite. First, I gotta try a bite
of it now. Thank you. All right, this looks
absolutely incredible. It just reeks of bacon in here, and I generally reek of bacon in my life. I'm gonna go in, grab myself
a knife. Take a little bite. Oh, my God. It's my quintessential
lasagna in the sense that the dough is so incredibly tender and all the layers just come rushing into your mouth at once. You're not like chewing
through thick noodle. It really does blend the
cheeseburger experience into the lasagna experience,
which is fantastic. And also if you wanna even blend it more, you can take a hamburger
bun from your pocket and you can kinda sop
the grease from the pan. That's real greasy. It's like better than garlic bread. But we all know that feeding family is the fun of the
friends, so let's spork V. V, come on down. I almost
spit bun, I'm sorry. V, are you as excited about this lasagna as I am about this lasagna? Yes, I am very excited. You look hungry. I don't think any of us
ate breakfast this morning. No, I just had, you know, a bagel. You had a whole bagel? I'm giving you a crispy edge. You said you liked crispy edges. Yes, I didn't, but I'll take it. I thought you did. Wait, wait. Are you ready?
Yeah, I'm ready! Now?
Yes! How is it?
Oh, my God. It's good, right?
It's so greasy, but in the best way because the cheese and the bacon balance it
out perfectly, I love it. Sometimes the greasiest
things are the best things. Hey, speaking of greasy things, it's me. I'm back. Thank you so much, V. Thank you so much for
being our taste-tester. And thank you so much for stopping by the "Mythical Kitchen." We got new episodes out every week. We got new episodes of our
podcast, "A Hotdog's a Sandwich," out every Wednesday wherever
you get your podcasts. Hit us up on Instagram, @mythicalkitchen with #dreamsbecomefood. You can talk to V. She's
the one who runs it. See you next time. Follow V on Instagram too @vandaaustin. Get as messy as you
want in your own kitchen when you have the
"Mythical Kitchen" towel, available now at mythical.com.
I love baconators! I would try it!
Josh:
"Umami's one of those words that, like, you don't say, you just say flavor. Flavor. You're gonna taste good. Umami. ... U - ma - mi."
I know what Josh was getting at here.
It's true. Umami is a fancy word for something tasting good. It's a fancy word for flavor.
It's not like sour, or sweet, or bitter, or salty. It's just a punch of flavor.
Thank you, Josh, for confirming that. I agree 100%!