Lasagna with Bolognese Sauce | Cooking Italian with Joe

hey guys welcome to my kitchen excited to be with you today we're going to take a trip to bologna and uh we're going to make lasagna and in italian italiano it's going to be pronounced lasagna ella boyeneze and remember in the italian language we pronounce all the letters uh but in bologna they're known for meat you're baloney right so essentially uh ella bollione's is going to be lasagna with meat and we're going to make the traditional version of lasagna so when i say that a lot of times on our recipes they're not going to follow exactly a lot of the american style or the italian american style recipes what we're going to make today is something that you would find traditionally in bologna so if you were to take a plane and land in bologna italy and ask for lasagna this is pretty much what you're going to get or certainly close to it so i'm really excited to bring this recipe with you or to you and i'm going to try to make it it's easy it's fun it's going to taste absolutely delicious something maybe traditionally a little different than you have but certainly something just equally as delicious so let me go over some ingredients with you we'll go from there first most importantly you need an awesome kick butt lasagna pan so uh every family certainly every italian family is gonna have some pan they like to make lasagna and here's mine okay and what we did is we got some sheets of of lasagna now lasagna is actually a type of pasta based on its cut so like if you have fettuccine or linguine or what have you that's based upon it gets its name from the diameter thickness of of the pasta so in this case there's sheets of pasta so lasagna usually is something that's very wide um something a little bit thicker and this is made from derm flour and it's really top quality top quality pasta so certainly that's what you want to do i can tell you never skimp on your pasta so whether you make homemade pasta or dried pasta always get the best ingredients certainly we've got our olive oil and if you guys aren't familiar with our farm in italy we've got our veto and joe's we have named after my two boys uh extra virgin italian olive oil some make a great gift for any holiday we've got some sea salt we've got our fresh pepper now lasagna in bologna they're going to typically use spinach so again in different areas of europe or in america you'll see different things that are put in there but traditionally in bologna you're going to have spinach sometimes you'll see the pasta is actually made with spinach but in this case we're going to cook the spinach and we're going to dice it up and we're going to put it in between the layers we've got parmesan and romano cheese we've got butter flour some garlic nutmeg oh for any of you guys watch our videos gotta love our nutmeg we've got some whole milk or actually what i got here some sweet cream two and a half cups and then i've got about four cups of our homemade uh bolognese sauce okay so in this episode we're not going to show you how to make the bolognese sauce because that's a whole episode but uh you're going to need anywhere from three to four cups of uh of a bolognese sauce something really good that's meat sauce okay so that being said let me show you how to put this together now what's really neat in this recipe is we're going to make a bachamael sauce which is which is essentially a white sauce and if you guys have ever made like a roux where you take fat and flour and you heat it up and then you add that to a sauce or an aju for example to thicken up that's basically what you're going to put in between the layers here that's almost like their cheese it adds like a cream to it in combination with the meat and the spinach and then our own cheese oh my god it's gonna be absolutely delicious so that being said let's get started i'm gonna start with our with our spinach now the easiest way that i found to do the spinach and i've got about four cups and change and i'm gonna dice this up okay so again you're not gonna put a whole leaf of spinach in between there right so all i'm going to do is i'm going to cut this up we'll spend a few minutes and then we're going to cook it down so what we're going to do is we're going to cut this up and then we're going to cook it down with some salt some olive oil some pepper and a little bit of garlic and what that'll do is that'll just give you this beautiful flavor of spinach flavored spinach to put in the lasagna and the easiest way to make lasagna is you want to just basically have everything prepared before you layer it and that just makes it really easy to put together makes it smooth you're going to pop it in the oven say 350 degrees 30 to 40 minutes depending on the on your uh size your pan how much lasagna you're making and traditionally you're going to see and i'll go over this with you as we go you're not going to cook the the pasta ahead of time the pasta will cook with all the liquid that's within the lasagna itself so you don't even need to cook the pasta just layer it in between there a lot of times i watch people you know they'll cook the pasta but you don't have to so so there we go so we've got essentially some rough cut spinach right real easy i'm going to take my pan right over here i'm going to fill it with a little olive oil and you know maybe tablespoons or so and then i'm gonna put my garlic now in here i've got about three cloves of garlic so i'm gonna put that in there i'm just gonna get that warmed up and we'll get that started and that'll cook down so let me start this so you're going to get that moving and then i want to start my roux now the roux is going to be essentially a traditional roux it's going to be a fat you can use olive oil you can in italy traditionally you'll see lard being used sometimes that grosses people out but in italy especially bologna you got to remember pork is a real common product in bologna so they're going to use a lot of lard so they'll use a lard my grandma these to use that actually in our baking too so they use lard or a fat and flour and you'll cook that down till it gets just starts to turn just to touch brown and in this case we're going to add our sweet cream it's going to be delicious sometimes people add a milk i'm not opposed to milk but the sweet cream or a cream will actually give it a much thicker heartier flavor which is delicious so what we've got here is five sticks of butter all right so i'm going to put that in my pan and what you want to do in this case is you want to heat your you want to heat your pan up first and you want to get your your fat whatever fat you're going to use you want to heat that up first before you add the flour so in this case we want the we want the butter to be melted so get a wooden spoon with a flat edge nice big flat pan and sometimes i'll add a little olive oil which i probably will today just a splash and you're going to cook that down and then what you're going to do is you're going to add the flour and what the flour will do is the flour is going to make a paste and you want to cook it you want to heat it up until it's just like i said just starts to turn color what that does is it takes that floury taste out of the out of the roux and it actually creates something that tastes delicious with uh with a lot of complexity a lot of depth to it and then we're going to add our sweet cream to it and that's going to be our white sauce you're making almost like a cheese if you will but you're going to make like a hot warm creamy sauce that's going to go in between the layers of the of the lasagna with the spinach that's cooked down with garlic oh and the bowling a sauce can be absolutely delicious i'll tune back with you guys in a minute okay guys so what i've got here right is i've got my oil going with my garlic right and i used a giant garlic in there it's equivalent to maybe two or three cloves i like the giant garlic sometimes just it's a little milder and i love that i got to tell you the smell in this kitchen right now is so good so you're just cooking it down it's gonna take a couple of minutes i'm gonna let that heat up okay because let me tell you the spinach will take moments with the lid okay now i've got my fat melted here okay and as i said earlier i'm probably going to add a little olive oil and for some reason i feel the need so i'm going to add a little olive oil so traditionally it's going to have butter sometimes olive oil sometimes not sometimes you'll see people put onion but a traditional smooth white sauce will be just this now what's really neat and i love to make is that roux so and you can make roux for example let's say for thanksgiving right you want to make a roux to thicken your gravy you'll take butter or some kind of a fat and then you can add it to the flour cook it down and then you can add that to your gravy and that'll thicken it right up what's nice is it doesn't you never want to add water anything because it dilutes it so in this case you're going to always add flavor that's one of the things you'll find with italian cooking it's always simple and it's always going to add flavor so now when this starts to get warm like this is warm right now we're ready to add that flour so i've got about a half of a cup of flour and the general rule on a roux is you add equal parts of fat and flour equal parts of fat and flour there you go in weight not in volume and weight so if you can get right in here and i just want to show everybody when you cook the stuff so you want to have a flat edge spoon and make sure your heat is low so i'm going to turn the heat right up here because the pans already and i've got my cream is about room temperature now you see how it's got lumps in there we want to cook the flour down and we want no lumps so so you've got to make sure you want it smooth and creamy and it'll almost do it on its own but if you see anything that's why i love the wooden now to taste it right away it would taste kind of grainy and almost like a it would taste like flour but you don't want to taste like that so as you cook it with the fat it'll cook all that out of there and this is gonna i'll tell you this smells so good in here with the garlic and the olive oil and the butter so if you can see that right now can you see so that's smoothed out there's a few little bumps see that there's just a couple but see how it makes a nice creamy sauce right there so that's essentially your roux right you want to make sure any flour anything you don't want to have any flavor taste of a flower so i'm really careful with the flat bottom and i stir this left to me this is the most important part right here is cooking down that roux i want it to be smooth and silky the worst thing you could ever have in a in a meal is to you know get a like a clump of uncooked flour it would be terrible it tastes terrible ruin the whole dish so so here we go this is beautiful okay guys so you see how nice and see how nice and silky that is so if i move that up right there's no lump it's perfectly smooth so once it's smooth look how beautiful that is right now once that's smooth i've got my my milk i'm going to turn the heat back on okay guys so i've got this cooked down the roux oh my god it smells delicious so i've cooked or heated up the flour with the fat okay and again it's not quite where i want it so i turn the heat back up and i want it to start to turn brown i want it to just start to turn brown because i know i'm warming up if you will heating up the flour essentially you're cooking the flour and right now it's the color of uh of flour and olive oil and butter so so until you cook it if you don't cook it down you'll still get the flavor now that's the roux we're going to add the sweet cream to it that's going to create the baccamel or the bachamal and you've heard it pronounced many different ways which is known many times as a french sauce but it was actually originated in italy so we're gonna we're gonna actually add the milk and once i have the milk and it starts to thicken that's essentially your white sauce or the bacomel sauce okay and we're going to add that in between now here's my here's my garlic see that and it's almost where i want it it's not exactly but it's almost there so one of the tricks that i use is i'll take something like a wooden and i want to see when i push on it when you push on it how soft is it if it's nice and soft and doesn't really have any pushback or crunch to it you know you're there almost there if you push down on you start to feel it kind of push back crunch like it would be something raw then it's not ready so i gotta tell you ready or not that smells really good okay so here we go we've got about four cups of the spinach right now remember the spinach got a lot of moisture in it so you want to cook some of that away as as well because you don't want your lasagna to be soggy right so i'm going to clean that out i've got my little spoon now watch how much this cooks down because it looks like you've got a lot of volume but you'll realize here is this starts to cook down already you're going to see it'll it'll drop and it'll be hardly anything left i'm just going to go ahead and put that cover on there like two or three minutes right now this should be heating up really nice which it is you see here it's starting to bubble right and look at that now watch i don't know if you can see that on the camera but you see how it's just starting to brown right so she's essentially ready so see the how it's browning you don't want to burn it you got to stay with it but you know understanding how to make a roux is really important if you're looking to make that core for a lot of different sauces and soups and well i'll tell you it's really easy though right so remember add your fat cook it down melt it i should say yeah this is almost there and then you're gonna add your flour and then just take it off the heat get everything smooth and silky then add the heat again introduce the heat whenever because it's already warm right then add your heat i do it that way because if not sometimes you'll see people that'll burn or they're trying to get all the lumps out while it's heating up it's not the way to do it so and this is great this is again a traditional white sauce and we are there so now this is heated up beautifully right so now i'm going to add the milk or sweet cream so in this case i've got two and a half cups okay so i've got two and a half cups and just add it slow because you don't want to there you go you come right in here you don't want to stop the whole cooking process see how it's starting to work away the and we're going to introduce some fat and don't worry what it's doing right now because it's all going to mix really nice hey guys so i just pulled this off the heat because it got thick enough so you see that look how beautiful it is nice and smooth and silky so i just go through if there's any if there's any bump or bubble or what have you any clumps in there i just smooth it out the back of my spoon and there what there really wasn't much the one thing just to remind yourself is keep the your cream or whatever milk you add to it try to keep it warm or certainly no colder than room temperature that way when you add it it doesn't like i showed you it won't stop the cooking process but this is perfect look at that and that's some people ask me like hey how thick you want it that's how thick you want you want to thick just like that because essentially it's like you're adding the cheese in the layer and that's the traditional uh bakla mel that's the like a french a french bachelor mouth that's how you say um but that's how you mix it look at that beautiful that's gorgeous okay so guys what i did here just at the end now this is still pretty warm okay i added some salt and some pepper just to taste now the butter we used had salt in it so that's why i'm always a little bit about hesitant about adding any salt i added a couple of grounds of fresh ground pepper a couple of rounds of it look how beautiful that isn't that nice and then last but not least our nutmeg right so i want to sprinkle that now i'll tell you any time any time you're doing anything with cream uh with our dairy products especially like a cheese with a high fat content you gotta add nutmeg and a little bit goes a long way but you want to add that nutmeg because what it does is it enhances it brings out all that depth of flavor that you normally wouldn't taste and it's italy i mean it's italy you know i love when i share that with you guys i always talk about like taking a trip to italy that's what i that's what it reminds me of when i have some of these dishes you know it brings me back to my to my childhood some of these great dishes that my grandparents used to make or my aunt or my uncle but also it just takes me back to italy i've been fortunate enough to be able to travel all through italy you know you find the greatest restaurant in the middle of nowhere that overlooks some water some lake or the end of some street and you go in there and have a meal with your family and some loved ones and you just absolutely share some of the greatest memories and you always relate it to food at least we do so it's always related to that phenomenal meal that you had and you'll take a picture and you'll tell somebody about it but unless you can taste it or be there or have that experience you know they just can't fully experience it in full so now i've got my nutmeg mixed i've got my salt i added just a little bit of salt and some pepper and that's our white sauce that's it that's beautiful i'm going to let that cool a little bit i don't want to hot and then i'm gonna i'm gonna add that just like a cheese in between the layers of our uh of our lasagna it's gonna be fantastic i'll talk to you guys in a minute all right guys whoo boy that smells good and there's our spinach and we're done so i'm going to let all this cool but look at that see how the spinach cooked right down and you got the boy can you guys smell that oh my gosh you know the garlic and the olive oil and the spinach see that so i'm going to let the spinach cool with our white sauce right with our baklava right i've got that with the nutmeg salt pepper we got flour butter olive oil we've got this going which is our spinach with garlic and olive oil and then i've got my parmesan and robano i've got my bolognese sauce remember the bolognese sauce has an enormous amount of flavor in it already right so we got our homemade sauce and then we got our lasagna pan so what i'm going to do is i'm going to let everything cool get down to about room temperature when it's done then i'm going to basically put everything together i'm going to construct our lasagna pop it in the oven oh a couple hours we're going to have a great feast i'll talk to you guys in a minute hey guys all right so what we've done is we've got everything ready to go right we got a bolognese sauce which is about room temperature romano parmesan cheese we've got look at how all that's finished cooked down isn't that amazing that was four and a half cups five cups of spinach so so there's our spinach i've got a spoon and everything right and then we've got our uh bacomel sauce which is our white sauce um my camera purse said it tasted like when she tasted it tastes like her milk gravy which is essentially what it is it's milk gravy so um now i've got a pound of lasagna which in this with which in this um dish is going to give us like seven layers so we're never gonna put seven layers we're gonna put three to four layers in so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna pull the lasagna off to the side and then this is a fun part this is a lot of times where the kids like to come in but i'm going to take some bolognese sauce and i'm going to put it in the bottom and you want to put a ton but you definitely want ooh there's look at that nice hunk of meat oh that's good oh that's nice bolognese is typically going to be made with beef pork feel and again bologna is just known for its meats they're delicious so so i don't want to have that big hunk of meat in there so i was cooking that earlier i must have good okay all right so there's our base right and now now you're just doing layers right it was like our tiramisu i don't know if you guys remember tiramisu so look at that we're gonna go like that right and then don't worry about they're gonna overlap a little bit right how perfect is that right then we're gonna hit some more sauce well i got some hunks of meat in it look at that that already looks good doesn't it so make sure you cover my my tip here one i've got several of you want to make sure you're covering your uh pasta well because it's gonna absorb that moisture okay so so there's that then it doesn't really matter what order you're gonna go in this case we're gonna put some we're gonna put some spinach in there okay and you want to space it out because you want to get a huge mouthful of spinach right so how nice oh oh my god that smells so good so you've got the garlic and i didn't put a lot of flavor in there right garlic and olive oil and oh that looks good so you want to just get a nice evenly spaced out and we got some i don't know what music we got going but it's kind of fun so it's a perfect music to go with her eliza all right so all right so they go right and then we've got as it's described our milk gravy i'm gonna get another spoon just to make sure that we're evenly evenly spread right and it's like again it's like a milk gravy it's like a cheese right and again this will spread out through as oop as it heats this is great this is a little cooler sometimes when you make the gravy it might be a little bit thinner which is fine you know it depends on how thick it comes out but don't worry about a thing because it's all it's going to heat up and marry itself with each other it's going to be so delicious and again this is our traditional that's our traditional lasagna right now we're going to take our parmesan giamo all right so there we go right and then we're just going to layer it again right so we're going to get two sheets of pasta layer it across right perfect and i'm going to push it down a little bit just to make sure we get a nice spread right and then i'm going to take our bolognese and then i'm just going to layer it so what i'll do is i'll go ahead and layer this across all right when it's done i'll show you how we finish it off and pop it in the oven i'll talk to you guys in a minute hey guys i'm feeling like i'm in bologna oh that is so good i gotta tell you the smell in this kitchen unbelievable so there i there i've got right i got four layers i topped it off with our milk gravy as it's being called right our roux or bacomel sauce topped it off with our parmesan and romano cheese all right and our baklava sauce and our in our bolognese sauce right oh my god it smells great so i've got it all in there then i'm going to cover it as i told you guys before you want to cover it with aluminum let me tell you why you definitely want to cover it regardless because there's going to be a lot of liquid in there right moisture and you want that to actually cook the pasta and you want all the flavors from the cheese from the vacumel sauce from the sauce you want all that to marry and you want it to be absorbed by the steam and the moisture you want to be absorbed in the pasta so leave it in about 30 minutes give or take but in this case with this size dish at 350 degrees we're going to leave it in about 30 minutes then when i'm done with it i'm going to pull the top off because i want the top to crisp i want the cheese to brown and get crispy so when i cut into it it gives you that actually added texture it changes the flavor when you heat the cheese up to that temperature it's going to be absolutely delicious so i've got my oven at 350. this is just here's dinner right here man and i've got my oven at 350 degrees and we're out of bake and i'll be perfect and this is what i've learned it's a lot cheaper to make a bolognese a lasagna than it is actually to take a trip to bologna in italy and you can almost get the same flavor maybe not i'll tune back you guys in about 40 minutes you guys ready to have some dinner i am talk to you in a minute hey guys welcome back it's been about 50 minutes so about 40 minutes in i saw it starting to bubble so i took the aluminum foil off and like i said you want to use about 10 minutes to get that top nice and crisp okay so here we go oh baby let me get over here i got to tell you the smell is incredible this puppy is hot is that good oh welcome to bologna italy right there man okay so that's our lasagna normally what you want to do is we're going to let this set um maybe like 10-15 minutes and it'll actually sink a little it'll drop and then it'll start to harden and solidify now a few things that we did is uh we made our uh sauce our white sauce a little bit firmer and uh even the bolognese sauce was firmer so what you're gonna it's not gonna be a watery lasagna is is the point so what it whether you make it with mozzarella or ricotta or any other types of cheeses or even some of the meats you want to make sure you drain everything out so it becomes nice and firm so you get a nice firm lasagna it doesn't get all water so we're gonna let this cool for a little bit and then uh after it sets we'll tune back we'll take a bite we'll try it out we'll take a trip right to bologna italy talk to you in a minute are you ready i'm telling you what that is seriously good all right so you see our drop down a little bit and look at that it's still pretty warm we're not waiting though i'm just going to tell you i wait the whole time look how perfect that is so remember i said the pasta would cook and normally you'd probably let it cool a little bit more but everybody's been waiting we're ready to eat oh that's perfect so i'm going to cut that right around so what you've got here you've got those layers right you see the spinach our white sauce you see how the top is nice and crusty nice in a puddle of our bolognese sauce is that absolutely delicious oh my god we gotta take a taste of that puppy right there hold on hold on all right we're gonna hop on a plane we're going to bologna right now here we go oh i can spell this minute the spinach i can't even talk my mouth is watering the spinach and the cheese that's hot are you guys ready i'm ready that is seriously yum right there i tell you the sauce the white sauce and the the spinach they go together so perfectly and then you got the romano and the parmesan and then the bouillon a sauce with the meat and then just a little bit of that sweetness oh my god it's absolutely delicious i'll take one little bit more that was hot just to warn you blow up there's one little bit more right there oh look it's giving me a little trouble you know when you get that you get all those flavors like i said they marry absolutely delicious and like i said that spinach just blends with it perfectly it's not too much it's cooked down it's got the garlic there isn't one the one thing great about this recipe there isn't one flavor that comes out at you overpowering the other flavors everything just melts perfect it's it's absolutely a perfect dish and you can tell why bologna being the really origin of lasagna why that dish just became so popular absolutely delicious guys thanks for taking a trip to italy with me allowing me to share some of my traditions my heritage with you don't forget to visit our website we've got a lot of great products for sale including our veto and joe's olive oil which would make a great gift at any time of the year we've also got some other products on there and don't forget to like our facebook and subscribe to our youtube channel so that you can get any of our upcoming recipes as well as all the recipes we've done over the last year again thanks have a great time enjoying your family i'll talk to you guys next week

Channel: Cooking Italian with Joe

Views: 155,075

Keywords: Italian Food (Industry), Sauce (Type Of Dish), Lasagne (Dish), Cooking (Interest), Recipe, Bolognese Sauce (Dish), Pasta (Food), Joe Borio, Pizza (Cuisine), Food Network (TV Network), Cooking Channel (TV Network), Mario Batali (Chef), Spaghetti (Food), Meatball (Food), Linguine (Food), manicotti, Gnocchi (Dish), mac and cheese, Macaroni And Cheese (Food), vito and joe's olive oil, cooking italian with joe, How to Make Lasagna with Bolognese Sauce Cooking Italian with Joe

Id: IaBFxqJrPiU

Length: 29min 34sec (1774 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 15 2014