Cooking Club Classics #1: Sparks' Lasagna

Excellent idea!

post your recipe for how you make this dish

My lasagna is what happens when I try to make thousand layer lasagna and get depressed about being stuck at 50 layers...

500g beef mince
1 onion
2 carrots (medium)
3 stalks of celery
4 cloves of garlic (or four teaspoons of garlic paste)
200ml whole milk
300ml white wine
1 can whole peeled plum tomatoes
5 fresh tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato ketchup
1 tbsp tomato puree
3 bay leaves
1 tbsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried thyme
2 balls of mozerella (about 400g)
100g shredded emmental or your favourite semi-hard cheese
50g butter
50g flour
300g 00 flour
two whole large eggs
4 egg yolks
fresh nutmeg

In the pressure cooker (lid off) on low heat, slowly sweat down an onion that you blitzed to a near-puree in the food processor, with a star anise thrown into it. After it's been slowly sweating (and don't let it start to make noise, you don't want to fry it), remove the star anise and discard, then add celery and carrots that you also blitzed in the food processor, and some garlic (I just use garlic paste for this, I buy it in 1kg jars from the asian food markets in town, but you could just throw some garlic in the food processor or smash and finely chop it by hand). While that continues to sweat down over a low heat, take a sautee pan and fry off, on high heat, 500g of beef mince (rib steak if you have a choice, you want the fat). You actually want to keep cooking this until it's dry, crumbly and browned, not merely grey. At this point, add 200ml of whole milk and stir through and drop the heat to medium. Let it bubble away, stirring until you don't see the milk anymore and the meat seems to have absorbed it. Now dump all the meat into the pressure cooker, and then deglaze the sautee pan with 300ml of white wine and pour off into the pressure cooker. You can add pancetta, but I prefer to bake my pancetta at 160C in a baking tray and then let it cool at room temperature on kitchen paper and then eat it on its own. Don't judge me.

Now add the bay leaves and oregano and thyme to the pressure cooker, along with the ketchup, tomato puree, and three of the fresh tomatoes (remove the seeds and roughly chop the flesh first). Then add the canned tomatoes, cutting off and discarding the hard top of the canned tomatoes and tearing or roughly chopping the rest of it. Now lid up the pressure cooker and bring it to pressure and then cook away for at least two and preferably three hours (you will have a rather dryish ragu after this).


Now, on a freshly cleaned benchtop, mound up the flour and make a well in the middle and crack the two whole eggs into the well. With your fingertip, carefully swirl the egg into the flour gradually - it'll form a rather craggy dough. As you go, add the four yolks one at a time. You'll eventually get a rough single mass. Knead it once or twice by hand to help with that. Then put it in the stand mixer with the dough hook and knead that way for a good 5-10 minutes on high until you get a smooth shiny elastic doughball (you can do that by hand. If you look like Popeye). Now form that into a ball, wrap it in clingfilm tightly and leave it rest on the counter for 30 minutes while you clean up for the next step and get your pasta machine sorted.

Now, pause for a moment on the pasta (you'll have time) and chop two balls of mozerella cheese to small cubes and put that in a bowl; you can tear up some spinach if you like that or want to feel healthy; and also tear up a small bunch of basil leaves and finely slice the last two tomatoes. Now melt the 50g of butter in a small saucepan, make a roux with the 50g of flour, and add more whole milk to make a thin white sauce; then add the 100g of shredded emmental as you whisk the sauce and let it melt (do this gradually).

Okay, that's the easy bits done.

Now, with every flat surface in your kitchen cleaned off - or with your clean ironing board set up by the counter with some parchment paper on top of it and the pasta machine clamped to it - divide your pasta dough to six parts. Set the pasta machine to the widest setting and run each of them through it twice, then the next setting down and do that again, and so on - you've all seen this done a thousand times on every cooking show going by every TV chef around. And it's as easy as it looks, but also as fiddly and demanding on space as it looks. Sprinkle the dough with a little flour anytime it feels like it's getting sticky instead of elastic. Don't be afraid to divide the dough after rolling it if it gets long; you'll probably have to do that for each piece at least once, maybe twice.

Here's the important bit - take it right down to the thinnest setting of your machine. Way thinner than the dried pasta you can buy. That's why we're making it ourselves - if I could buy it that thin, I wouldn't bother making it. You want to be able to read a newspaper headline through it and it will stick like a sticky thing if you try to pile it up in a stack without parchment or wax paper between the layers, and your work will be ruined.


Now, when you get your tissue-thin layers all done, you can begin assembly. I have a special dish for lasagna - it's an ordinary lasagna/cassarole pyrex dish thing, not even very large, but it's almost six inches deep. That's important.

Start off with a thin smear of the meat sauce (take the bay leaves out...) on the bottom of the dish, then add a thin layer of the pasta. Then a few dots of mozerella cheese and a tablespoon or three at most of the cheese sauce. Then a thin layer of pasta and some of the torn basil and a few thin slices of tomato (you can add another layer of pasta and some spinach here if you're doing that). That entire set of layers should only be just under a centimetre thick at most and preferably half that. Now, repeat, over and over till all the meat and mozerella is done. Yes, it's a lot more pasta than normal - lasagna is a pasta dish, not a meat soup with some noodle dumplings in the middle.

You should still have some slices of tomato and cheese sauce. You might want to make a little more if not, it's easy enough to make small amounts quickly. Now put to thin layers of the pasta on the top, cover with any basil or mozerella you might have left, and all the remaining cheese sauce. Grate fresh nutmeg on top, then top with the last thin slices of fresh tomato. Cover the top of the dish with tinfoil, then bake at 160C for 20 minutes and remove the tinfoil and bake for at least another 10-15 minutes or until the top is golden brown and the tomato slices are looking sun-dried but not crispy.

Now leave to rest for a good fifteen minutes so it all compresses and binds.

Now, slice and serve. If it's deep enough, a 1" slice will be enough to eave a rugby player feeling uncomfortably full and then some. You can try serving with a green salad, but you're only kidding yourself

Also, this dish is like every lasagna ever in that it takes ages to make, but you can make two just as readily and they freeze in the just-before-baking-at-160C stage and will keep for a good while in the freezer and defrosting doesn't hurt them much at all. But this is *not* a monday evening meal, you make this on a weekend and eat lasagna till thursday