2013 Cooking Club Week 32: Classic Lasagne

METHOD - RAGU SAUCE

The key to good, unsloppy, fantastic lasagne is a dry, rich ragu sauce. This is that. Before you start your preparation, turn your oven to about 150 degrees centigrade so it can pre-heat while you prep. You start this sauce off on the hob and finish it in the oven.

Start with the meat – if you haven't already, weigh out the minces. If you don’t want to use veal, double the quantity of beef mince. Don’t be tempted to put the whole pack in if you buy mince in 450g or 500g packs – again this recipe is all about producing a ‘dry’ sauce and you can’t play with the amounts.

First, rinse your chicken livers gently under cold water and pat dry with kitchen towel. Trim away any sinew or gristly bits. Chop the livers very, very finely – sometimes using a kitchen scissors to start can help because liver doesn’t chop that cleanly. If you don’t have a sharp knife and a hard board, you run the risk of pulping it down so it looks chopped but actually it’s just mangled larger pieces. This chopped liver needs to disappear into the ragu sauce, bringing flavour but being almost indiscernible in the mixture.



Once your meat is weighed and the liver is well chopped, put it all in the fridge and get on with the vegetables.

Chop your onion, carrot and celery into tiny, evenly sized dice. You can keep them all together because they’re all going in the pot at once.



Chop your semi dried tomatoes and leave them to one side for later.



Put one tablespoon of olive oil in the casserole dish and place it over a very low heat. Pour the mirepox mix into it - you want to sweat the veg, not make it crisp or golden. Put the lid on the casserole dish so they’ll sweat down. When they’re transparent, add your garlic – you can grate the whole cloves into the pan for a more intense flavour. When the garlic is added, stir it in and then take the pan off the heat and leave the lid on. The residual heat will take the rawness off the garlic.



Put a little of the remaining oil in the non-stick pan, and heat to a high heat. Start breaking the raw mince into the pan by hand. You want to get a braise on all of this mince. You don’t want to simmer this mince in its own juices until it’s a dirty grey – you want to cook a little at a time, over a high heat, until you have a golden-brown braise across it, as in the pic below.



If you put too much fridge-cold mince into a hot pan, you reduce the pan heat and end up boiling the mince, which is gross. This much at a time:



Break it up with a wooden spoon as you braise it. There should be no lumps. Work your way through all three varieties of mince – as each handful-sized batch is braised off in the pan, add it to the casserole dish of sweated mirepoix. Add a little oil for each new batch, but wait until it’s hot in the pan before adding the raw mince.

This batch of mince is sealed but not broken down or braised enough. There is still some pink in the meat, and some liquid pearling on the pan. (Apologies for the blurry photo.)



...and this one is right. Note the complete lack of bubbly mince juice in the pan.



For some random reason I decided to take those 'not there, now we're there' pics when braising the pork mince. It would've been a lot more clear on the beef mince, but hey, whaddya do...

When the mince is all braised and in the casserole dish, add the last of the oil to the non-stick pan and braise the chicken livers, again a little at a time, until there is no more pink and they have some braise on the surface of the pieces. Add them to the casserole dish as you go, until all of the meat and veg are in the pot.



When all of the meat is in the casserole dish, return the pot to the heat, then deglaze the non-stick pan with the red wine and pour it into the casserole, making sure there’s no flavour wasted.

Stir the mixture in your casserole dish and season well with salt (no pepper). Grate a half a nutmeg into the casserole dish and mix it well through the meat and vegetable mixture. Add your chopped semi dried or sundried tomatoes.



Now you can add the passata and the tomato puree. Heat to a gentle simmer. Add the Worcestershire sauce and the sugar and stir through. Take half of your bunch of basil and pick the leaves off the stalks. Tear the leaves into small pieces with your hands and add to the sauce. Stir through and simmer for about 10-15 minutes. Taste for seasoning – might need more salt or sugar. Please don't use ground black pepper in this dish. Black pepper is a spice and it has a really distinct flavour. Hey - I LOVE the stuff, but this is one dish that's better without it.



You can see there’s not a lot of liquid on this sauce, which is how it should be.



Put this casserole dish in the oven with the lid off on about 150 degrees and start it off for one hour. It’ll take up to three hours but I’ve found it’s heavily dependent on the kind of casserole dish you have and the way your oven behaves. This long, slow cook will allow the sauce to thicken up and this is essential for the finished lasagne. At the end of this time, you should have a very thick ragu sauce with hardly any liquid, but an evident richness you can see in every stir of the spoon. This cook won’t work in a slow cooker because the liquid needs to evaporate off – it’s gotta be the oven, and it really does take hours. Fan assisted in my oven in a cast iron enamel casserole takes about three hours.

When your ragu sauce is done, it will look like this:



You can see how dry, but rich, the sauce is.



Strip the remainder of your basil and shred the leaves.



Stir through the cooked sauce and then leave it to stand and cool down – this can happen while you make your cream sauce.

LET'S BUILD THIS BITCH

METHOD - BUILDING YOUR LASAGNE

Before you start, turn your oven up to 180 degrees to pre-heat. (Incidentally, it took my ragu sauce 3.25 hours in the oven until I was happy with it.)
Set yourself up somewhere convenient with the lasagne pan in the middle, the meat sauce on one side, the cream sauce on the other and your lasagne packets and your cheese bowls within easy reach. (The WORST thing that can happen is you build it and realise you’ve forgotten something. NOESSSS!!!!)



In a pan the size I'm using, you’ll get about four layers out of this recipe before the pan is full. Using a spoon I split my ragu sauce in four by simply drawing a quarter on it.



Then I used a quarter of the sauce at a time. I know I keep harping on about amounts, but the below pic shows just how thick the sauce is when you take out a quarter to do the first layer. This sauce is still hot, so this isn't a case where it's congealed in the fridge over night!



The cream sauce needs to be split in five. The finished sauce delivers about 1.75 litres. At the outset, you can set aside 350mls of the cream sauce in a separate bowl if you like, and then you know the remainder needs to go four ways. My ladle holds about 100mls, so for each layer, I use three and a half ladlefuls and it’s all good.



With about a tablespoon of soft butter, thoroughly grease your lasagne pan (or pans).



Start with the ragu sauce at the bottom. Spread it evenly over the pan and into all the corners. Tamp it down as you spread.



Over the ragu sauce, ladel a layer of the cream sauce. You need to get four lots out of the remaining cream sauce, so ladel enough to cover the ragu without drowning it, but be sparing.



Then stud the cream sauce layer with a quarter of the bocconcini balls. I use the tiniest ones, even smaller than cherry bocconcini, but you can even tear these apart if you like.



Over the top of the cheese, place a single layer of your lasagne sheets. How many it takes and how they fit depends on the size and shape of your pan. They need to overlap, but not by huge amounts (or you get a chewy knot of pasta in the middle of your lasagne – blerch). If you need to split a lasagne sheet sideways, score it gently with a knife and snap it over the edge of your benchtop, with the scored side upwards and the bench edge on the reverse side of the sheet in the same place as the score. Attempts to snap sheets by hand delivers an unreliable mix of perfection and weird and useless shapes.



Once the lasagne layers are in, that’s the first layer of your lasagne built. Three more to go. Start over with the ragu sauce, then the cream sauce, then the cheese – top with more lasagne sheets. It’s easier to spread the sauce around without disturbing the layers if you dot it from the next layer onwards.



Continue until everything is gone and you have a full pan, with a clean layer of lasagne on top, and about 1/5 of the cream sauce left in your bowl (unless you were clever, in which case you have an empty bowl and a secret stash of cream sauce set aside).



Cover the top layer of lasagne in cream sauce. Smooth and stretch it out so it reaches every corner of the tin.



Then sprinkle grated parmesan over your cream sauce. Make sure you get a good, thorough covering of parmesan.



This is going to go a magnificent golden brown in the oven, and when you carry your gigantic tin of lasagne out to the table for your dinner guests they’ll go ‘Ooooh!’ and ‘Aaaaah!’ in admiration.

At this point, your lasagne can be frozen (though to be perfectly honest I’d be making it in far smaller quantities and using far more dishes if I was going to do that). It can also be left in the fridge overnight and be cooked the following day (but give it a little longer in the oven if it’s coming out of the fridge).

It takes between 45 minutes and an hour (45 mins if it’s going in with warm sauce, closer to the hour of it’s out of the fridge.) It needs to be golden brown and bubbling gently around the edges.

It’s currently in the oven, so y’all have to wait for it to cook until I can post the last one. Here’s what it looks like in the oven. :pac:

When it comes out of the oven, the lasagne looks like this:



It'll stay hot out of the oven for quite some time, and it even carves up into portions better when it's a little cooler so feel free to let it stand. For the purpose of these pictures I portioned it up straight out of the oven, so its layer integrity is more cheesy goo than clearly delineated layers.

I serve this with a salad of mixed leaves, cherry tomatoes, avocado that I’ve tossed in lemon juice as soon as I cut it, toasted pine nuts and a little shaved parmesan, dressed with an olive oil and balsamic dressing that’s been seasoned with pepper, salt and a little more lemon juice and then shaken with a bashed clove of garlic.

Bon appétit.