100 Layer Lasagna | Anything With Alvin

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This week on Anything with Alvin: 100 whole layers of cheesy, delicious lasagna.

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– [Narrator] This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I used Squarespace to build both Basics with Babish and BingingWithBabish.com. On the sites, you’ll find recipes, equipment lists, other news and updates, all beautifully designed if I do say so myself, get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace.com/babish.

– Moment of truth is here. We’re gonna flip this baby and see what happens. I love it. That’s a baby. Look at all the layers of the meat, the cheese, you know, the bechamel just barely visible, but that makes it creamy and delicious.

– [Chef] All it is a little bit of the bolognese sauce. A slab will be of the lasagna that’s been nicely seared off. – [Host] Oh my god, that’s so beautiful. – [Alvin] Hello there. Welcome back to another episode of Anything With Alvin

Where I attempt to create a fun food from the videos that I like to watch in my spare time. This episode, we’re going for a 100 layer lasagna, which is a dish that although seems crazy, is served by a couple of restaurants around the world.

This one in particular is served at La Palma Restaurant in Toronto. Now, I’ve had a bit of experience in making this previously, but the restaurant version of this dish seems very exciting. The huge lasagna baked in a massive pan, which is baked and chilled and cut into small sections

To be served crispy for the diners. And I think that’s a great idea. So we’re gonna do it ’cause it’s fun. First things first is the pasta. Now we could use store-bought noodles, but I think those would be a little too thick. So we need these very, very, very thin

To be able to layer properly. In order to make this a lot easier, we’re gonna use the help of two food processors, 16 cups of all-purpose flour or 2080 grams, 24 eggs total, a half cup of olive oil and eight teaspoons of kosher salt. These ingredients are gonna get split evenly

Between each food processor and just set to pulse until they have reached almost a ball stage. Then I’m gonna turn these out onto our work surface with some bench flour and kneed these for about 10 minutes until the nice supplements smooth and my wrists have been hurting a little bit recently.

So after a little bit of kneeding, I’m gonna ask for Rachel’s help to come in and do a lot of the heavy lifting. Thank you, Rachel. You’re making this a lot better and you definitely know how to kneed pasta dough a lot more than I do. These two dough balls have been

Wrapped up and kneeded nicely. They’re gonna go into the fridge and rest. We’d repeat our whole process again. Now that our dough has been prepped, we’re going to move on to the sauces. We’re gonna get started with our meat sauce, which does require quite an amount of vegetables.

First I’m going to roughly chop up eight large carrots, which have been peeled. These are just gonna get cut into small chunks and you’ll see why in a bit. Then we’re gonna follow up with 16 celery ribs or stalks of celery with the edge trimmed off and again chopped up into rough chunks.

Instead of hand chopping all these vegetables, I thought we might as well just lean into the food processor for this one ’cause it’s all gonna get cooked down anyways and would probably make a more smoother sauce. We’re gonna put the carrots in one food processor and the celery in another.

Just blitzing them until they have basically broken down all the way. What a beautiful color we have here. These vegetables are all going to combine in one giant mixing bowl, like work on our onions. I’m gonna go ahead and take eight large onions, take off the skins

And cut them into halves before throwing them in the food processor, we’re also gonna go with 20 garlic cloaks split between the food processes as well. These are gonna get blitzed out until they turn into a taste like situation and they go to the rest of our vegetables to join

For a giant vegetable fiesta. Kind of looks like mashed potatoes. It’s funny how the one with the carrots in it was staining the onion so it couldn’t looks like an orange creamsicle. Now that our vegetables are ready, it is time to give them a nice cook.

So in a huge Dutch oven, probably the biggest one we have. We’re gonna go ahead and put in two sticks of butter, and once that gets simmering nice and hot, we’re gonna go ahead and throw in all of our vegetables, mixing that up and letting them cook and soften.

This is going to take a while. So while that goes, we’re gonna go ahead and get started on our meat mixture separately. in a large roasting tray, we’re gonna throw in one and a half pounds of pancetta, which has been diced into small pieces. We’re gonna let the fat brown itself,

And once it gets crispy, we’re gonna throw in three pounds of ground beef and three pounds of ground pork, breaking down those lumps and mixing it around until everybody has started to get a nice color on it. Once everything is thoroughly combined,

I decided it would be a good idea to speed things up by splitting these into two pans each just to create more surface area and not to boil this thing the whole time through. Half of the vegetable mixture is going into a large wok, and the meat mixture is going to get divided

Among two evenly sized stainless steel pans. Now there’s a lot of fat coming out in one of these and I don’t think we need that much, so we’re gonna go ahead and use some paper towels to get a lot of excess fat out. Once the meat is looking very brown

And started to crisp up on pretty much all sides, we’re gonna transfer one pan back into the first one because now it has shrunk down a little bit. We’re gonna go ahead and add six cans of tomato paste to our rice crispy browned meat mixture. Stir that around, let the cook down,

And then we’re gonna deglaze that empty pan with one bottle of red wine while we put the other bottle of red wine into our meat mixture. Oh look, fire. Now that’s cool. Now that a red wine is also cooked down and a lot of the alcohol has had a chance to evaporate,

We’re gonna put this beautiful meat mixture back into our vegetables, dividing it half among each. Then they’re gonna get some milk, four cups between the both of them, and we’re also gonna add in four cups of stock between the both of them to add some seasoning and some flavor and some liquid.

Once the liquids have been added, we’re gonna take both off the heat and transfer the mixture from the wok into an oven safe stainless steel pot. Now we’re gonna add in nine cans of pureed tomatoes across the both of them, as well as four tablespoons of brown sugar per batch.

I love to add a little bit of brown sugar to my pasta sauce just to emphasize the sweetness of the tomatoes. Now, once these are done, they’re gonna go into an oven at 350 degrees for about two to three hours until they’re nice and bubbly.

Now that our massive amount of meat sauce has been accounted for, it’s time to work on the be melt or the white sauce for our lasagna. Instead of a ricotta based filling like a lot of western lasagnas, this would probably make a lot more sense taking inspiration from Italian lasagna.

So a white sauce that is a little bit thinner is my way to go. In a large pot, we’re gonna go ahead and melt down and brown two sticks of butter. Usually you don’t brown it, but I like to brown my butter ’cause well, it has a little bit more flavor.

Once the butter has been evenly browned, I’m adding in one cup of flour and stirring to make sure the raw flour taste has been cooked out. Then once the roux has been nicely formed, we can add in one gallon of whole milk, slowly, making sure that it gets a chance

To work at all of those lumps before adding more, kinda like making a crepe or a pancake batter. Once the milk has been slowly added and our sauce looks relatively lump free, we’re gonna bring this up to a simmer so that the flour has a time to thicken the sauce.

Then we’re gonna add our seasoning, about 10 seconds worth of grading fresh nutmeg into the sauce, a tablespoon of ground pepper and a tablespoon of salt. Our white sauce is now ready. Now it’s time to turn those pasta balls we had earlier into as many lasagna sheets as possible.

Now in the 100 layers explained by the restaurant, it’s not actually 100 layers of pasta. It’s 33 layers of pasta, 33 layers of red sauce, and 33 layers of white sauce finished by either a layer of pasta or some more white sauce on top. So we’re gonna need about 33 layers

Of freshly made lasagna sheets, which is quite a lot of pasta. So we’re gonna try to get these really nice and thin. I’m taking each of these pasta balls, cutting them into quarters and working with that one at a time. I’m starting from the lowest setting,

Which is at the one in the thickest and moving down to a two and then actually re-laminating it by folding it over itself and starting it back again from one. This is going to create a little bit more chew and some better structure for our lasagna noodles.

So I like to do that at least once before proceeding to roll it down to its thinnest form. These you’re gonna get really, really thin ’cause I’m going all the way down to an eight. Meanwhile, Rachel is over there helping me out,

But she has to use the manual crank one while I get to enjoy the luxuries of an electric powered pasta maker. Thank you, Rachel, for again, making this video possible. After these sheets get super long and thin, I’m gonna go ahead and trim them into large flat sheets. Approximately the width

Or the length of our hotel pan, process takes us about two hours or so. It’s a lot of manual rolling, cutting, trimming, flowering, and just trying to balance this pasta delicately on the back of your hands. But it is quite fun to play with a large amount

Of pasta dough, almost like curtain drapes. After our pasta dough has been all rolled out as flat as they can shaped and trimmed, we’re gonna go ahead and cook these pasta sheets. Now these are super thin and made with fresh pastas. They only need about a minute in boiling water to cook that.

So I have three pans here, both with salted boiling water, and we’re gonna cook all of these pasta sheets to make sure that everything is ready for our assembly. Now, for the daunting task, making and layering all 100 layers, I have a huge hotel pan.

The biggest one we could find for commercial sales, which is about six to seven inches deep and the size of a sheet tray, a half shape to be exact. First I’m gonna take some oil and oil down the sides of this pan and then put enough parchment sheets to make sure

That while we’re layering this, this has an easy release, thinking for the future here. Then we begin our layering. We start with a layer of pasta and followed by a layer of meat sauce, which we have to be relatively not so generous with, as we need to be able

To make sure that we can get as many layers as in as we can. So we’re gonna first start out by spreading the thinly across all the pasta and giving it a nice few dollops of bechamel right on top, making sure that it also gets smoothed out as well.

Three layers down, 97 to go. We’re gonna repeat the process over and over and over again, starting with pasta, following up with meat sauce and spreading a thin layer of bechamel right on top. Approximately 15 layers through, I forgot that we were supposed to also add cheese, so on top

Of the bechamel I’m grading some nice Parmesan cheese that doesn’t count as a layer, but it should add to the flavor a little bit. And after an hour or so, we’re approximately halfway through. We’ve gotten up to 50 layers and well, there’s 50 more to go,

So we just buckle down and get right to it. Pasta, meat sauce, bechamel, cheese, pasta, meat sauce, bechamel, cheese. It’s quite satisfying to see this thing get larger and larger in height. After about two hours or so, we realized that we didn’t have any more pasta and we were counting the whole time.

Steve and Rachel have been vigilantly watching my layering process and counting each time we move up a different layer. We got to 88 layers before we ran out of pasta, but we still have meat sauce and bechamel leftover, so we’re gonna keep going and push through.

Rachel and Kendall found some dry lasagna noodles in a box that usually make lasagna with so we’re just gonna cook those off and use that to fill our remaining layers. I’m not saying it’s fate, but the amount of dry lasagna noodles that we boiled got us to 100 layers with no extra.

Now I think that’s pretty cool. For the final layer, I’m taking our remaining bechamel and putting in a lot of our grated Parmesan cheese, mixing that together and just layering that right on top to get nice and brown and crispy. We’re gonna put this in an oven at 325 convection

For about three hours. It was gonna be really late by the time lasagna was finished cooking, so we did ask Andrew to help keep an eye on it and take it out after the three hour mark. So thank you, Andrew for doing that.

Oh, it’s a little crispy and probably a burnt on top. Probably should have turned the convection off at some point. That was our mistake, but thank you to Andrew for taking this out, covering it properly, making sure that it is nicely sealed. Andrew is now gonna put this inside his outdoor grill,

Which is off because it’s super cold outside and that seems to be the best way to naturally refrigerate this thing ’cause it won’t fit in the fridge. This is me coming to retrieve my prize the next day. We’re gonna go ahead and take this downstairs and see what we got.

Oh yeah, top layer is definitely, it’s a little bit too, too, too charred for my taste and I like crispy lasagna, but I think this one’s probably not gonna be edible. Let’s take off the top layer and see. Let’s just treat that as a sacrifice for the other 99 layers.

Oh yeah, don’t eat that. That’s definitely burnt. After trimming off the parts that are a little too dark, it is time to flip this thing, which is crazy to say, oh, it’s almost gonna fall out. Just better. Go ahead and flip it. Boom, that looks pretty cool.

Really nice color on the outside there. Didn’t even need the parchment, it just kind of slid right out. Perfect. Now that’s a lot of lasagna. Now for the reveal, we’re gonna go ahead and trim off the sides to keep as trimmings and snacks

And also to create cleaner cuts so we can see the layers. Oh, here we go. Whoa, that looks pretty cool. It’s like a super compressed, massive brick of lasagna, which is exactly what we did. It’s always interesting to me that even though we laid the whole thing flat

As we assembled it, you always get these interesting wave patterns that go on. I’m not exactly sure why that happens, but it looks pretty cool. Wanna clean this up and make sure all the sides are trimmed off and nicely squared away. Making sure to save all of those trimmings as snacks for later.

And then we’re gonna go ahead and just for fun, grate a bunch of cheese and put some parsley on top, even though this is not gonna be the final way we serve this, but I will say this is a pretty good looking lasagna for its size.

You can’t really hear it, but everyone in the studio is crowding around and just giggling, taking pictures of this crazy thing that we made, and I think that’s usually a good sign. So in the restaurant, how they do it is they make it

For the size that they can slice it into really nice clean portions to be able to sear off during service. So that’s exactly what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go ahead and cut a nice one inch thick slice of lasagna, make sure that it is trimmed down to a normal portion size,

And we’re gonna sear this in some pan with a little bit of butter to make sure that it gets crispy, once this is seared on both sides and each side has gotten a chance to caramelize and get nice and crispy, we’re gonna go ahead and get ready

To plate it on a nice pool of our leftover meat sauce and a generous helping of grated Pecorino Romano cheese and a sprinkling of freshly chopped parsley to compliment the final dish. And I present to you our version of the 100 layer lasagna found in restaurants across the world.

But the real question is, after all this work, all this labor and all that time, how does it taste? You kind of need that extra sauce for the moisture and extra cheese for the saltiness to make this little brick of seared lasagna even tastier.

I think that’s a really cool way of starting lasagna instead of having to scoop it out of a nice dish. We also made sure that absolutely 0% of this lasagna was wasted. All of those trimmings and leftover lasagna was going to be trimmed up and sliced into large portions

For our entire studio to take home. Each person probably took home one to two giant gallon Ziploc bags with breaks of lasagna in it. It’s going to be a great holiday. – [Narrator] Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today’s episode. They’ve been a great partner in supporting the Babish culinary universe

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