How to Make a Great Lasagne | or is it Lasagna…?

Lasagne is one of the best pasta dishes, and you can’t change my mind. In this video, learn how to make a delicious Lasagne from scratch. Enjoy!

Also, just a little note – you can now listen to my video in Spanish. Simply select the Spanish audio option in the settings while watching.

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RECIPE: https://www.andy-cooks.com/blogs/recipes/lasagne
Ingredients:
– 2 sticks celery, diced
– 1 large carrot, diced
– 1 brown onion, diced
– 4 cloves garlic, finely diced
– 500g pork mince
– 500g beef mince
– 700g tomato passata
– 250ml red wine
– 50ml olive oil, plus extra for frying
– salt, to taste
– 250g baby spinach
– 3 large eggs
– 320g Tipo 00 flour, plus extra for dusting
– 50g butter
– 50g flour
– 600ml milk, plus an extra 100ml
– 1/4 tsp ground fresh nutmeg
– 350g mozzarella, grated
– 100g Parmesan, grated, plus rind
– small bunch basil

Method:
1. To prepare the Sofrito, in a large pan, heat about 50ml of olive oil until hot. Add onions, carrots, and celery with a big pinch of salt, and sauté for 4-5 minutes. Add garlic, stir through, and cook for 1 more minute. Remove the sofrito from the pan and set aside.
2. To cook the meat sauce, place the pan back on the heat and add a little more olive oil. Add pork and beef mince, season with salt, and cook for 3-4 minutes to get some colour on the underside. Break up the meat with a wooden spoon, add red wine, and reduce by at least 80%. Add the sofrito back to the pan with the remaining tomato passata and Parmesan rind. Mix well, bring to a simmer, then lower the heat and cook covered for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.
3. To make the spinach pasta, blanch baby spinach in boiling salted water for 20 seconds, then plunge into ice water to stop cooking. Drain well, squeeze out excess water, and blend with eggs until smooth. Pour flour onto a work surface, make a well in the centre, add the spinach mixture and a pinch of salt. Work the mixture into dough, knead until smooth (about 8-10 minutes), and let rest for at least 45 minutes. Roll out dough to about 2mm thick, cut into sheets, blanch in boiling water for 2 minutes, then cool in water. Place onto an oiled tray until ready to layer.
4. For the béchamel sauce, melt butter in a pot over medium heat, stir in flour, and cook for 2 minutes. Gradually add 600ml of cold milk in stages, whisking until smooth. Simmer for 10 minutes, season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.
5. To assemble the lasagne, in a 23 x 30 cm oven dish, layer meat sauce, pasta sheets, mozzarella, and Parmesan, repeating until all ingredients are used, finishing with a layer of pasta. Spread remaining passata over the top layer of pasta, cover with foil, and bake at 180°C for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, discard foil, top with basil leaves, more mozzarella, and Parmesan, then return to the oven for 15 minutes. Finish under the grill until golden brown.
6. Let the lasagne cool slightly for 10-15 minutes, then slice and serve.

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Director, Chef and Host: Andy
Videographer, Editor: Mitch Henderson
Production Manager: Dazz Braeckmans
Editor: Caleb Dawkins

This classic Italian dish is
a household favourite
all over the world.
There’s many, many versions
and none of them are wrong.
All of them are delicious,
but your nonna’s is always
the best.
This is my version of a lasagne.
Let’s get stuck in.
So we’re
going to start with the ragu
and this is something that,
the more time you have,
the better.
What we’re going to need
to start is a sofrito.
So we’re going to do some
diced celery,
some diced carrot,
and some diced onion.
Controversially,
I also add garlic.
Now, I’m
not sure if that’s traditional.
Italians often
get frustrated
when people just
put garlic in everything,
but I think it definitely adds
something to it.
So what else are you
gonna need for your ragu?
Well, meat.
I have 500g of pork mince
and 500g of beef mince.
You can kind of use
whatever mince
you want really in here.
Duck works really, really well.
Make sure you do it
with something fatty,
like pork mince.
Veal mince is kind
of pretty traditional.
Lamb mince works really well.
So yeah,
if you don’t eat pork, feel free
to swap that out
for another mince.
Parmesan rind.
Now you’re going to use
parmesan later on
when we start layering it.
So cut the rind off
and we’ll use that in a second.
Tomato passata,
which is tomato sauce.
So not like the canned tomatoes.
This is cooked tomatoes,
like you see
the Italian families
make once every year
and they bottle their sauce
for the rest of the year.
That’s what this is.
I haven’t had the pleasure
of doing that yet.
I do want to do it one day, but
this is just a store
bought version.
And of course, I didn’t
forget the wine.
Now you can use
red wine or white wine.
I like to use a red wine.
Kind of a lighter red wine.
Salt and pepper.
Olive oil.
That’s pretty much it.
Let’s start cooking this ragu.
So pot with a lid.
Every time
scares the bejesus out of me.
Temperature on high.
Olive oil.
Alright, once
you get a bit of heat in
your pan,
doesn’t need to be ripping hot,
just a bit of heat,
we’re going to add
our onions, carrot
and celery.
Decent pinch of salt.
We’ll just sweat that down.
You don’t
want like heaps of colour,
but you do want it to start
breaking down.
One of the other things
to remember about this dish
is it takes time.
Once it’s up simmering,
this ragu,
you really want to cook it
for about two hours,
if not longer.
It’s not something that I make
midweek, it’s
usually something
I make on the weekends.
And because it
takes so much time to make one,
it doesn’t take much more time
to make two.
So I usually make two, I’m
only making one today,
but I normally make two,
and I shove one in the freezer
and it freezes
really, really well.
Alright,
this has been sweating down for
about 4 or 5 minutes now.
The veggies are starting
to soften.
But we don’t have much colour.
That’s what we’re looking for.
Time to
add the garlic.
And I’m actually going
to add
another drizzle of olive oil,
starting to
get a little bit dry.
Don’t want too much.
You don’t want it to get greasy,
but you still want to make sure
there’s enough oil on there
so that stuff doesn’t start
to stick and catch too quickly.
Alright.
We’re going to pull
this sofrito out.
Make sure you get all of it too.
Otherwise it’ll burn
in the next step.
Back on the heat.
Some more oil.
Let that come up to temperature
which shouldn’t take long
because your pan should be nice
and hot still.
I like to try
and break up my meat
a little bit before I put it in.
So I’ve got a plate
like the roughly the same size
as the pan.
If you break it up so it fits
the kind of shape of the plate,
you can kind of just
slide it in.
Season with salt
and then just leave it.
Let that come right
up to temperature and start
getting some good colour on it
before we start
moving it around.
Alright, now we can see it’s
kind of starting to ease up,
we can start breaking it up
a bit.
You don’t want it to catch, but
you do want this stuff here.
When you pull it back,
you kind of
want to see
like a nice golden colour
on the bottom,
because this is what
we’re looking for
on the underneath.
All this nice colour,
all that stuff is
delicious flavour.
You kind of want that there.
So continue breaking this up.
Now you’re not going to get that
colour over all the meat
unless you do really
small batches.
Which if you want to do
that, that’s perfectly fine, but
this recipe is
long enough for me
for a home meal.
I don’t stress too much.
I think you’re going
to build enough flavour
through the layering
of all these
beautiful ingredients.
Once you got that pretty
well broken up,
get your wine in there.
And this is the point
where you can scrape
all that beautiful
fond off the bottom of the pan.
I’m going
to let that wine reduce
right down to almost nothing.
I can see here
this wine’s reduced.
It’s almost gone.
It’s about over 50% now.
We’ll add our sofrito back.
Make sure you get all that
beautiful oil off
the bottom too.
We’ll stir that through
and then we’re just
going to reduce
the rest of that wine
until it’s pretty much all gone.
While that’s happening,
we’ll give it another decent
seasoning of salt.
We haven’t put heaps in there
just yet.
Don’t go too crazy,
but you can always add more.
But with seasoning it’s
really important
to season
all the way
through the cooking process,
not just add a little bit
at the start and all at the end.
Okay,
that pan is almost
completely dry.
You don’t want it to be 100% dry
or you’re
going to risk the chance of it
catching and burning,
which is what
you really don’t
want to do at this point.
Time to add our
passata
and just use a
little bit of water
to make sure you get all that
beautiful- whoa!
make a mess- tomato.
Got a bit overzealous
with me, me water
and my spoon just then, geez.
Going to have to have a bit
of a clean up in a second.
Mix that through,
then there’s not much more
you can do apart from
keep an eye on it
and let it do its thing.
Control the temperature.
You don’t want this
rapidly boiling,
you just want this simmering.
The only other thing left
is our piece of parmesan rind.
Put that in there.
Cover this up.
Nice low temperature,
little simmer.
One hour minimum.
Minimum!
Two hours is better.
Three hours
is incredible.
Four hours
if you love your family
all that much.
We’ll let that do its thing.
We’ll come back
and we’ll start
making some pasta in a second.
Just gonna have a little tidy up
because I made a bit of a mess.
Pasta.
Now I highly encourage you
to make your own pasta.
It’s not that hard
and it’s a great way
to learn with lasagne
because there’s
a little bit of room for error
I guess.
You can kind of hide
a few mistakes there.
If you are time poor
and you want to buy
pasta instead, please
buy the fresh sheets of pasta
that you can get in
the refrigerated section
in the supermarket.
Don’t use that dry stuff.
It doesn’t really work
for this style of-
well it does work, but
I think that the fresh sheets
work better.
So I’m going to make
like a spinach infused pasta
for a couple of reasons.
I think
just a good way to kind of get
some veggies into your diet
and it’s pretty easy.
It looks pretty good,
but by all means,
you can kind of
do the same recipe
without the spinach.
It will work just as well.
So I’ve got, 250 ish
grams of baby spinach.
A big pot of boiling water, I’m
going to season
that really well.
Then I got a bowl with lots
of ice and water in it and
all we’re going to do
is dump this spinach in here.
Literally
20 seconds.
Once it goes like a really dark
green, out it comes.
Let it drain off,
straight
and shock it into
the cold water.
We’re gonna turn that water off,
but don’t throw it out.
You can use that when we cook
our pasta sheets later on.
So put that to one side.
Get all this ice
out of here.
Pull all the spinach out
and let it drain in a rack
or on a spider.
I don’t know why
we call these things spiders.
I’m sure,
that’s not their official name.
And then we’re going to squeeze
as much water out of this
as we can.
It’s pretty important
to try and get
as much of it out,
because we are going to
blend this with the eggs
and that way
the recipe should still work.
If there’s too much
moisture in here
and you still use the
same amount of eggs,
your dough
is going to be to wet.
Alright, break
that up into the bowl.
And then I like to blend this,
but if you don’t have a blender,
don’t stress.
Just chop this really fine
with your knife
and mix it through.
It’ll work just the same.
This is just kind of a,
I guess, a bit of a cheffy
restaurant thing to do.
Actually, if you chop
with a knife too
it saves an extra dish.
So the spinach
and then we’re going
to put our eggs in here.
Hot tip
crack your eggs into
something else first,
because then if you do
get a bit of shell in there,
you can take it out
instead of ruining this.
Ooh.
*laughing*
Yeah righteo.
New blender too.
Not sponsored, I paid for it.
I don’t even know
how to use it.
Unbiased review,
can confirm, works well.
The other good thing about this
pasta is that you don’t need
any fancy equipment
apart from a rolling pin.
*Nervous laugh*
As I just use a blender.
Okay. Flour down.
Then our egg-spinach
in the centre.
Oh, how good does that look?
So that’s the difference between
using a blender
and hand cutting it as you’re
just going to get
like a more vibrant green
from the blender.
I was going to say
something, it’s
probably not true.
I’ll say it anyway.
Don’t quote me
because I have no idea
what I’m talking about.
I’m guessing it breaks the cells
down in the molecular…
*nervous laugh*
Ignore me.
I have no idea why,
why it gets really green.
Someone will let me know
in the comments.
I know how to cook.
I don’t know anything
about science.
Thank you to everyone
who let me know why
the vodka works
in the crispy batter.
Because the alcohol evaporates
quicker than water, so it makes
it crispier.
Genius.
Heston, you’re a genius.
Fork.
Start working your flour in.
Pinch of salt.
Once you kind of,
it’s kind of not going to
run everywhere,
I like to use a dough cutter
to start kind of chopping it in.
Just be patient.
Sometimes it does feel like,
‘oh, that’s that’s never going
to absorb all that flour.’
The flour doesn’t take
on the hydration super quickly.
So just be patient.
If you do need to add
a little bit of water,
then there’s no issue with that.
And if anything,
this dough feels like
it’s going to need
a generous dusting
on the board
for it to not stick.
But that’s okay.
It’s hard to describe
kind of the texture,
but if that’s happening, right?
Pretty quickly on that’s
sticking to my hand,
it feels like that’s probably
a little bit wetter
and that’s because of the
the moisture in the spinach.
So I can go pretty generous
because I know it’s
probably going
to need all that flour,
but we’re going to start
kneading.
You’ll need to knead this
until it’s nice and smooth,
which is probably going
to take about 8 to 10 minutes.
Kneading action
is pretty simple.
It’s using the palm
to push down and away,
flip it over
so you end up
with like a sandwich
and go again.
Sometimes you can get
two kind of swipes at it,
if that makes sense.
Now’s a great time to talk about
and think about why it’s spelt
with an E or an A.
Long story short,
in Italy, in the north
it’s spelled with an E.
In the south it’s
spelt with an A.
And I think the reason is
because in the North,
because it’s like plural, right?
In Italian, E means plural.
So there’s lots of layers.
In the South, it’s an A
because it’s singular,
because the whole dish,
even though it has layers,
it’s one dish.
So neither is wrong, really.
Look, how good’s that.
Feel free
to argue in the comments
about whether it’s an A or an E.
The engagement helps.
Alright, there you go.
That took me about
eight minutes, maybe.
So at this point
you can either
just cover it with clingfilm.
I like to use one of these
vacuum pack bags.
I’m just going to rest that
for half an hour,
half an hour
to an hour
before we roll it out.
You can rest it in the fridge.
I honestly just leave it out
at room temperature.
As long as your total process
of making
this is under two hours,
you’re fine
because I know
there’s raw egg in this.
If you think like it’s
going to take you
a bit longer than that,
then when you’re resting it,
just chuck it in the fridge
to keep that temperature
nice and under control.
So our pasta’s been resting.
It’s actually rested
for about 40 minutes now.
You can rest
as long as you want really.
If you want to have it,
like I say, don’t
leave it out all the time.
But if you’re going to rest it
for longer, two hours,
24 hours,
leave it in the fridge.
If you do rest it for more
than sort of three hours
or something,
and that core
temperature is right down
cold, you’ve
got to let it come out
and kind of come up
to room temperature
before you start rolling out,
or you’re
going to be
in all sorts of trouble.
The other thing
I got is my dish.
So this is a 23
by 30 centimetre dish.
I also have some flour
and some semolina mix
here, 50:50,
and that just helps
with us rolling it out.
Pasta out.
Dust it well.
We’re going to do
what’s called a lamination
first before we
really start rolling it out.
And don’t be afraid
with the flour
because we don’t
want this to stick anywhere.
Now I have a really big
rolling pin here.
You can do without.
You can do with a normal one.
It just makes it a bit harder.
So the first lamination,
we’re just going to roll it out.
Sorry about the noise
and try to keep it kind of
the same shape.
Dust any of that excess off.
And we’re going to fold it
like an envelope, over
and over.
Roll again.
We’re going to laminate
that once more
and then
we’ll start rolling it out.
So if you do have
a pasta roller,
feel free to use that.
The reason
why I like this method,
if you’ve got a pasta roller,
like one of the small ones,
one of these ones,
you can only make sheets
that wide, right?
There’s a bit of old pasta
there.
Important you don’t wash
these too.
Stuff gets stuck inside.
They don’t dry,
they rust, anyway.
You can only get them
that wide right?
Which is fine
if you’re making tagliatelle,
fettuccine, blah blah
blah blah blah.
For lasagne,
I like to do single sheets.
Makes it way easier
when we’re assembling it.
Enough gas bagging Andrew.
I’ve got a lot to say today
don’t I Mitchell?
Okay,
we’re on to the rolling part.
It’s pretty simple.
Start rolling, even pressure.
Try and keep an even shape.
When it starts
sticking to your board
like that, a little bit more
flour over the top.
So roll once,
twice, three times.
Turn your dough.
Once, twice,
three times.
Move your dough.
Flip it over every now and then.
Alright.
So we’re now at the point where
we’ve pretty much filled
the board and I have a big board
here.
Take the sheet,
I’m going to dust it really well
with flour and semolina..
And you can kind of adjust this.
You can feel how sticky it is,
how quickly
it’s absorbing this stuff as to
how much you have to dust it.
Now what we’re going to do
is, we’re going to start
stretching it over the pin.
So roll it over your pin,
tuck it under nice and tight,
hold the end
and stretch it over.
So that’s why
we need so much flour.
Because if it starts
to stick to each other,
you’re never going to get it off
the pin.
Get it to the end.
Add
some pressure
down.
Bring it back
and push.
Bring it back.
Make sure it doesn’t flip over
and push.
And you’ll see
it starts to get way looser.
And that’s
because it’s rolling out.
So we’ll pull that out.
Flip it over.
Make sure
we’ve got plenty of flour.
And we’ll do the
same on this side.
Now you can see
there’s like
Italian
nonna’s online,
they can get this stuff so thin.
It’s so incredibly impressive.
They’ve been doing it
a bit longer than I have.
So we’re not making tagliatelle.
We’re making lasagne sheets here
so they don’t need to be
paper-paper thin.
But you do want them
relatively thin.
Pretty happy.
I just want to make sure,
I’d like 5, or 6 ideally,
layers of pasta.
So if we go,
yeah, that’s 60.
And that’s 70,
20, 60.
Oh yeah.
We should get that right.
What’s 23 times 3?
Mitch: 69.
Andy: 69.
No it’s not.
Oh it is.
Mitch: 23 times 3, 69.
Andy: Alright.
We’re bang on.
Dazz:
Just thought Mitch
was being dirty.
Andy: Yeah I did.
I’m going to cut that in half.
So we have our six
layers of pasta.
Alright.
It’s time
to cook these.
Alright.
We’ve got boiling salted water.
In they go.
Just do one sheet at a time
for two minutes.
Then I’ve got a bowl of salted-
salted?A bowl
of iced water
that we’re going
to plunge it into after
to stop it from cooking.
Once it’s
cooled down in the ice water,
take it out
and let it dry on a rack.
Use a clean tea
towel between them.
Really important that these stay
nice and dry.
Okay, final thing
to make, the bechamel before
we start assembling.
In a pot,
heat on,
50g of butter.
Let that melt
before we add our flour,
50g of flour as well.
Once the butter’s melted, flour
and whisk.
We’re just gonna
whisk this and cook this
until the flour is cooked.
It’s probably going to take
one minute, two minutes.
Not that long.
It should start smelling like
cookie dough.
Alright.
Once your roux is cooked out,
going to start adding the milk.
500ml of cold milk.
Add it in two goes.
Add half of it,
whisk.
Then add the other half.
Make sure you get in the corners
so that you don’t have any roux
kind of stuck there.
We’re going to simmer this for
as long as it takes really,
until we get this consistency
we’re looking for, probably 10
-15 minutes.
While waiting for that
to come up to temp,
we can season it.
So we’ve got some fresh nutmeg,
maybe a quarter of a nutmeg
just finely grated in there.
Pinch of salt or two.
Some fresh ground pepper,
as much or as little
as you like.
Start to feel
it thicken already.
Once you get to
this consistency,
turn the heat off
and then you’re just going
to keep whisking it.
That didn’t even take that long.
Only took about five minutes.
Just going to keep whisking it.
You don’t want it
much thicker than that.
You want it
to kind of pour off a spoon.
If it gets too thick,
kind of gets a bit clumpy.
Let that kind of just
cool down a little bit.
I’m going to check our ragu,
see if that’s almost ready,
which I’m pretty sure it is.
We’ll get our cheese ready
and we can start assembling.
This has been
about 2.5 hours now
and it’s looking good.
The reason we keep the lid on
is so
that it doesn’t
dry out too quickly.
This is about the consistency
we are looking for.
So pretty happy with that.
Going to mix that through.
One last little step that
I want to do before
it’s ready to go,
which we’ll do now.
That is about 100ml of milk.
Seems kind of strange, but
makes sense to me.
Tastes good.
I’ve just spotted that parmesan
rind as well,
going to pull that out.
Stir that through.
I’m going to leave the lid off
now too.
Smells delicious.
Meaty.
And it looks all shiny
and velvety.
Have a little taste.
That needs nothing else.
Alright.
The last thing we need to talk
through is cheese.
Pretty simple.
Parmesan.
Parmigiano reggiano.
I like to use a fine microplane
to grate it.
Ooh, piece came off.
Mozzarella.
I’m just going to rate
the mozzarella in a box grater.
Then we can start assembling.
Got my dish.
Turn my oven on.
Phwoar, got me meat
sauce, got me
bechamel.
First layer ragu.
Don’t need heaps,
nice and evenly spread out.
Three spoons.
Pasta.
Now this looks a bit wide,
so we’ll
cut it down a bit.
Tomato sauce or
red sauce, meat sauce.
Whatever you call it.
Bechamel.
Mozz.
And repeat.
So the last layer, I’m
going to do pasta
and then we’re going to do
just straight passata,
straight tomato sauce.
And at the moment
we’re not going to
put any cheese on it either.
Just loosely cover that in foil.
That oven’s on 180ºc.
Bake that for half an hour.
I’m going to pull it out
and we’ll finish her off.
Let’s have a look.
It’s not finished.
Don’t forget that.
Just be careful.
We don’t really want it to stick
like it is.
So to finish
we’re going to take a leaf
out of Camilla’s book.
If you don’t know who
Camilla is, she’s
a fictional character
from my favourite TV
show of all time.
Sopranos.
Put a layer of basil leaves.
That’s Carmela’s lasagne.
The rest of the cheese.
Back to the oven
for 15 minutes
before we turn it to grill,
or broil if you’re in the US,
just to get that nice
golden top.
There it is.
Alright.
Suppose
we better cut some lasagne.
Look at those layers.
Now, the truth is that
you should really let
a lasagne sit
for like half an hour
and they’re actually better
the next day reheated.
They kind of keep their shape
a bit better, but
I guarantee you
they taste the same.
Delicious.
Meaty. Cheesy.
The tomato sauce with
this is slightly acidic.
It really cuts
through all that fattiness.
The pasta’s cooked really well
and you don’t
really taste the spinach at all
so a great way to sneak
some veggies in on the kids.
Definitely worth making.
Definitely make 2 or 3
and leave one in the freezer
for another day down the track,
but that’s a
classic for a reason.
Thank you all
so much for watching!
Please like this video
if it took anything
from it, and subscribe
if you’re not.
Because we’re here
every week with new recipes
and we’ll see you next Sunday,
if we don’t see you sooner.
Peace.