Homemade lasagna is a delicious idea any night of the year, but it is especially prevalent at holiday dinners and on special occasions. But if Grandma’s lasagna is on your holiday menu this year, you may want to take heed of some warnings currently getting a lot of attention on social media, and it begins with the type of pan your lasagna is in, and how that pan reacts to the lasagna’s ingredients and the heat of the oven.
Recently, a Threads user got a lot of attention for a post about a lasagna disaster that occurred, when the foil baked into her lasagna as it baked, making the lasagna unsafe to eat.
Among the comments, some referred to what had happened as the “lasagna battery” effect, and it’s something that has actually been getting attention in pop culture and on social media for a long time.
A great explainer of what this effect is, and how it ruins your lasagna (and possibly your oven and your kitchen while you’re at it) is in a recent YouTube explainer, depicting lasagna as, believe it or not, a renewable resource, and how the components of the foil and the pan actually react with the components in the lasagna (that’d be the lasagna ingredients!) and create a form of battery, whereupon the burning effect happens.
This actually came up in an episode of “A Man on the Inside” this season during a Thanksgiving episode. “I think what just happened was you accidentally made a lasagna battery,” Ted Danson’s character said. “The steel pan acts as the cathode and the aluminum port, and then all the acid and the salt in the lasagna is the electrolyte. So a current just runs all through it.”
So, basically, if you use a reactive pan, it may just go ahead and react. Stick to non-reactive and have it just do the job it’s there to do, such as make your lasagna.
So, all that science aside, how to save your lasagna, and your holiday dinner? Well, don’t use a steel or aluminum pan, for one. Perhaps this is a good excuse to invest glass or ceramic pan and avoid having to make a call to the fire department in the middle of Christmas dinner.
Dining and Cooking