Several of my co-workers asked me for my Bolognese Lasagna recipe after I posted the following pic on Flickr.

Bolognese Lasagna
The problem, I actually don't have a recipe for the lasagna. This is one of the dishes I make entirely from taste, the ratios of ingredients for a pair of 10" rectangular pyrex pans honed from practice.

Here are some cook's notes from my most recent attempt:

Since I still haven't purchased a pasta maker, I use dry. Though, I have found, and this may shock some of my readers, ready-bake pasta sheets make better lasagna, at least in my kitchen.

Ready-Bake Pasta Sheets
The reason involves the time it takes the trays of lasagna to bake in the oven. I have found dried pasta sheets, even when par-cooked or just cooked to super-al dente (a little more toothy than toothy) lose their starch coats after baking. The meaty bolognese I make is by no means wet, but enough moisture is present that the pasta sheets comes out with a slippery texture.

I usually start with 2 lb's of medium ground beef. Lean will do, but fattier beef sears off better. Yes, you read sear. Over the years, I have found that a rich ragu, which is what a bolognese essentially is, comes from scraped fond and seared ground meat. Flavour, comes from adding spicy Italian sausage meat. For 2 lbs of meat, 2-3 sausage links worth of sausage meat, generously dosed with red pepper flake, paprika, and black pepper adds spice for flavour and fat for texture.

This time around, I decided to capture juices by adding fried breadcrumbs, mixed with dried herbs, to the ground meat mixture before searing it up in a metal pan. By frying the breadcrumbs crisp beforehand, they took on some toasted flavours. Both the breadcrumbs and herbs hydrated when the meat cooked, trapping juices.

When cooking the ground meat mixture, cook in batches and let the meat sit for a minute or two to develop a crust. De-glaze after every batch with a splash of dry white wine (no more than 3 tbsp), reserving the deglazing liquid for the following tomato syrup.

For the tomato component, I made a concasse using two cans of plum tomatoes. I seeded the tomatoes, draining them of their canning liquid and juice and reserving both. The tomatoes, I roasted in the oven at 350F for 90 minutes to concentrate flavours and slightly toast the tomatoes. The canning liquid, juice, and white wine deglazing liquid mixture, I slowly reduced on a stove into a thick syrup, resembling pancake syrup. I then blended both together in a table top blender, pulsing until almost smooth.

When you purchase canned tomatoes, read the labels for sodium content. Purchase only canned plum tomatoes whose salt is no more than 50 mg/125 mL (1/2 cup). Primo brand tops out at 300 mg/125 mL (1/2 cup), an unnecessary amount.

Always, always taste the bolognese as it comes together. Some canned tomatoes taste better seasoned than others, even despite the salt content on the label.

To the tomato component, I added sweated finely chopped mirepoix vegetables: 2 parts onion, 1 part carrot, and one part celery. I find that 2 small cooking onions to 2 stalks of carrots and celery is optimal, but it depends on taste. Sometimes I add more. Sometimes I add less.

To complete the bolognese, the tomato component was mixed together with the meat component and heated through.

Every layer of pasta sandwiches a layer of ragu and a layer of bechemel. For the bechemel, I usually use 1/3 cup flour, 1/3 cup canola oil, and 2 cups of milk. To flavour it, I like to infuse garlic by dropping 3 whole cloves into the milk as it thickens. I retrieve and discard the cloves as I build the lasagna.

The topping is a mixture of bechemel and egg wash, something I borrowed from a Greek pastitio recipe I came across years ago.

That's it! When available, I make a concasse of tomato from vine ripened tomatoes. The fresh flavours transform the dish. Given that it's winter, we make do.



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