Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [104]
LASAGNE
Properly made lasagne consists of several layers of delicate, nearly weightless pasta spaced by layers of savory, but not overbearing filling made of meat or artichokes or mushrooms or other fine mixtures. The only pasta suitable for lasagne is paper-thin dough freshly made at home. If you have not mastered rolling out pasta by hand, the machine method does a fully satisfactory job with nearly no effort.
It might take a little more time to run pasta dough through a machine than to go to the market and buy a box of the ready-made kind, but there is nothing packed in a box that can lead to the flavor of the lasagne you can produce in your kitchen. Using clunky, store-bought lasagne may save a little time, but you will be sadly shortchanged by the results.
Baked Green Lasagne with Meat Sauce, Bolognese Style
For 6 servings
Bolognese Meat Sauce, the full amount
Béchamel Sauce, using 3 cups milk, 6 tablespoons butter, 4½ tablespoons flour, and ¼ teaspoon salt
Homemade green pasta dough, made by the machine method, OR by the hand-rolled method, using 2 large eggs, ⅓ package frozen leaf spinach OR 6 ounces fresh spinach, salt, and approximately 1½ cups unbleached flour
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons butter plus more for greasing a 9- by 12-inch bake-and-serve lasagne pan, no less than
2½ inches high ⅔ cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese
1. Prepare the meat sauce and set aside or, if using sauce you’ve previously frozen, thaw about 2½ cups, reheat gently and set aside.
2. Prepare the béchamel, keeping it rather runny, somewhat like sour cream. When done, keep it warm in the upper half of a double boiler, with the heat turned to very low. If a film should form on top, just stir it when you are ready to use it.
3. Make green pasta dough either by the machine method, or by the hand-rolled method. Roll it out as thin as it will come by either method. If making the dough by machine, leave the strips as wide as they come from the rollers, and cut them into 10-inch lengths. If making it by hand, cut the pasta into rectangles 4½ inches wide and 10 inches long.
4. Set a bowl of cold water near the range, and lay some clean, dry cloth towels flat on a work counter. Bring 4 quarts of water to a rapid boil, add 1 tablespoon salt, and as the water returns to a boil, slip in 4 or 5 of the cut pasta strips. Cook very briefly, just seconds after the water returns to a boil after you dropped in the pasta. Retrieve the strips with a colander scoop or slotted spatula, and plunge them into the bowl of cold water. Pick up the strips, one at a time, rinse them under cold running water, and rub them delicately, as though you were doing fine hand laundry. Squeeze each strip very gently in your hands, then spread it flat on the towel to dry. When all the pasta is cooked in this manner, 4 or 5 strips at a time, and spread out to dry, pat it dry on top with another towel.
Explanatory note The washing, wringing, and drying of pasta for lasagne is something of a nuisance, but it is necessary. You first dip the partly cooked pasta into cold water to stop the cooking instantly. This is important because if lasagne pasta is not kept very firm at this stage it will become horribly mushy later when it is baked. And you must afterward rinse off the moist starch on its surface, or the dough will become glued to the towel on which it is laid out to dry, and tear when you are ready to use it.
5. Preheat the oven to 400°.
6. Thickly smear the bottom of a lasagne pan with butter and about 1 tablespoon of béchamel. Line the bottom of the pan with a single layer of pasta strips, cutting them to fit the pan, edge to edge, allowing no more than ¼ inch for overlapping.
7. Combine the meat sauce and the béchamel and spread a thin coating of it on the pasta.