The Emilian pride!
You will need
- 500 gr fresh pasta (better with eggs)
- 1 litre bechamel sauce (click qui)
- A portion ragù sauce
- 50 gr parmesan
Have you seen our post about making canelloni? Not yet? Do it right now, as the preparation of canelloni pasta is almost similar to that of lasagna. In both cases, the first thing we have to do is to prepare an egg pasta (at most cases), to let it rest and then to form well floured sheets. So, it is more than necessary to read our fresh pasta encyclopaedia (click qui) in order to find out what you have to do to prepare the pasta dough and to turn it into sheets.
Then you have to prepare a ragù, in other words a meat sauce for stuffing.
– What the hell are you saying to the readers? I have eaten meatless lasagna a lot of times
– You are right. Lasagna stuffing can be with or without meat. But the most classic, the most known, the most adored stuffing is with tomato-meat-beschamel cream sauce. We can use either the bolognese (you can find it qui) or any other ragù sauce from our site (click qui) or you can prepare your own ragù, as I did today.
You, first of all, have to use a fatty piece of meat and you also need to add a portion of pancetta. I would suggest a combination of beef and pork shoulder. It is crucial that the meat becomes very very tender. So, you have to cook it for hours, always at low temperatures.
When the meat is ready, we separate it from the sauce and with a ladle we turn it to very small pieces.
When finished we return the meat into the sauce and we let it rest and soak in it.
We also subfry the pancetta, cut in pieces, making it crrrrrunchy.
Meanwhile we turn pasta dough into sheets and we prepare the bechamel sauce. By the way, look how the meat haw already absosbed by the red sauce.
The bechamel sauce should not be very thick, as its cooking will continue in the oven.
We begin the assembling of our lasagna by spreading a part of the bechamel sauce in the bottom of the baking pan.
We continue with a part of meat and red sauce.
We cover with pasta sheets. Pasta sheets must be simmered if they are thick, otherwise they can be used raw. DO NOT USE ready made dry pasta sheets. DO NOT press firmly the pasta sheets.
With our fingers we push the pasta sheets against the edges of the baking sheet, trying to “seal” the whole preparation.
We continue adding portions of meat (with a little amount of red sauce),
bechamel sauce,
and fried pancetta pieces, repeating the procedure.
We finish with “construction” of lasagna with bechamel sauce and we sprinkle with cheese.
We preheat the oven at 160 Celsius degrees. We bake the lasagna, covered with aluminum foil for about an hour. We raise the temperature to max, we remove the aluminum foil and we continue baking, untill the surface becomes ………. LIKE THIS
You understand that the lasagna must be lightly brown on the top, but juicy and very tender inside. Just wait at least 30 minutes, letting the lasagna to cool a little bit and then cut it into pieces. You must take a result like this.
