Scratch That Lasagna!

helllllllo my lovely readers! Back with a new post today on home made, almost everything from scratch, lasagna! Although I was able to make the sauce about as home made as it gets, I unfortunately forgot my pasta maker at my other house, so I was stuck buying pre-made lasagna noodles. Anybody who knows me, knows that I am absolutely, ridiculously obsessed with spaghetti-or any pasta for that matter. The only time I ever use boxed pasta though, is when I am making it for myself. Other than that, I get out the semolina, put a little elbow grease into it, and make my own dough and roll it out in my pasta maker, but hey- thats another post. I figured to make up for my nonexistent home made noodle sheets, I should at least take the time to make my own sauce. Therefore, I went out, bought a bunch of tomatoes, and got down to business. Hope you enjoy it! 

First, we're going to start with the sauce since it will need to simmer for a long time. Take a pound of hamburger and brown it up in a medium to large saucepan. Leave all of the juices and grease that comes out of it in the pan. DO NOT DRAIN IT. It may sound gross, but trust me, compared to all of the preservatives and fake chemicals in canned sauce, this is nothing. Plus it will add a ton of flavor that you'll need. 

Then, you want to chop up a medium onion, not quite a dice, but a smaller chop, and add it into the pot. Sweat the onions in the same pot as the hamburger until they become tender and slightly translucent.

Once the onions are translucent, add about 3 cloves of garlic, 4 if they're small, and stir it all together. Let this cook into the meat and onion mixture for another 5 minutes or so. The onions should be almost fully translucent now. However, if they arent, dont hold off on adding the next ingredients until they become translucent because by now, the garlics oils have been released, and you could run the risk of burning the garlic. 

Now, for the aeromatics. I used 4 basil leaves from my garden. They are very large, so if you have smaller ones, use about 6 or 7. I know it seems that we are adding alot of garlic and basil but think about how bland a simmered down tomato would be. We need to add flavor, and aeromatics and garlic are the simplest way. Chop up some parsley and throw that in there, too. I used about 2 or 3 tablespoons.

Quick tip on chopping up basil, if you roll it up, then julienne it, then just do the same vertically, it is way easier to get a more uniform size cut. Hopefully you'll get more of an idea from the video above.

It should look something like this once youve chopped it all up. So, add that to the pot, and let it cook down and release all of its flavors.

Then, you want to take the stems out of about 8 tomatoes. I chose beefsteak because they have way less seeds than most other types of tomatoes, but if you have a garden and would like to use some of those, go for it.

Next, you want to add the tomatoes to a pot of boiling water. Let them cook in there for a few minutes.

When the skin is cracking like this, you know they are ready to be removed. Some might take longer than others, it just means that the ones that are done first are mature, which in turn gives them a thinner skin. 

Once they are done, scoop them right out of the pot of water into an ice bath. This process is called blanching. The reason you are putting them in the ice bath is to immediately stop the cooking process. If you were to just take them out of the boiling water, they would continue to cook once they were removed. However, this way, the tomatoes will reach and equilibrium between the temperature of the boiling hot water, and the ice cold water bath, and should come out to about room temperature. 

Once they are cool enough to handle, simply take the cracks that the boiling water had caused, and peel the skins off of the tomatoes. Once you have skinned all of them, add them into the pot of hamburg, onions, and garlic. Let them cook down and simmer for a couple hours. If you have a potato masher, you can use that to speed up the process if you'd like. This will just help the tomatoes break down at a quicker rate. You'll still have to it simmer down for a while though.

Once it has been cooking and simmering down for a couple of hours, it should look something like the picture above. If not, take the back of your spoon to crush the tomatoes, to emit more juices and speed up the process, and just let it simmer for longer. If it is a little bit more liquid-y than you think it should be, just simmer it down longer and it will eventually thicken up. Make sure you aren't simmering it covered though, because then all of the evaporation leaving the pot, which will thicken it, is just going to get caught on the lid and drip back in and make it even more liquidy. Low and slow is the best method here. 

While that is simmering, you want to mix together ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese, an egg, and some parmesan cheese. Mix that all together, and set it aside until its time to prepare the actual lasagna. 

Once you feel that your sauce is at a good enough consistency to put the lasagna together, boil your noodles. 

Put a little big of sauce in the bottom of your dish; just enough to keep the noodles from sticking when it is baking. Then, layer noodles on top of the sauce.

After you have placed your noodles down, spread some of the ricotta mixture on top of the noodles. Then more sauce, more noodles, and more ricotta. Keep repeating this process until your dish is filled.

Once it is almost filled to the brim, it should look something like this.

Then, you want to sprinkle about a cup and a half of mozarella cheese on top the of the lasagna, and about a cup of parmesan cheese. Then, bake it at 325 degrees, covered with aluminum foil for about 40 minutes. After the fourty minutes is up, you want to remove the tin foil, and bake it for about 15 to 20 more minutes. After youve finished cooking it, remove it from the oven and let it sit for about 10 minutes. This way it will cool off a little bit, which will help it get alittle bit firmer, so its easier for you to get a piece out of the dish.

Serve it up on some plates with a side salad, and maybe some crusty italian bread and you're good to go. If you try this, let me know how you like it! Also, let me know int he comments how you like having videos inserted in along with the regular blog entry. It's fairly simple to do, so if you like having them there, I definitely dont have a problem putting a couple in per post.

Until next time,

K