It’s a bit of the maverick among pasta types. Whereas you prepare all other Italian pastas in more or less the same way, it’s a completely different story for lasagna.
Lasagna is pasta from the oven. The most famous dish with lasagna is therefore simply called “lasagna al forno”: lasagna from the oven. Maybe it’s just because it’s a little different from other Italian pastas, but lasagna is one of the most popular pasta dishes out there.
Everything you need to know about lasagna
You can tell all kinds of things about the pasta form, about the possible recipes, about the preparation, but of course there is only one question that everyone really wants to know the answer to: is it lasagne or lasagna?
It’s both good, but if you want to be bland you could say that lasagna makes a very sparse dish. After all, lasagna is the Italian singular of the thin sheet of dough and lasagna is the plural form.
Lasagna sheets
No butterflies, no shells, no spirals; the form of lasagna, for all its simplicity, is nevertheless perhaps the most recognizable pasta there is.
You lay out the thin lasagna sheets layer by layer in the baking dish, with sauce between the layers and a nice grated Italian cheese on top to top off the dish.
Maybe some sheets are bigger than others or just a millimeter thicker or thinner, but where other types of pasta get a different name lasagna remains just lasagna. Nice and simple, honest and delicious.
About lasagna
If you dig around a bit on the Internet you will come across the most wonderful stories. What is certain is that lasagna is many centuries old.
The meaning of the word can be “flat dough” (then it would be a Greek translation) or “cooking pot” (from Latin). Both sound plausible and well, it’s not much of an issue beyond that. It’s all about the here and now and making great dishes with lasagna.
Lasagna recipes
As with almost all pasta recipes, the great thing about lasagna is that you can endlessly vary it to your own taste. Especially with an oven dish like this one, you can easily add or omit ingredients. This does not affect the preparation of lasagna, as long as you don’t do any crazy culinary tricks.
In Italy, lasagna all’Emiliana and lasagna Napoletana are known and loved, named after the region and city they come from. The former is filled with the tomato-meat sauce ragù, a bechamel sauce and has cheese on top.
The version from Naples has more vegetables, but if you look up twenty recipes, all twenty are slightly different.
Making lasagna
You prepare lasagna with your sauce as a base. First you make the sauce and then you put a layer of sauce in the oven dish, then a few lasagna sheets, then sauce again and so on, until the sheets are finished (count on 100 to 125 grams of pasta per person).
The bechamel sauce, which goes wonderfully with the tomato sauce, is simply made from butter, flour and milk, and the cheese on top must, of course, be a good Italian one. In a good half hour in the oven, the lasagna is ready. Let it taste good!