Do you know what lasagna is?This is a traditional Italian dish made from layers of dough, layered with filling and covered with sauce. It is a kind of casserole pie with a filling of minced meat or ragout, vegetables or mushrooms. Traditionally, lasagne is prepared with béchamel sauce and parmesan, mozzarella and ricotta cheese. And the composition (almost like pizza) of this dish is quite traditional: dough, filling, cheese. Initially, lasagne was cooked in ovens on special frying pans. In such frying pans, sheets of dough were placed mixed with filling and cheese. It is believed that the first lasagne was baked in Emilia-Romagna (one of the largest regions of Italy), and in Liguria they came up with the idea of adding sauces to lasagne. It is also known that sometimes lasagne dough was dyed green by adding spinach to it. By the way, it is also noteworthy that the recipe for lasagna was borrowed by the Poles, as a result of which already in the sixteenth century such a dish as lazanki appeared in Polish cuisine. There are a great many options for preparing lasagna, but the most famous recipe for this dish is lasagna bolognese. We suggest you prepare it.
Classical lasagna Bolognese
Recipe for classic lasagna bolognese to makeinto life is quite simple. The only snag may be Parmesan cheese. It is the hardest of all cheeses, distinguished by its special flaky structure and unique taste. Theoretically, it can be replaced in lasagna with any hard cheese, but the recipe for classic lasagna Bolognese implies exclusively Parmesan cheese. Ingredients:
- Sheets for lasagna - 1 package;
- Parmesan cheese - 150-200 g;
For the Bolognese sauce:
- Minced meat - 600-700 g;
- Fresh tomatoes - 2 pcs .;
- Tomato paste - 2 tablespoons;
- Olive oil for frying;
- Pepper and salt - to taste.
For the béchamel sauce:
- Milk - 1 l;
- Butter - 120 g;
- Flour - 3 tablespoons;
- Nutmeg - to taste.
Preparation:First, you need to cook the lasagna sheets: cook them according to the instructions on the package. By the way, you can buy these sheets in any supermarket in the pasta section. Cover the boiled sheets with cold water and leave until you assemble the lasagna. Next, start making the Bolognese sauce, which will actually be the filling. The Bolognese recipe is not complicated either. First, fry the minced meat in olive oil. While the minced meat is frying, you can make the tomato dressing. To do this, wash the tomatoes, peel them and chop them (you can use a blender or just use a knife). Mix the tomatoes with tomato paste and add this mixture to the minced meat. Add salt, pepper and continue cooking the sauce until the excess moisture evaporates and the sauce thickens. Then prepare the béchamel sauce. By the way, the recipe for this sauce was given to us by the French, but it is also successfully used in Italian cuisine. To prepare the béchamel sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan and mix it with flour, then add milk in small portions. And do not forget to constantly stir the sauce so that the flour does not stick together into lumps. This sauce also needs to be cooked until it thickens. Now that the sauces are ready, start assembling the lasagna itself. Take a baking dish, pour in a little white béchamel sauce and carefully spread it along the bottom. On top, overlap (edge to edge) two sheets of dough. Grease the dough again with white sauce and sprinkle with grated cheese, and pour a layer of Bolognese sauce on top of the cheese. Then repeat this layer of lasagna (dough, béchamel, cheese, Bolognese) three more times. In total, you should have at least four layers, and ideally - six. Pour the last top layer with white sauce and sprinkle generously with grated cheese. Place the lasagna dish in a preheated oven and bake for about forty minutes. If you reproduce the recipe and cooking steps without errors, you will get a classic Italian lasagna bolognese.
Lasagna Bolognese at home
In a simplified version, this dish also hasright to exist. What to do if you can't find Parmesan cheese with fire (well, not all of us live in the capitals!), and it's also problematic to buy ready-made lasagna sheets? In this case, we offer you a recipe for homemade lasagna bolognese. And we will make the sheets for it ourselves. For the dough, we will need the following ingredients:
- Flour 300 gr;
- Eggs - 3 pieces;
- Salt - 1 teaspoon;
- Spinach - 100 g.
For the Bolognese sauce:
- Minced meat - 500 g;
- Tomatoes - 5 pcs .;
- Tomato paste - 2 tablespoons;
- Olive oil - 4 tablespoons;
- Salt and black pepper - to taste.
For the béchamel sauce:
- Milk - 1 l;
- Butter - 150 g;
- Flour - 3 tablespoons;
- Salt and nutmeg to taste.
For the cheese layer:Parmesan cheese or any very hard cheese – 150 g. Preparation: First, you need to prepare the lasagna dough. This recipe includes spinach, which will color the dough green, and as a result, our lasagna bolognese will turn out unusually beautiful. Grind the spinach (frozen must first be defrosted) in a blender. Pour the sifted flour onto the table in a mound and make a small hole in this mound, then pour raw eggs into this hole, add salt and spinach. Start kneading the dough until it becomes elastic and stops sticking to your hands and the table. Add flour if necessary, since the specified amount of flour may not be enough: different flours have different amounts of gluten. Wrap the well-kneaded dough in cling film and leave to rise for half an hour. After that, sprinkle the table with flour, divide the dough into three parts and roll each of them into a thin layer (one to one and a half millimeters). From the rolled layers, cut rectangular plates approximately ten by seven centimeters in size. Boil the plates one by one in salted water, rinse and lower into a bowl (saucepan) with cold water. Now we will need them only when assembling the lasagna. The recipe for Bolognese sauce is unchanged even in the homemade version of lasagna. Therefore, we prepare it in the same way as in the previous recipe. First, fry the minced meat in olive oil for ten minutes. After that, add tomato paste and chopped tomatoes puree to it, salt, pepper, mix and cook for another five minutes. For the béchamel sauce, mix melted butter with flour directly in the saucepan, and then, stirring constantly, cook the sauce, adding milk to the saucepan. There is another way to prepare this sauce. Pour milk into the saucepan and bring it to a boil. Melt the butter in a frying pan and mix with flour, resulting in a butter-flour gruel. Then dilute this gruel with a small amount of warm milk and pour the resulting mixture into the saucepan with milk. Then put the saucepan on the stove and cook the sauce over very low heat, stirring constantly, until thickened. When the sheets of dough and sauces for lasagne are ready, we begin to assemble it. Grease the baking dish with butter and pour a little milk béchamel sauce into it. Next, overlap the sheets of dough, sprinkle them with grated cheese and pour over the Bolognese sauce (minced meat with tomato). On top, put the dough again, white sauce, cheese, and béchamel sauce. There should be four to five such layers in total. Be sure to sprinkle the lasagna very generously with grated cheese on top, then place the lasagna dish in a preheated oven and leave for forty minutes. Try to cook this incredibly tasty Italian dish. You will definitely like it! It is not for nothing that the recipe for lasagna Bolognese is known and popular all over the world. Enjoy cooking! We recommend reading:
