Lasagna

Someone had the audacity to post a recipe, "World's Best Lasagna" after seeing it touted on the ABC program Good Morning America. The rationale for claiming this top planetary ranking was the fact that the recipe had received 8,000 five-star reviews on a popular recipe site over an eleven year period. That's less than a thousand up-votes a year!  Good Morning America obviously agreed with this hubris and didn't bother to question the facts, which ought to tell you something about ABC programming standards.  How can 8,000 votes constitute "world's best" when as of this writing, there are 7.8 billion people on this planet?  Even if you ruled out five or six billion people who've never eaten lasagna, 8,000 is still an infinitesimally small percentage hardly worthy of a global title.

Leaving the math aside for a moment, how can a lasagna claim such a hyperbolic award when it doesn't even include a little red wine in its list of ingredients; nor any green bell pepper?  Such tripe and balderdash!  I won't claim my recipe is the world's best, but I will tell you it at least includes red wine and green bell pepper.

What you need for a great lasagna is a great meat sauce, and if you can't make my Baked Italian Meat Sauce and don't want to go with my Crock Pot Lasagna version of this classic Italian dish, then this is a pretty good recipe to go with.  This will make enough for one 9" x 13" casserole dish and I recommend you buy a couple of those aluminum baking dishes they sell at the grocery store, one of which you should use just for support.  It makes for much easier storage and clean-up, particularly if you buy the ones that provide a plastic lid.  It's great also if you're planning on leftovers, and unless you're sharing this lasagna amongst six people, plan on it.

There is some debate among food historians on the origins of Lasagna given that the root word is not Italian, but Greek.  "Laganon" was the Grecian word used to describe the first known pasta.  Some say the British invented Lasagna because it first appeared in print in the late 14th century. But most believe that a 1390s cookbook would have had few newly inspired recipes, and sought merely to capture and record already known recipes in common use at the time.  There was certainly nothing new about layers of sauce and pasta. 

In fact, the Romans used the word "Lagana" so its likely lasagna has been around since well before the Middle Ages, and has undergone many iterations to get to what we now hold up as a classic Lasagna.  Cheese wasn't introduced until the late 13th century.  Eggs were not used in the recipe until the Renaissance.  And tomatoes were considered poisonous until the late 19th century. 

The layered dish we now call Lasagna came about in the city of Bologna in the 1800s and contained egg pasta dough with spinach, ragù sauce, béchamel sauce and grated Parmigiano.  

Americans in the 1950s replaced béchamel with ricotta, mixed with Parmesan cheese and egg yolks, and began adding more cheese in-between the layers of pasta, including mozzarella and provolone.

Aside from adding red wine and green bell pepper to the "World's Best" recipe from the dallasduobakes website, I use green onions in my meat sauce recipe and always have.  I think it gives the sauce a brighter, garden-onion flavor that doesn't contain the heavier, sulfur undertones of white or yellow onions. 

I also used cottage cheese instead of ricotta because that's what I happened to have on hand.  Ricotta has a bit more umami flavor, but cottage cheese works just fine.

Ingredients
5-6 large green onions, trimmed and finely sliced
1 medium green bell pepper, cored and finely diced
2 tbsp garlic, minced
1 lb ground 80/20 beef
1 lb ground mild Italian sausage
1 24-oz jar Bolognese sauce (like, Rao or Classico)
1 14.5-oz can tomato sauce (like, Hunts)
1 14.5 oz can petite diced tomatoes (like, Hunt's)
1 5.5 oz can tomato paste (like, Hunts or Contadina)
1-1/2 to 2 cups dry red wine
2 tbsp dried Italian seasonings
2 tbsp dried parsley
1 tbsp dried basil
16 oz small-curd cottage cheese (like, Breakstone or Daisy) - or use ricotta cheese
2 egg yolks
3/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese (like, the Kraft green can)
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
12 oz grated mozzarella cheese
6-7 slices provolone cheese
6 oz fresh grated Parmesan cheese
9-10 lasagna noodles
olive oil for sautéing
non-stick cooking spray (like, Olive Oil Pam)

The Recipe
In a large stock pot bring salted water to boil and cook the lasagna noodles for 10-13 minutes until they are al dante, but do not over cook. I like to cook an extra noodle or two just in case I need to fill in some gaps while making the lasagna. Drain well and transfer the pasta to a mixing bowl of cold water until ready to be assembled in the dish.

In a sauce pot, sauté the green onions and bell pepper in olive oil over medium high heat until limp, 8-10  minutes.  Add the garlic, then add the ground beef and Italian sausage, and cook until all the pink color is gone, stirring constantly. Drain off any rendered fat.

Add the Bolognese sauce, petite diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste, red wine, Italian seasonings, parsley and basil, and stir well to combine.  Add a little more wine if the sauce is too thick.  You want the consistency of a loose salsa. Bring the sauce to a simmer.

Now, you can simmer the sauce over low heat on the stove, but you'll need to be very attentive, stirring frequently, to keep things from burning on the bottom of the pot.  I prefer to put my sauce, covered, in a 325-degree oven, which is goof-proof.  Cook the sauce for 90-minutes to two hours.  Remove from the heat source and allow to cool a bit.

In a mixing bowl, combine the cottage cheese (or ricotta cheese), egg yolks, grated Parmesan (and I strongly recommend the Kraft green can for this), salt and pepper, and stir well to combine.

Set up an assembly station with the following in this order: the pasta; a couple of clean, dish towels folded in half and topped with paper towels; your aluminum casserole dish sprayed with the non-stick cooking spray; the pot of meat sauce; the cottage cheese mixture and the other three cheeses.

Here are the assembly instructions:

• Using a slotted kitchen spoon, start by putting enough meat sauce to cover the bottom of the casserole dish.  Allow the slotted spoon time to drain away some of the liquid before spooning into the dish.
• Lay out each lasagna noodle one at a time on the towels and using another paper towel, blot the noodle so it is reasonably dry.  Three lasagna noodles side-by-side will neatly cover the bottom of the dish with the meat sauce, but you may have to cut off an inch to an inch and a half of the length of the noodle so it rests flat.
  
• Spoon out 1/2 of the cottage cheese mixture and spread more or less evenly over the layer of pasta.  Top with 1/2 of the mozzarella cheese.
• Then, lay out another layer of pasta; top with meat sauce; top with the remaining cottage cheese mixture, and then lay out the slices of provolone cheese.
• Lay out the final layer of pasta; top with the meat sauce; top with the remaining mozzarella cheese and the freshly grated Parmesan cheese.

Cover and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours but you can even leave it overnight until ready to cook.  Refrigerating the lasagna gives it time to firm up and the flavors to amalgamate.  When you're ready to cook, uncover and place it in a 350-degree oven for 1-1/2 hours until the top is brown and bubbly.

Allow the lasagna to cool for 10-15 minutes before cutting into squares and serving along side a simple, Italian salad and a slice or two of garlic bread.