Hi everyone, I'm Gemma Stafford and this week on Bigger Bolder Baking I'm
going to show you how to make an entire lasagna from scratch.
I'm talking ricotta, the noodles, the meat sauce, everything.
Stick around and check it out.
So the first thing I'm going to do is start out with our bolognese,
because that needs to simmer and develop flavor and get all yummy.
So here I am at the stovetop.
In a large heavy bottomed sauce pan
over like a medium low heat i'm going to add in my olive oil.
A big glug of olive oil.
A few glugs.
When that's nice and warm, add in your onion.
So you want to sautee the onion for around 8 to 10 minutes or so.
Sautee means to soften and go translucent, but not to color.
Give em a little stir every few minutes so they don't stick to the pan.
Eight or nine years ago on YouTube, somebody asked me to make lasagna
and I thought to myself, I can't make a lasagna.
I'm a baking channel.
Like how how does that work?
And then, you know, it took me a few years, obviously,
but then all these years later, it was like, I make my own homemade pasta.
I make my own ricotta, I know how to make a bolognese,
like I'm a professionally trained chef.
Like, why don't I show everybody how to make a lasagna from scratch?
So here I am today doing lasagna from scratch.
The onions are looking good.
I'm now going to add in my garlic.
You have to have garlic in a lasagna.
Now we’re just gonna satuee that in there
for like 2 minutes or so just to get it nice and cooked, but not browned.
So i’m smelling my garlic, it's nice and fragrant.
So now we're going to add in our beef.
Good quality beef always, 80/20.
You want a bit of fat in there to make it nice and tasty.
Into our nice hot pan.
Now let me tell you a little something about cooking beef like this.
Make sure your pan is at a good medium heat.
If your pan is not hot enough, your meat will stew,
which means it will release a lot of liquid and it won't color.
And we don't want that.
Also, don't move your meat around too much.
This applies to cooking meat in general.
The more you move it, the more it will kind of disturb it,
it won’t caramelize and it will also release liquid.
So just let it be for a few minutes.
We'll go back in and stir it when we know the time is right.
I'm going to give it a
stir now because I can see it's caramelizing and it's smelling good.
If you have one of these guys, it's a beef breaker upper
and they're really handy for like making lasagna and stuff.
So the beef is looking good.
It's almost fully cooked and I broke it down a lot.
I have a pet peeve and it's lumpy bolognese,
so just make sure you break down any of those lumps.
Now, here is my secret.
I've been doing this for years.
When you're adding tomato paste into beef, don't add it in after you add
in the tin of tomato sauce, add it into the beef by itself.
Here's what you have to do.
You actually have to cook tomato paste to really get it
to release its flavor and not taste kind of too raw tomatoey.
So put it in with the beef, stir it around
and almost like fry it off with the beef.
And what will happen is it'll soak up any liquid in the pan, if there is any,
and it will completely coat all the beef making it really tomatoey,
but also really rich and just like penetrating that beef.
You can see I’m very passionate about this.
But I think that's a very good tip.
So just fry off the tomato paste for around 2 minutes or so.
You'll know when it's done, you’ll kind of feel it.
Okay, this is looking good.
Now in goes our crushed tomatoes.
I like to use crushed tomatoes. You can also use chopped.
I’m gonna put a little bit of water in my bowl to get rid of all that extra stuff
and just to thin out our sauce a little bit.
And then lastly, before we let it simmer, a little bit of sugar.
Now the sugar is because of the tartness and the acidity in the tomatoes.
So a splash of sugar in there, just a small amount neutralizes that acid
and will just make our sauce a much more balanced flavor.
Okay, this is looking lovely.
That is the hard work done there.
So here's what we're going to do. Put a lid on.
We don't want to lose any extra liquid.
We want it to be actually quite a saucy sauce.
When you're making lasagna,
you need a little bit of extra wetness to soak up for the noodles.
So we're going to put a lid on, i'm going to move it over here
and I'm going to put it on a low setting.
I'm going to let that simmer away for around 45 minutes, maybe even an hour.
Just let it really break down.
Let the flavors just all marry together and get delicious.
While that's doing that,
let's head over to the countertop and we'll make our homemade pasta.
So while our bolognese
is simmering away over there, we are going to make our homemade pasta.
Now, this recipe is my two ingredient pasta from my website.
People love this pasta.
You're going to want to make it from scratch;
it makes such a difference to your lasagna.
So here we have our flour.
This is just regular all purpose flour.
We’re going to make a well in the middle.
We're getting legit here.
Like, we're going to do this all by hand.
We're not even using a bowl.
I hope this was a good idea.
Not to use a bowl.
We’ll soon find out.
Okay, here we go. In with our eggs.
Room temperature eggs, they’ll just blend in so much better.
And use large eggs.
It'll take around four large eggs or around five small eggs.
So go in with a fork and just break up those yolks and start
to slowly kind of incorporate the flour into your eggs.
And by doing this, you're slowly starting to bring your dough together.
So this is a bit of a messy job, but believe me, it's well worth it.
You're going to have to get stuck in there.
You have to get stuck in when you're making pasta.
It's part of the fun.
I'm going to go in with my hands now and bring the dough together.
What we're going to do as the dough comes together is kind of also knead it gently.
We're going to knead it for a few minutes
to pick up all those dry bits of pasta.
By the time we're done kneading,
all of this will have been incorporated into our dough, all these dry bits.
So for those of you who have not made your own homemade pasta before,
it is incredibly easy and it is life changing.
I make it with George sometimes and we do it by hand
and he absolutely loves that.
And just the delicateness of the pasta and the flavor
and like making your own sauce to go on top.
And usually I only do like Kerrygold, salt and pepper,
maybe a little bit of truffle oil or something.
Just amazing.
So there you go.
Our dough is looking good. It came together.
It feels nice and tight, not too wet,
and we picked up all of our dry bits.
Wrap this puppy up
and pop em into the fridge.
So now with pasta dough, for the years that I've been making it,
you don't want to let it sit too long in the fridge.
I just think it's best if you use it within a few hours.
So I'm going to
put this into the fridge, let it rest.
We're going to make our ricotta.
and by the time we're done with that, it'll be ready
to rock and roll.
So homemade ricotta is absolutely delicious and super easy.
A few years ago, I made it as part of my Bold Baking Basics series,
and it's one of my most popular videos to date.
People just love it either to have in a lasagna
or an Italian dish to bake with or even just to eat warm as is.
It's super yummy.
So definitely check out that video if you haven't already seen it.
So here is my nice large big pot.
We're going to make a big batch.
I'm going to put the heat on a medium and we're going to go in
with our full fat milk.
So you want whole milk,
full fat milk because it will produce more curds, more ricotta.
Don't use low fat, slim, anything like that.
And also, fat is flavor.
We want all that yummy flavor in there.
And I'm going to go in with more milk.
Next, we're going to add in our heavy cream.
And then lastly, salt.
So now all we have to do is just wait and let this mixture come to a simmer.
Once it does, then we're going to move on to our next step.
So my liquid has come to a simmer. Here
I have in my hand some lemon juice.
You can also use a vinegar like apple cider vinegar or a white vinegar.
And we're going to pour this in
and stir.
And this is what is going to curdle our dairy.
Now, I turned it down
on a low setting and I'm going to keep on stirring this.
And I can see it happening.
Do you see this? Do you see those lumps?
There is our ricotta. So this is great.
That actually happened really fast.
If it doesn't happen for you straight away and you feel like you're not going
to get the curdles, add in a little bit more acid and it will happen.
And just so you know, in case you see very little curds or something
like that, it's generally because you didn't have enough fat in your dairy.
So good full fat milk. Look at those curds.
Oh, my gosh. Lovely.
Okay, I'm going to turn off the heat.
Very carefully
going to bring this over the counter top.
Join me over there because we're going to finish this off.
So here is my ricotta.
Now we have to strain it.
So very simply, get a strainer, a sieve, something like that.
Put it in a big bowl or a pot like I did.
I have cheesecloth here, which is super handy. If you do not have cheesecloth
that's totally fine.
You can use like a thin tea towel or something like that.
And here's what we're going to do.
Gently.
Oh, pour it in.
Look at that.
You are now a cheese maker.
Do you know that?
You just made your own homemade cheese.
There we go.
This looks amazing.
It smells really good, too.
So here's what we're going to do.
We're going to let this hang here and drain, I usually say, around an hour or so
What we want to do is actually let it cool down
because we need to be able to handle it
afterwards and mix in some other ingredients.
So this is just going to hang out for a little bit and do its thing.
Now's a good time to turn off our bolognese
and we're going to add in some salt and pepper to season it.
I'm going to leave this here for a little bit until I'm ready for it.
Our last step before assembly is to roll out our homemade pasta.
So here I have my Kitchen Aid. Now, if you want,
If you're feeling ambitious, you can roll this by hand.
It's totally possible.
However, I want like a certain thickness to my noodle.
So I'm going to use my KitchenAid.
So here's what I'm going to do, and it's going to dust my dough a little bit.
I'm going to cut it into like six pieces,
kind of more manageable pieces for me to work with.
So I'm going to put my pasta machine on the widest setting
and then you get thinner and thinner and thinner as you go.
Turn this on and we're going to roll some pasta.
There's something very therapeutic about this. At any point if you
need a little bit of extra flour
don't be afraid to dust that dough.
Using a pasta machine
makes this so much faster.
And you also get like the perfect thickness to your noodle.
If you want to do it by hand, then definitely
check out my video of how to make homemade two ingredient pasta
and it'll show you how to roll it out and how to get it as thin as possible.
Okay, I'm going to run this through one more time, so I'm going for like
roughly a five or a six
on the machine.
I want a lasagna sheet that has a bit of bite to it.
That's a little bit thicker
you know? That doesn't just disappear into the lasagna.
Once your pasta is rolled out,
just cut your noodles roughly 12 inches by four inches.
This is the perfect size for our dish.
How satisfying is that homemade sheets of Lasagna.
Okay, now we have all the elements that we need for our lasagna.
Let's assemble it and get it into the oven. Before assembly
preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit or 190 degrees Celsius.
Here I have a nice big nine by 13 lasagna dish.
So our first layer is going to be a layer of sauce, and we want that there
so our noodles have something to soak up.
Then we're going to lay down our fresh noodles,
more sauce on top, our lovely ricotta
dollop that around as evenly as you can, and then some shredded mozzarella.
Now we're going to repeat those layers again.
It's really simple.
I do pasta, meat sauce, more ricotta, mozzarella. Repeat.
So if you're making my lasagna from scratch, I don't recommend
that you make it the night before just because with the fresh noodles,
they can get kind of gummy sitting in all the liquid.
But I would say, you know, make it a few hours in advance and then bake it off.
Also, this will freeze really well.
And then for the last layer, I finish it off with last sheet of pasta,
some meat sauce,
and then sprinkle over the more generous amount of mozzarella on top.
As you can tell already by looking at this, it's going to feed an army.
So if you're going to make it make sure you have friends and family
coming over. kay, there's our masterpiece ready to be baked off.
I'm going to cover it in some foil
and then let's get this into the oven.
So your lasagna for 25 minutes covered and then take off the tin foil
and do another 30 minutes uncovered until lovely golden brown on top.
Now, I didn't par-cook the noodles in case you're wondering that; you don't
need to actually cook them. You can just put them in there
and they will cook in the dish while it's baking.
Oh, this looks amazing.
And it's all lovely and bubbly and cheesy.
Oh, my gosh. This.
This is perfection. I'm very happy right now.
So what I have to do is be patient.
Let your lasagna sit, let it relax for around, like half an hour, 45 minutes.
Just rest a little bit and then we're going to come back and cut into it.
So this is the payoff.
Look at that.
Beautiful.
All those lovely layers, the meat sauce, the ricotta, that lovely fresh pasta.
Oh, my gosh. Heaven.
And it's steaming hot. I’m laughing,
because I'm very happy right now.
I left the noodles a little bit thicker
so they had more bite.
Meat sauce is absolutely delicious.
Homemade ricotta.
I mean, who makes lasagna with homemade ricotta?
I'll tell you who. We do.
You are going to absolutely lose it when you make this
lasagna.
I really hope you enjoyed this video, but I want you to let me know in the comments
below what other recipes you'd like to see me make completely from scratch.
I love a good challenge.