- Making lasagna can be a huge undertaking,
but our recipe takes a few simple shortcuts,
and the result is just as delicious
as something your grandma would make.
We're using some of our favorite shortcut ingredients.
This is Delish's favorite marinara sauce.
Rao's is also a really famous restaurant in New York
that is super, super exclusive.
We've never been invited,
so we just have to use their sauce.
We're gonna start with boiling some lasagna noodles.
I'm gonna give the water a lot of salt
because we know how important that is.
While that water is coming to a boil,
we can start cooking our beef.
Large skillet over medium heat.
I'm just gonna add a little olive oil.
We're just using straight up ground beef
but you could also use ground pork or a blend of the two.
Or if you want to be healthy, you could do
a ground turkey or ground chicken.
We're gonna make essentially a shortcut bolognese sauce
with our Rao's and a couple spices, garlic,
and this ground beef, and that will be sort of
all our bolognese layer of our lasagna.
We're at a rolling boil, so it's time to add our pasta.
We've got a dry lasagna noodle.
You could also use the, what are those called,
like the ready made ones that cook in the sauce,
but we like using these dried ones.
So I'm only gonna boil these for four or five minutes.
So they're gonna be super al dente.
If you boil them until they're soft,
when they bake in the sauce,
they'll start getting really mushy
and just generally not as appealing.
So our meat is pretty much completely cooked.
I just have a little glass bowl here.
The reason we're draining the beef is because if we don't
and then we mix in our marinara sauce,
the resulting sauce is gonna just be way too greasy.
Just in preparation for our noodles,
I'm gonna give this baking sheet a little spray,
and then I'll just cover them with a damp paper towel
when we're done so that they don't dry out.
There's that timer.
So I'm just gonna lay them out on our baking sheet.
Beautiful.
And adding another layer.
We've drained the fat, so I'm gonna return this to
a medium heat, and then we're gonna add salt,
pepper, dried oregano, Italian seasoning
would also work great here,
and now we're gonna add our garlic.
I'm just gonna stir in this garlic
and we're just gonna cook it
until we can smell it, basically.
So we're gonna use a jarred marinara sauce for ease,
but I showed you how to make a marinara sauce
in a previous episode of this show.
So if you wanna make it from scratch,
check out the link below.
This garlic is smelling really nice,
so it's time to add our marinara sauce.
So it's starting to bubble.
We're just getting some of that moisture release,
we're warming up the sauce.
We really don't need much more than this.
So I'm gonna turn it off and we can just finish
the last bit of our prep, which is the ricotta mixture.
So we've got some delicious whole milk ricotta
that we're going to mix with some parsley,
some Parmesan, this is a quarter cup, salt and pepper.
And if you're a big fan of garlic,
you could put some chopped garlic in here as well.
And this is gonna be one of two cheese layers
in our lasagna.
This is a super cheesy lasagna.
It's time to build.
We're starting out with a layer of sauce first.
If we started out with a layer of noodles, they might burn,
so it's good to have this first layer of sauce.
Starting with our noodles.
And now we're gonna go in with our ricotta mixture.
So we've got some fresh mozzarella
sliced about a quarter of an inch thick.
And of course a layer of our meat sauce.
Great.
Good, even layer of the meat sauce.
Time for more noods.
It's a messy job, but it's a good job.
(upbeat music)
To finish off the lasagna, we're just gonna do
one more layer of mozz, and then some parm.
And then it's going in the oven.
So I'm gonna cover this lasagna with a layer of foil.
If you bake the whole time uncovered, it's gonna get dry.
Sad, sad dry lasagna.
So we're gonna start it covered in foil
for the first 15 minutes of baking at 375 degrees,
which is what we have our oven preheated at.
And then after 15 minutes passes,
we're gonna up the temperature to 400 and take the foil off.
Soon we will have lasagna.
I guess I'll do dishes now.
So it's been 15 minutes.
So I'm just gonna pull off the foil.
Try not to get too much cheese along with it.
Looking good, but you know, not ready yet.
I'm gonna up the temperature to 400
and add 20 more minutes to the clock.
The lasagna is done, check it out.
It's all gooey and bubbly.
Alright, so as tempting as it is
to just dig right into this, it needs to cool
for like 10 to 15 minutes.
If you try slicing it now, it's gonna be messy.
We wanna see some layers, so we're
just gonna give it a little time.
(upbeat music)
I'm so excited.
Finally gonna try a bite.
Ooooo, cheesful.
The noodles are perfectly cooked, sauce is delicious.
The noodles have just soaked up
all that delicious bolognese flavor.
It's killer, you gotta try it.
So what kind of lasagna do you guys like to make?
I'd love to hear.
Let me know in the comments.
(upbeat music)