The Secret to Perfect Lasagna

A couple weeks ago, some high schools friends and I got together for a weekend-long baby shower in Baltimore. I offered to cook a big dinner for everyone Saturday night, and since I was traveling, our Baltimore hosts graciously procured the ingredients for a wild mushroom lasagna recipe I'd selected. It seemed like an easy, one-pot meal for a large group, but as I began the preparations Saturday afternoon, it quickly became apparent that this recipe was a little involved for a kitchen full of people plus one toddler. It was a good thing I made the mushroom sauce first (with dried porcinis and tomatoes)--before our late afternoon walk around the Inner Harbor.

When we returned, I put together the bechamel sauce and then turned to the lasagna noodles, which came from a great Italian specialty shop called Trinacria in downtown Baltimore (I'll admit to shoving a freshly filled cannoli in my mouth when we stopped there for bread Saturday morning).

The recipe warned against no-boil noodles--the kind that, in my experience, end up undercooked and crisp around the edges. But I'd used pre-cooked noodles before and had them turn out the opposite: too soft. This time, as my recipe advised, I pre-boiled the noodles for just eight minutes, then grabbed them from the boiling water with tongs, laid them on dish towels (not in a bowl of cold water as the recipe instructs--somehow in the chaos I missed that part), and with the help of a couple assistants, assembled the lasagna, starting and finishing with a generous layer of bechamel, which kept the top and bottom layer of noodles from drying out.

The finished product was quite tasty (though it didn't get served til after 8pm), but I marveled most at the perfect consistency of the noodles--something I'd never before achieved with lasagna. When I got home, I tried again with the same noodles, again pre-boiling them, for an eggplant and ricotta lasagna. They turned out marvelously.

So I am now convinced that this is the secret to well made lasagna: don't take short cuts with no-boil noodles. Buy regular noodles (the best you can find), boil them until they are about 70% cooked, and start and finish with a layer of sauce (be it tomato or bechamel or whatever you like). This may work best of all when you're alone in the kitchen and can fully focus on the task at hand. But it won't be nearly as much fun as cooking in a house full of people you've known since you were a kid.

Thanks to teenytinyturkey for the photo.