How To Make Lasagna For Two from Don Angie

How long have you been together? 12 years? Yeah, like 12 years. How long have we been married? Because she won't remember. No. You told me the other day. Hi, I'm Scott Tastanelli. And I'm Angie Rito. And we're here from Don Angie in the West Village. And today, we're going to make our lasagna. OK, so first things first, we're going to make our pasta dough. We use the egg yolks to give richness to the dough. And then the whole egg adds structure to the dough. We're going to use an all-purpose flour. This is the way we make it in the restaurant. If you don't have a stand mixer, you can totally make pasta dough in a food processor. So I think the key with making pasta is you can't just dump all the eggs in at one time. So I'm just going to add, like, half of the egg yolks. All right, I'm going to add the rest of the egg yolks. You want the dough to appear to be sort of shaggy at this stage. Like, it shouldn't be a smooth, like, moist ball. We sell, like, between 30 and 40 lasagnas a day at 50-seat restaurants. Like, on the weekends, we'll sell, like, into the 40s of lasagnas. I've been kneading it just for a couple minutes just to bring it all together and to incorporate all the flour. And this is what you're looking for. You want it to be kind of a little shaggy when you break it apart like this. But you want it to be one solid mass. What you do at this point is wrap it in plastic wrap and leave it on the counter for at least 30 minutes. So now our dough is made. It's resting. In the meantime, we're going to make our bechamel. Add some butter here. Scott is chopping up some shallots. This is a pretty straightforward bechamel recipe. Bechamel is usually found in, like, traditional lasagna from Bologna. So we definitely wanted to incorporate it in our version of lasagna. We're going to add the shallots and the aromatics. We have bay, thyme, black peppercorn, and some salt. We're basically going to cook this until the shallots are translucent, so they're infusing all their flavor into the butter. Now we're going in with the flour. So it takes about probably, like, a good, I would say, like, 10 minutes to cook the flour out. If you add the milk now, it's just going to taste like raw flour. You definitely need to stir it because if you don't stir it, it will burn pretty fast. I'm going to add the milk. Once this comes up to a simmer, then it'll start thickening. You can feel it as you stir it. It'll start to get thicker. So we're using a chinois with a small ladle. We're basically just separating out the sauce from, you know, like, the chunks of, like, shallots and herbs and everything else and the peppercorns. So now we're going to cool this down. So we'll just put this in the fridge. Okay, so next we're going to make our version of Bolognese sauce. First thing we have to do is make the sofrito. Our sofrito is onions, carrots, celery, and garlic. We're going to process it in a food processor. People always think that, like, a Bolognese sauce is anything with meat in it. And they'll make, like, you know, a tomato sauce with meat in it, and they call it that. But that's not really what it is. It actually only has, like, a tiny bit of tomato via the tomato paste in the traditional recipe. I am going to cut the pancetta also at this point. Everything's even. And cut up, like, really, really small but even. All right, so get the pan nice and hot. First we're going to cook the veal and the sausage. This is sweet Italian sausage. We took the casing off. So once you put it into the pot and start cooking it, you can just break it up with a spoon. All right, so we're going to set this aside. So now we're going in with the pancetta. Basically, we're rendering this out. We're adding a little water just to kind of deglaze the bottom of this thing here. Just so all the stuff that stuck, if we didn't just do that, it would just continue to, like, stick there and, like, burn. Fat's coming out. You can see it's sort of, like, translucent. So at this point we're going to add in the sofrito. So this has a lot of water in it. It's going to help sort of, like, deglaze the bottom of the pan. So we also are going to put in the star anise, which is kind of like a little secret ingredient in this thing. Not a secret anymore, but. Right, not very secret. So star anise makes the meat taste, like, meatier. All right, we're getting close. You can see, like, a lot of the water is evaporated. It's starting to change color. I think we're pretty good. What I'm going to do now is add in the tomato paste. You want to stir this really good. Coat everything. It'll coat all the vegetables, but you want to cook the tomato paste again. So otherwise it's going to be like one of those things you'll have just raw tomato paste in it. You can smell the tomato is cooked. It's bright orange. You're going to add the wine and cook out the wine. It should go pretty quick because the pot at this point is really hot. Once the wine is cooked out, it's like everything in the pool, pretty much. And then this isn't one of those sauces that you need to cook for, like, five hours. Like, you know, it's usually about, like, 40 minutes to an hour and it's done. So now we're going to add everything else back in. Milk. The meat back in. And the tomatoes. And you want to stir it really good. Let it simmer for about an hour. And while it's doing that, we're going to make the tomato sauce. My first move is I'm just going to process some tomatoes. Angie has this thing where she'll, like, I've never seen anybody do this but you. What? I'll be opening cans of tomato at the restaurant and she'll come by and just take one of them right out of the can. She loves them right out of the can. I really love them, like, a lot, yeah. We really have a thing for San Marzano tomatoes specifically. Like, we're really particular about a lot of our ingredients, but, like, that's one that we're definitely super particular about that. Now I'm just going to sort of pulse the tomatoes. Scott's peeling the garlic. So we're leaving the skins on and we're just sort of, like, gently crushing them. All right, so we're going to start with some olive oil. Good amount, actually. You have to be really careful with this part because it's going to splash for sure. You see it's, like, simmering in the whole pot? Yeah. Yeah, so we're going to turn it off. Start cutting the heat. And we're going to season it with salt and a little bit of sugar. And this, I mean, this cooked so briefly now, but we're going to cook it again when we bake the lasagna in the oven. When it's all done, we're just going to add in some basil. Okay, so now that our sauces are done, our next move is we're going to roll out our pasta sheets. So the pasta dough has been resting for, like, at least 30 minutes. If it's a little sticky, we're just going to put a little bit of flour on it. You can see in that time period it got, like, smoother. We're going to use a pasta sheeter. You could roll it out with a rolling pin. You could use a hand crank, which are totally fine. You could also get the attachment that goes on the stand mixer. And the best way to go about getting the pasta to go through it is to slice this into pieces. I like the sound this thing makes. So then once you get the thin sheets, the best way to do it is to put them on top of each other and then put that through. This process is also sort of like kneading the dough. There it goes. So now we're going to go thinner. Yeah, if you don't have an assistant handy, you get to, like, cut it in half. Now in order to make the rolls, we have to cut the sheets. I'm going to cut them, like, about 12 inches. All right, so now we're going to cook the sheets. We have water here that's been brought up to a rolling boil. Really heavily season the water with salt. It should be, like, seawater. All right, so drop this in for, like, a second and pull it out and put it in ice water. Seems ridiculous. It seems like that barely did anything, but... The water's so hot. So as I'm doing this, Scott is going to pull them out of the ice water, like, once they're iced down. You got to be really careful because they'll, you know, they sort of seize up. So you have to be really careful not to tear them. I'm also being careful to lay the pasta flat in the water because if it folds at this point, it tends to, like, sort of stick together. So someone does this every single day at the restaurant. So the sauce has been cooking for about an hour and a half. We're going to season it with salt, a little bit of sugar, and we always squeeze fresh lemon juice for, like, acid to balance it out and to, like, brighten up the sauce at the very end. So now that all of the ingredients are completely cooled down, I just want to reiterate again, like, how important that is because if you try to do this with even, like, warm ingredients, it's so much harder. So it really has to be cold. We're going to go ahead and start rolling lasagna. So Scott is starting with the bechamel. So the first, the bottom layer of pasta is you put the bechamel over the whole entire thing. Or if you have some sheets that might have torn or aren't perfect, reserve those ones for the inner layer. So this is the outer layer. It's important to have no tears on that layer because it's going to sort of, like, hold everything together. After the bechamel, we're going to put Parmigiano-Reggiano. We like the 24-month Parmigiano-Reggiano, but it is the most expensive, but it definitely does taste the best for sure. You put the bechamel over the entire sheet all the way to the corners, but you don't put the Parmesan or the mozzarella cheese. You leave, like, about, you know, like, an inch on the top, and that's what's going to seal it together. So I'm going to come in after Scott with the mozzarella. And then we're going to take the other sheets. So we're going to put it down, and you're going to go right on top, and you're going to push it down on the part that doesn't have the cheese. Then you're going to take the bechamel and put it on the very top of this, just, like, an inch. We wanted to do, like, a lasagna for two, like a large-format pasta dish. And we were thinking about a number of different ideas. And I honestly, I saw a picture of cinnamon rolls, and, like, they were, like, baked in a pan, you know, and they looked really beautiful. And that's, like, where the idea came from. So now comes the, I guess, fun part. I don't know. You got to roll it. And when you do it, you can kind of pull it back a little bit as you're rolling it. Typically in the restaurant, we let it sit for, like, an hour in the fridge just to, like, set up even further. So it's, like, really easy to get a nice, clean slice on it. Yeah. We're going to slice it now, but it's kind of... Yeah, but if you don't want to wait that long, like, you can just kind of transfer them to the dish. I think we're going to do, like, a couple more in here today. Now we're going to go in the oven for about, like, 10 minutes. Okay, so after about 10, 15 minutes, you can see it starts to bubble and starting to get brown on top. What we do is one final step where we take fresh Robiola cheese. It's basically like Italian cream cheese. So now we're going to put it in the oven. Okay, so we pulled the lasagna out of the oven. It was hot and bubbly. The edges of the pasta have all browned. The Robiola cheese also is starting to brown a little bit. So our last move here is just to finish it with some chopped fresh parsley and some olive oil. Now we got to eat it. You can see, like, all the edges are really brown, which is, like, I think the best thing about it. Textural contrast between, like, the crunchy bits at the top and sort of, like, the soft, creamy cheese. The Bolognese sauce is, like, super rich. And then to counter that, we have, like, the bright acidity of the tomato sauce. Cuts through, like, any heaviness and really, like, makes it come across as light. Mm-hmm. For the recipe, click below and come see us sometime at Don Angie.