A delicious lasagna recipe made entirely from scratch

Hi everyone I'm Gemma Stafford and this week on Bigger Bolder Baking I'm gonna 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 we're gonna 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 saucepan over like a medium low heat. I'm going to add in my olive oil. A big glug of olive oil. Few glugs. When that's nice and warm, add in your onion. So you want to sauté your onion for around 8-10 minutes or so, sauté means to soften and go translucent but not to color. Give them a little stir every few minutes so they don't stick to the pan. 8 or 9 years ago on YouTube somebody asked me to make lasagna and I thought to myself I can't make lasagna I'm a baking channel like how does that fit? And then you know it took me a few years obviously but then all these years later it's like I make my own homemade pasta, I make my own ricotta, I know how to make a bolognese like 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. Our 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 going to sauté that in there for like two 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. 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 just going to give this 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 this 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 a tomato paste into beef, don't add it in after you add in the tinned tomato sauce added in to 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 to 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 tell I'm very passionate about this but I think that's a very good tip so just fry up your tomato paste just for around two 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 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 your 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 this to be actually quite a saucy sauce when you're making lasagna you need that 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 those 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 so 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 the 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 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 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 and sometimes and we do it by hand and he absolutely loves it and just the delicateness of the pasta and like 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, it's just amazing. 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 them into the fridge. So now with pasta dough for the years that I've been making it, I 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 Bowl 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 gonna go in with more milk, next we're gonna 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 gonna 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's 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 gonna get the the curdles add in a little bit more acid and it will happen. 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 gonna turn off the heat very carefully gonna bring this over to the countertop join me over there because we're gonna 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 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 a thin tea towel or something like that. And here's what we're gonna do, gently pour it in, look at that. You are now a cheesemaker 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 gonna do. We're going to let this hang here and drain, I usually say around an hour or so, all 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 gonna hang out for a little bit and do its thing. Now is 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. So our last step before assembly is to roll out our homemade pasta. So here I have my KitchenAid, 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 noodles. So I'm going to use my KitchenAid. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm just 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 gonna 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 4 inches. This is the perfect size for our dish. What's satisfying is that homemade sheets of lasagna. Ok 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 your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit or 190 degrees Celsius. Here I have a nice big 9 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 now 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. Okay, there's our masterpiece ready to be baked off. I'm going to cover it in some foil, and then oh, let's get this into the oven. So bake your lasagna for 25 minutes covered and then take off the tinfoil and do another 30 minutes uncovered or until lovely golden brown on top. Now I didn't par cook the noodles in case you're wondering but you don't need to actually par 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 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.