We had thirteen people at my Mom’s house this last Christmas. One of our traditions is a heroic Lasagna for Christmas Eve, a specialty of a family member. This year we asked them for the recipe and they agreed, but would rather remain uncredited. It’s called “Very Rich Red Sauce and four-Cheese Lasagna”.
I sort of enjoy cooking but would never have the courage to take on a project like this. I can testify that the results are wonderful.
Sauce · Key sauce ingredients are red wine & sun-dried tomatoes; lasagna is all about mozza, the provolone adds a certain extra something. Over to the chef:
Ingredients · Sauce:
butter - half a lb block or less
olive oil to sauté
carrots - 2 to 4 depending on size, make sure they are fresh!
celery - 5-6 spears, say ⅔ of a bunch
onions (ideally yellow, but whatevs) - 3-6 depending on size.
(by volume, you are looking to get roughly 3:2:1 proportions when chopped of onions:celery:carrots)
a red sweet pepper
extra lean hamburger - 1 kg
3 cloves
salt - half a tablespoon? more? (tomato sauces tend to need a little more salt than other applications)
black pepper - if not using cayenne, a LOT, perhaps a tablespoon of freshly ground
cayenne - if using, to taste, I find strength is highly variable so hard to say how much, perhaps a couple of teaspoons?
Two big cans of diced tomatoes (NOT AYLMER! yuck, Unico is acceptable, Italian imported best)
3 small cans or one big can of tomato paste (or tubes, if you get them from an Italian grocery store, which are a rather superior product) It is hard to use too much tomato paste
(pro tip for cans of tomato paste: use the can opener to open BOTH the top and bottom of the can, then the paste slides out neatly and you don’t have to fool around trying to spatula the paste out of the can!)
about a half bottle of cheap red wine (the grocery store sells cheap cooking wine in demi bottles, though red can be hard to find, one demi bottle is more than enough)
most of a garlic bulb, say three quarters, once again FINELY chopped (no not pressed or processed!)
a LOT of dried oregano, say 3-4 tablespoons plus
a fair amount of dried basil, say 2 tablespoons plus
some died thyme, say a half tablespoon plus
(herbs are tough to give measurements for, as they vary enormously in potency with brand, age & storage)
about a tablespoon of powdered beef stock
about 1½ to 2 cups of finely chopped sun-dried tomatoes NO SUBSTITUTIONS!!!!!
Lasagna
1 disposable foil pan
foil to cover
butter to grease pan
melted butter to cover top lightly
1¼ margarine tins of sauce above
1½ boxes of lasagna noodles (NOT the “instant” or pre-cooked kind)
salted water to boil noodles
1 big block of mozzarella cheese, coarsely grated
2 packages (12-16 slices) of provolone cheese
1 tin of ricotta cheese
grated parmesan cheese
little bit of freshly ground black pepper
Procedure: Sauce · For the mirepoix, the vegetables all need to be FINELY chopped up for sauce consistency. And I mean FINELY chopped-- I have tried both powered and manual food processors, and they do not do a good job, either reducing things to mush, or leaving big chunks-- the idea here is to get everything about the same size (and the garlic later), it gives the sauce some consistency.
This is tedious and takes a long time.
To give you an idea, a celery spear can be cut into 5-7 strips longwise with the grain, and then the strips chopped as finely as possible across the grain. A big carrot can yield say 6 long flat pieces that can be cut longways into strips, and then the strips cuts finely against the grain to produce little cubes.
The mirepoix is important, we need to get the natural sugars to balance out the acidity of the tomatoes and wine. I cook the onions separately from the rest…
Caramelize the onions. Frankly, this is a pain in the ass. There are no shortcuts; the internet has all these handy tips like using a pressure cooker at first or a slow cooker or adding baking soda or water or whatnot, I’ve tried them, and just no. So a big non-stick frying pan, and sloooow saute with a little butter and salt, frequent stirring, a lot of patience, at LEAST 40 minutes. Maybe an hour. And constant attention, the bastards will burn on you at the drop of a hat. There is no hiding it, this is tricky and somewhat difficult. But worth it, caramelized onions are magic.
Meanwhile, in as big a heavy bottom pot as you can find, saute the celery and carrots (and peppers if you are using them) with say 3 dried cloves, in a little butter, you want to shrink them down and bring out the carrots’ natural sugars, and soften the cloves & bring out their flavour, this takes a while, say 20 minutes or more?
Remove the onions and carrots and celery to a BIG bowl, clean out the big heavy bottom pot and brown the hamburger, about 1kg. DO NOT USE “regular” as it is mostly fat; lately I have been using the “extra lean” because even the lean is quite fatty these days. A little olive oil in the pot, a fair amount of salt (half tablespoon?) & a lot of freshly ground black pepper (approaching a tablespoon?) on the meat and lots of stirring.
This where a lot of people screw up, essentially they “grey” the meat, they don’t BROWN it, ie achieve the Maillard reaction-- as with the mirepoix, we are trying to bring out natural sugars. A lot of stirring/scraping, to break the hamburger up into as small pieces as possible, ie the same size as the veggies in the mirepoix.
While this is happening, add the rest of the ingredients to the mirepoix in the big bowl: tomatoes, tomato paste (more is better), wine.
Also the chopped garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, about a tablespoon of powdered beef stock (yes this is cheating, shhh).
A word about sun-dried tomatoes: they are absolutely wonderful things, but hard to find. Ideally, you want the dried kind, not the “in oil” kind, but you may have to settle for that. There are two different kinds of “in oil”, the ones in jars floating in oil like pickles in brine (they are prepped for salads, not sauces, so they are floating oil, and disintegrate once they are in a sauce), which you really do not want, and the ones in packages that have been oiled for preservation. This is usually what you have to settle for. The best ones are dry and quite hard.They are hard to find.
Of these, the worst sun-dried tomatoes are the North American product, the big food companies noted there was a demand for them, and started tossing field tomatoes into drying kilns. These are quite inferior, but useable if it’s all you can find. The best ones are Turkish, followed by Italian, you can usually find in Italian delicatessens or grocery stores (even the Italians agree the Turkish ones are best).
[Tim says: I found them in Vancouver and the chef is right, the flavor is to die for.]
If you get the fully dried/no oil kind, you can simmer them a little in a little water to soften them before you try chopping them up; the water (or some of it anyway) should be added to the sauce…
Drain any fat from the browned meat, add the mix to the meat in the big pot. Stir it all up some more, get it well mixed. You can add a little wine and/or tomato juice if it seems too thick, but be aware that it will liquify a little during cooking. If you are going to use it as a pasta sauce, you want it more liquid, if for lasagna, you want it as thick as practical. In any case, it is very difficult to judge the final thickness at this point.
You can add a little (sun-dried tomato?) water, or tomato juice, or wine, if it needs it, but be cautious.
Put on medium to low heat and stir frequently until it comes to a high simmer/low boil (don’t let it burn!) then turn the heat down to minimum, and slow-cook for at least 4 hours, stirring every 20 minutes or so. Cooking it longer is a Good Thing, I often cook it for 7 or more hours.
LEAVE it out overnight! (this is important!)
Warm it up the next day, bringing it back to a high simmer/low boil and stirring a lot, serve it on pasta. Or make lasagna. Or freeze it. One margarine tin makes a meal with leftovers (each serving would be small, because the stuff is quite strong). One margarine tin (plus a little, ideally) makes for one lasagna. You should get about 3 or so margarine tins from the above. It freezes just fine.
Whew.
Lasagna · In theory, one box of lasagna noodles is just enough to make one pan of lasagna. However, there are almost always a lot of broken pieces of lasagna in a box, and pieces that break or get stuck or something during cooking. I allow for 1 and half a box per lasagna pan.
Ingredients:
enough lasagna noodles, cooked al dente in salted boiling water
1¼ margarine tins of sauce, gently heated up
Butter (better than margarine but you can use that if necessary)
1 big block of mozzarella (the regular supermarket kind is fine, I tried the expensive high quality italian stuff, and it was a LITTLE bit better, but not enough to justify the cost)
1 tin of ricotta cheese, or failing that, dry curd cottage cheese
12-16 slices of provolone cheese (usually 2 packages)
parmesan cheese (like with the mozza, I find the cheap Kraft product fully acceptable for this purpose)
freshly ground black pepper
foil lasagna pan
heavy duty foil
Grease the pan with butter. do a thorough job, you don’t want huge amounts of butter, but you do not want any bit of foil that might come in contact with lasagna ungreased.
Coarsely grate the mozzarella.
Lay an overlapping layer of lasagna noodles crossways in the pan, with the sides going up the sides of the pan. The pieces at either end need to overlap the piece on the bottom, but bend up to cover the short end of the pan as well. This is a pain in the ass to get right.
The sauce goes a long way, you do NOT want a thick layer. Spread a thin layer over the bottom of the pan, about a third of the sauce. Put a layer of mozza on top, about a third of it. Put half the provolone on top. Put a layer of lasagna noodles down long-ways , overlapping a bit.
Spread a thin layer of sauce, another third, covered with mozza, another third, and cover that with the ricotta (or dry-curd cottage). Put down another layer of lasagna long-ways.
The rest of the sauce, the rest of the mozza, and the rest of the provolone.
Cover the cross-wise lasagna noodles, overlapping, and trying to tuck the ends in to seal the package. This is tricky at the ends, I find putting a small cut in the lasagna noodle at the corner makes it easier to fold over neatly. (Usually I am tired by this point and less inclined to be finicky and careful, which is a pity.)
Pour a little melted butter over the top, enough to grease the surface. Sprinkle some freshly ground pepper and a fair amount of parmesan over the top. Cover with foil. Put in fridge (you can pre-make hours before use if you are having a party or something) or immediately put in pre-heated oven.
Preheat oven to pretty hot, 375-400. Cook lasagna for 45 minutes to an hour. Remove foil from pan 10-15 minutes before you remove it from the oven. Put the foil back on and let it stand for AT LEAST 15 minutes, better if you can hold off for half an hour (the hotter it is, the more likely it is do disintegrate when being served, you want the melted cheese to start to re-set a little)
Serve with garlic bread and salad and an impertinent red wine. One pan goes a fairly long way, serves 6-8ish? Depends how many hungry teens you have around…
