The crispy part of the lasagne.
The cause of many century of family feuding and so highly valued that it features as it’s own dish in one of the world’s greatest restaurants – Osteria Francescana.
Today, we’ll be channeling our inner Massimo Bottura, attempting to create an all-crispy lasagne. Here, there’s no room for stodgy pasta.
Read on for the full story.
I’ve been looking for an all-crispy lasagna for a whilst.
Not only is it the best part of the lasagna made the star of the show, but it’s also practical! It’s my dream to be able to take a frozen bag of bolognaise, microwave it to death, slap it on some ready to go sheets of crispy, cheesy pasta, and have myself a ‘fresh’ lasagna in five minutes. Completely avoiding the soggy, wet mess that is a defrosted whole lasagna.
But despite my best efforts, my searches have come up empty. I’ve tried Byron Talbot’s crispy lasagna recipe, with layers of fresh pasta deep fried finished with Ricotta cheese. But honestly, the ‘crispy’ pasta tasted more like poppadom than Parmesan to me.
I even tried to go to the source. Find the recipe that Massimo Bottura, the man himself, uses to create his famed Crispy Part of The Lasagna dish. However, all I found was a weird ASMR style New York Times video of Massimo recording all the sounds necessary to make the dish.
Great.
So it was up to me then. I’d have to do my own bit of experimenting to get to something I could be remotely happy with and that didn’t taste like the bottom of a bag of prawn crackers. Easy.
Experiment 1: Lasagna layers boiled, then baked with white sauce only.
Method
Sais it all really. As a trial run, i boiled up some dry lasagna sheets until al dente before baking on a sheet at 180°C for 15 minutes.
Half the sheets got covered in Bachemel, whilst the other half got a generous helping of Ricotta cheese.
Bachemel Recipe
Add flour to a saucepan with melted butter, cooking and stirring until smoothe ( < 1 munud )
This is your roux.
- 40g butter
- 20g flour
To the roux, add warm milk and bring to the boil ( ~ 2 mins)
No need to stir or whisk continuously here, the occasional stir should do, with a final whisk at the end once it’s thickened.
- 400g milk (warm)
- pinch salt
- pinch pepper
- pinch nutmeg
The sauce will be ready to use as soon as its done cooking and thickening.
I also halved the Bachemel and Ricotta covered sheets, adding mozzarella to half of each sample to see what impact this additional cheese would have on the final sheet texture
Result
It worked…ish.
The sheets help up and released from the sheet just fine, however there’s no denying their leathery-ness. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, in fact, it’s exactly what I wanted, the top part of the lasagna, everywhere!
The Ricotta and Bachemel both worked great, wet enough so that the al-dente pasta had enough moisture available to finish cooking, whilst not introducing so much moisture as to prevent crisping. Personally, i preferred the Bachemel due to it’s slightly higher moisture content and it’s flexibility in terms of flavour, whilst the Ricotta had a bit more of a grainy texture after baking.
All in all though, it’s just a toss up between texture and flavour here so both topping do a great job, even without the support of the ragu. An overall succes, but it does beg the question;
Maybe there is such a thing as too much of a good thing…
