Lasagna

Dish size 30cm x 25cm will serve 6 people.  

Alternatively, you can use 6 small dishes with 14.5cm in diameter.

I (Zuzana) learnt how to prepare lasagne while living on Sardinia. It is classic recipe, with ingredients commonly used in Italy. You can find hundreds of different types of recipes on internet and every country adds different ingredients.

I would strongly recommend precooking pasta (even when the package says you don’t need to). The final result is never the same, and pasta and lasagne will come out of the oven dry or hard.

You can feed whole bunch of people with lasagne and you can also cook it in advance and just stick it into the oven when your friends arrive.

You can serve it with a bread, which is delicious combination.

Ingredients

3 tablespoon of olive oil

1 medium size onion

500g minced beef

1 cube of beef stock

Salt & pepper

Optional - fresh herbs - thyme and rosemary (you can use dry herbs as well)

700g passata

400g canned tomatoes

½ teaspoon sugar

500ml of readymade bechamel sauce

Or for 500g of minced meat you can use 3 cans of tomatoes or 2 bottles of passata. You can’t go wrong with any combination/or too much of sauce.  While cooking a sauce, it will become thicker and it will be less liquid.

200g grated cheese (the best is parmesan, but you can also use any left-over hard cheese you have at home). We would recommend parmesan at least on a top layer of lasagne. Again, you can’t go wrong with little bit more or little bit less of cheese.

Directions

1. Chop the onions.

2. Heat up the oil in a large frying pan and fry onions until light golden brown. Add minced beef and break it into pieces in the pan.

3. Stir until evenly browned. Season with salt and pepper.

4. Pour in passata and chopped tomatoes. Rinse a can and bottle out with water and add to the pan. Bring to boil and add beef stock.

5. Add herbs and sugar. Reduce heat to minimum and simmer. Stir occasionally. Cook for 25 – 30mins.  Once sauce is cooked, remove herbs.

6. Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees.

7. In a large pan of salted, boiling water, cook pasta for 1 ½ mins and transfer onto the plate. 

8. Lay pasta on the bottom of an oven proof dish. In this recipe, we used small lasagne dish (14.5cm). If you have for example dish size 30cm x 25cm you will need 4 sheets of lasagne pasta and you will need to cut them so you can adjust size of pasta and cover the bottom of the dish.

9. Spread a full ladle of a meat over a dish. If you are using a big dish spread one third of the meat over a dish.

10. Spoon over little bit of bechamel sauce. If you are using a big dish spread over ¼ of bechamel sauce. Sprinkle with cheese.

11. Repeat two more times. The top layer will remain uncovered (no need to add pasta on the top layer). Bake for 25 mins. Let cool before serving for 5-10 mins.