How to Assemble a Lasagna

How to Assemble a Lasagna Hello everyone! Welcome to Kahunasfoodandwine.com, the galaxy’s -- back with the bears most popular food and wine show. I'm your host Patrick, and in this issue of The Lasagna Chronicles, we are going to be -- what are we going to be doing? Assembly, we’re going to do assembling the lasagnas so we did the meatball part, we did the sauce part, now we’re going to do the assembly part. So, enjoy and it was good actually so I don’t really have any footage of the finished cook. I will footage of it after I party some for myself. So, enjoy! And there are the meatballs and the sausage. We’re going to cut these up into slices, and that it’s going to go on the bottom layer of the lasagna. Okay, so put your pasta in the water, and I don’t like to just dump the whole box in because then they kind of get stuck together. Maybe just take a second really, to just kind of mix -- put them in different angles. You know you’ll get a little you won't have any of that get really stuck together, and that just it makes easier once you take them out of the pot. Now, they come out off the pot and rinse them off with cold water to stop the cooking. And then, I layer them in just a bowl or something. I'm going to cut and cook them in two batches just so they get easier to work with. Well, the cheese I'm using two to three pound containers of ricotta biazzo. This will have -- we miss some left over just to have to make a few smaller versions to go to some other people. So, we’re going to do that. We’re going to add in probably about two cups or a cup and a half of grated Romano and Parmesan. I'm going to add in some chopped parsley and salt. I think I’m adding some more salt in, a touch of red pepper flakes. And, we’re going to use a couple of gloves of garlic through this garlic press. And usually be careful when you're using the raw garlic like this. One is you want is to make sure you’ll mix it real good, and number two, is you don’t want to overdo it. So, what are we missing? I forgot to knife -- I just want to put it in gradually the raw garlic like this. You could certainly use garlic powder because this gets very strong when you run it through this press. I’ll mix these all up when I'm done with everything, and until we taste it, if it needs to be little more garlic or that back in. And, let's mix in five beaten eggs. So for the mozzarella, you could certainly grate it, and if you're going to grate, you are going to put them the mozzarella in the freezer for about 15 minutes to firm it up. This is the block style mozzarella. You don’t want to use fresh mozzarella for this lasagna. It would just really get lost in the flavors. And, the reason I don’t grate this is I don’t want like mozzarella to get -- when shredded too thin, it kind of gets lost in the cheese filling, and by doing it in small dice cubes, it allows it to still retain some of its body and taste. So, when you're biting into it, you usually get flavor of the mozzarella, and I suppose it was getting lost with the rest of the ricotta. So, I'm going to add the mozzarella now, and what you want to do is, just put it in your hands, just rub it between your hands and it will break up the chunks if this is the style that you're going to go with. If you're going to shred it, you don’t have to worry about this. And, I will just help -- I'm just going to give it a quick mixing through and with the rest of them and keep doing the same thing, a lot of few handfuls. And, that was two pounds of mozzarella that I'm putting into here. So, to get them out of mozzarella. So, this is a new spoon we’ve just got for as a present. Actually, my wife got it for me because but she know how much she would say he could use out of it. And, its’ from Williams- Sonoma, it’s a spoon with the silicon in. What’s nice with this is you could use this in your non-stick stuff, and what’s really great is it really scrapes the side of the bowl well as you're mixing. So, even id you're doing pancake batters and you want to scoop the last of the batter out to make that last pancake, you won't have to reach for your other device. You can just now turn to one device which would be this. There are a lot of things going towards with this silicone on the end there but I like it so far for its use and a big success, I would have to say. Let's give this filling a test. Hmm, that’s good, not garlic came out, not salt, I’m going to add a little cracked pepper and that’s it. That is done. Now, let's make the lasagna, I put some sauce on the bottom, and then I'm just going to start layering in my lasagna strips, and since each strip is not going to be long enough. We’re going to have a little overlapping, a little bit, not much. I'm going to do in the opposite like this. Then, I’ll cut some in half to fill in the other spots. If you're making this home made noodles which I do quite a lot -- I'm just not doing it today, just going to have the time, what’s nice is you can actually just make your sheets the exact size as your pan and you had no problems. So, works out nice. So, we got this and now the bottom layer gets the meat. So, we’re going to, you know just layer in our sliced meatballs. Okay, so that’s the meatball layer in. Now, we’re just going to start sprinkling in our sausage. This is a combination of hot and sweet sausage. Again, this is all done in the big sauce we’ve made. Sprinkle that in. All right, so the sausage layers are all in, we got our sausage and our meatballs, and now I'm just going to dab it a little bit of our cheese. Make sure I don’t put much on this bottom layer, just a little bit to help bind it off together sort of. It’s just a matter of flicking and down a little bit. Okay, so I have that layered in, and I'm going to sprinkle that again with our parmesan Romano mix, then on to the next layer. All right, so next layer is on now, sauce this, cheese it and do another layer. All right, so this is it and I'm just going to top it with our Romano parmesan grated here. This will go in the over for about 45 minutes, maybe to an hour. I’ll do the first half hour so with the tin foil on and then the last remaining time out of it, I'm giving it a shot little olive oil. Then, the key to any lasagna is letting it set up. You’ve got yourself at least to 20 minutes set up time after it comes out of the oven. Then, up with the tin foil back on it. If you can avoid if you do, cut some holes in it, you want to let the steam escape, you don’t want this to turn into a big steamed puddle of lasagna. So, here’s our piece of lasagna. This is one of the pieces I've brought at home, since I didn’t get to film it, right out of the pan but get a profile shot. That’s one of those things that and stuff to scooped out of the pan. There we go.