Lasagna is not a weeknight dish, nor was it ever meant to be. I don’t make lasagna every day, or even once a month. It bears little resemblance to those shortcut lasagnas that are mostly meat and sauce and cheese separated by a few layers of dense frilly-edged noodles from a box. In your mouth, that bite of that lasagna is airy, almost weightless, a complete contradiction to what you know its components to be. When you slice into it, your fork glides through the layers with hardly any effort. The delicate, paper-thin layers are sandwiched with a judicious amount of sumptuous filling so that the pasta and filling get equal billing. It combines the richest of ingredients - egg pasta, hearty sauce, cheese - in multiple layers (generally between six and 12) that are then fused together in a hot oven. Real lasagna is a culinary marvel, if you think about it. Sometimes, the long way is the right way. These recipes provide us with a vital connection to the cooking process, and mastering them bestows upon the cook a real sense of accomplishment. And yet, I hope we haven’t completely lost the desire to challenge ourselves in the kitchen, to tackle recipes like homemade lasagna that take time and effort and a certain amount of learned skill. Like any working person, I rely on one-pot meals and simple recipes that deliver a lot for minimal effort to get me through the week. (Goran Kosanovic/For The Washington Post) Just follow the link to achieve home-cooking perfection. The hard work is done, the tweaks have been made, the guesswork taken out. Social media continuously points us toward “the best recipe” for this, or “the only recipe you’ll ever need” for that. Simplicity rules in the kitchen these days. Yes, there are recipes for Instant Pot lasagna just open a box of no-boil noodles, a jar of sauce and a container of ricotta cheese, layer them in your high-tech vessel, lock the lid into place and cook. Meals that once took hours to prepare can now be ready in minutes, including lasagna. After all, we live in the age of the Instant Pot. Don’t I have better things to do with my time?įair questions.
Lasagna rest time plus#
Those thoughts are: Why am I doing this? Is it worth the considerable time and effort, not to mention the inevitable mess, required to make lasagna from scratch? In addition to making, rolling out, cutting and precooking the fresh pasta, there is the making of the sauce - or sauces, since the particular lasagna I’m making calls for both meat sauce and a bechamel - plus the prepping of other filling ingredients, and the assembly of the thing. The sheets keep sliding back into the pot, causing hot water to splash.
Halfway through the parboiling of the pasta, thoughts rise up, like wisps of steam from the pot of hot water over which I am hovering as I work to corral slippery lasagna sheets onto a skimmer and into a bowl of ice water.
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