Alteon, 1 year ago (edited 7 months ago)

Looks good, but your layering and sauce could use some work. Not trying to be critical, I just know that I personally like knowing how I can improve upon things for next time. I’ve made this all the time for family events, and have made the same mistakes.

The sauce needs to be cooked down so it’s thick and rich. You don’t want a watery sauce, because you wind up with soupy lasagna that just falls apart when cut (which is what you see in the first picture). You’ll find that your lasagna hold a great shape when you do this.

As for the layering, if you have a thicker sauce use a thicker noodle, otherwise you can keep them pretty thin (0.8-1.0mm). Parboil after making the noodles so that way you don’t have to worry about water content in sauce. Lastly, don’t leave pasta exposed to oven, you’ll end up with gross crunchy, sometimes inedible noodles. I’ll typically add a thin top layer of sauce and coat it with thinly shredded cheese.

Other than that, it looks really good. The bechamel is a great addition to it. If you really want to take it to the next level, try braised short rib for your next lasagna, I typically cook it the night before in whatever sauce I intend to use for the lasagna, and then leave it in fridge for 24 hours to let the flavor develop more. Makes for an extremely rich, thick tomato sauce and the beef shreds up nicely for a good thin layer. Alvin Zhou does a recipe very similar: m.youtube.com/watch?v=-aCJtxibSpA