Red Lasagna

A couple of days ago I wrote about my "white lasagna" Fair is fair, and red lasagna , here we come.

Just like I said about white lasagna, to me, the key is to remember that ANY lasagna is not supposed to make you feel like "you ate the whole thing." If it does that, it wasn't made right. A good lasagna should make you want to have a nice piece of fish, or meat, grilled, and some vegetables.

If you scroll down to my piece on making sauce, you'll have the sauce recipe I use. I normally need two, maybe two and a half quarts of it to make a big lasagna. I also use the same amount of ricotta and mozzarella as in white lasagna, but I stay away from smoked cheeses, or strongly flavored ones. With tomato sauces, I find that the strong taste of the smoked cheese detracts from the lovely taste of the tomato sauce. Use a mix of mozzarella and fontina cheese, if you like. Use YOUNG fontina, and make sure it's the Italian one (a yellow rind: Danish fontina has a red skin, and tastes nothing like the Italian. Don't ask me why they share a name. I haven't a clue). The red sauce takes the place of the bechamel in a red lasagna.

And now we turn to the question of meat. Hmmmm. A tough one. Honestly, I like red lasagna that just has the cheeses in it, with a heavy sprinkle of parmesan when it comes out of the oven. But a case can very easily be made for ground meat, or sausage. Anything more than that begins to get a big too heavy for me to feel comfortable serving. Again, using a big (9x13) lasagna as a model, I think a pound, maybe a pound and a quarter of meat is fine.

Do you cook it ahead of time? Well, yes. I know that people begin to sigh at this point, because many people believe, with no reason, that meat takes longer to cook than vegetables. I don't think many people would put raw mushrooms into a lasagna, but many people think that, since the lasagna is going to get very hot, the meat will cook within the layers of cheese and noodles.

It will. But it will steam. And how many of us like the taste of steamed meat to browned meat? I suggest using a little olive oil and cooking your chopped meat, or your sausage (hot or sweet) until you get some browning. It's hard NOT to cook chopped meat all the way through, and that's fine, but if your sausage is a little "pink" that's fine too. All I look for when I cook the meat is to get some browning, so you get that level of flavor in your finished product.

Then what I do is I follow the same system I used for the white lasagna, only substituting the chopped meat, or cut up rounds of sausage, for the vegetable. Same cooking time, same everything.

If you are really feeling ambitious, try a lasagna party, or at least "dueling lasagne." I've done that for a number of parties. One meat, and one vegetable, one red, one white. When I do the dueling lasagne, I usually have spinach in my vegetable lasagna, and then spicy sausage in the meat version. It's a tough call.

And... in perhaps my most ambitious lasagna outing, ten plus years ago, for my fortieth birthday party, I cooked FOUR lasagne. One was a meat one, just like described here. Then I made a vegetable one with both spinach and mushrooms, in a pure white sauce. Third was a seafood lasagna, where I used saffron bechamel, and a filling of flounder, shrimp and scallops. The last one, perhaps my favorite, used red peppers, eggplant, and zucchini as a vegtable filling (small amounts of all of them), substituted scarmorza for regular mozzarella, and a bechamel.... BUT... instead of the final cover of bechamel, I used pesto. Pesto does tend to burn, so I saved some out, and covered the lasagna at the end, with fresh pesto.


So there you have it. A bit of a walk through recipes for a favorite. Make some of them, make all of them, but for heaven's sake, make ONE of them. Again, it's hard not to make someone happy with a plate of fresh lasagna in front of them. And you know? There are few breakfasts that are both more frightening and more wonderful than a small (okay, medium) sized square of cold, leftover lasagna.