Weeknight Broken Lasagna with Lots of Greens Recipe on Food52 (2024)

FAQs

How do you keep vegetable lasagna from being watery? ›

Cook your vegetables separately.

It's also important not to overload you vegetable lasagna. Having a proper amount of vegetables will help the lasagna maintain its shape, and will keep everything moist, but not watery. As you're creating layers, don't worry if it looks more sparse than you'd think.

FITTING IN ALL THE LAYERS

Generally, lasagna has about 3 or 4 layers of pasta, with sauce, ricotta cheese, mozzarella, béchamel, and sometimes meat or even meatballs or sausage between those layers. Our many layer lasagna has around 12 layers of pasta, or even more depending on how thin you end up rolling the dough.

The biggest offender, though, is watery, thin pasta sauce. A helpful technique can prevent this pitfall from sabotaging your lasagna: Reduce your sauce to thicken it before pouring it into the casserole. A thin sauce runs right off of cooked lasagna noodles, causing all the layers to slide off of each other, as well.

If you have this problem the moisture can come from all kinds if sources. The sauce could be too watery. The noodles can be holding on to water. The vegetables are releasing excess moisture.

Salt Your Vegetables Ahead of Time

The salt draws out any excess moisture that would get in the way of your vegetables crisping,” says Chef Hong. After adding salt, beads of water are released from the vegetables. Before you cook them, make sure to dry them well with a paper towel.

Some acidic bakes (like fruit cobblers) and lasagna or casserole (containing tomatoes, citrus, or other acidic fruit) may bake best in a glass dish, to prevent the metal from reacting to the acidic ingredients.

It may sound surprising, but you shouldn't cover a casserole dish with foil directly when baking, as it can impact the final dish. "Acidic foods like tomato sauce [in lasagna] will react adversely when exposed to foil under the heat of the oven," says Brian Owenby, chef at the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

Milk. It tenderises the meat, to leave you with the most tender ragù.

(Do notice that I put the noodles criss cross – perpendicular from the layer below – it helps it to hold together when you serve it). So, the noodles directly on the cheese means there won't be enough for a top layer of noodles.

Is there a wrong way to layer lasagna? ›

The best way to layer your lasagna is to start with a layer of red sauce, follow it up with a layer of white sauce, then pasta, then cheese.

Finish off your lasagne either with a layer of tomato-based sauce or with your white sauce – whichever you have left – and then grate over plenty of Parmigiano-Reggiano. A common extra topping is torn mozzarella, which makes a lovely, melted cheesy layer on top.

Poke 9-12 toothpicks over the surface of your lasagna (to keep the foil from sticking to the cheese). Cover with foil and bake at 375˚F for 45 minutes.

Lasagna is the kind of food that can keep a family fed for many nights in a row, happily. But it has other perks, too: namely, that you can prepare the whole thing in advance, and store it in the fridge overnight—ready to pop in the oven an hour or so before dinner (just before the kids start to whine).

For moisture coming from the sauce (tomatoes, broth, wine...) allow your sauce to simmer longer before adding it to the lasagna dish. Again this 'reduces' the sauce and will leave you with less liquid at the end. Cheeses, choose well aged cheeses over some of the cheaper alternatives.

If you are finding the lasagne sheets too soft then you may want to try reducing the amount of liquid in the meat sauce slightly. You can either reduce the amout of beef stock or broth used, or simmer the sauce after cooking in the oven to reduce it.

Tossing watery vegetables with salt before cooking not only seasons them and rids them of excess moisture, but also draws out more flavor.

Just like steak, you need to allow the lasagna to rest before slicing into it. Resting or letting it cool for a good 10 to 15 minutes at least allows the heat to dissipate, the ingredients to settle from its bubbling state in the oven, and firms up the cheese that you added on top.