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Oh boy. Okay. This is BA's Best Lasagna deep dive into So, I'm looking at a video of me doing BA's Best Lasagna 2018 recipe. This is a dish that a lot of people want to make. It's a big celebratory dish that feeds a crowd. You're pulling out a lot of stops. Since that video came out in 2018, food costs have gone up 30 to 35%. If you were to go out and shop for all those ingredients that went into that 2018 recipe now, you'd have to spend about $125. Got a version I'm going to do today that's going to cost about 50. I'm Chris Morocco and we are making my inflationfriendly lasagna. We're clapping back at capitalism today here people.
Not even going to need that. [snorts] Done. One more. The original version of lasagna and today's version both have three components. You've got the meatbased ragu, the bashimal, and then you have the assembly with the pasta. We're going to start today with the meat sauce, lentils. Okay, pitchforks down. Just stop writing the comments. I know. And we're going to talk about it and it's going to be fine. We're cooking these lentils like pasta. That means generous amount boiling salted water is about two cups worth. There's a really vibrant tradition of pairing pasta with either beans or lentils in Italy. So, we just wanted to borrow from that for our playbook today. It's going to be okay.
They're just there to round out the meaty element of our sauce. Trust me. Let this come back to a boil and simmer them until they're just past al dente. And we're gonna prep the rest of our ingredients. Okay, so garlic, it's like practically free and there's virtually no vegetable out there that is going to work harder for you. And listen, and in the original recipe, I used six cloves, but I figured if you're going to buy a head of garlic, let's just use the whole thing, right? It's not going to be too garlicky. Moving on to pepperoni. So this is a 6 oz package of pepperoni. Pepperoni is just a mildly spicy cured pork sausage. That's it. We think of it as pepperoni because it shows up in
specific ways on pizza and cowzones and hogies and things like that. But the fact is pepperoni gives you really good bang for your buck, but it's also going to bring a little bit of heat. A really welcome addition when it comes to how we liven up the flavor of this meat-based sauce. We need ingredients that maybe have multiple facets to them that can do multiple things at once. Couple tablespoons of olive oil. Everything I'm doing right now is going to be to maximize the potential and impact of one pound of meat. In the original dish, there was three lbs. It was two of ground pork, one of ground beef. We're just going to use one pound of ground beef today. Part of the solution to how
you're going to make it work really hard for you is going to be to really aggressively brown it. You can see oil is lightly smoking. I'm not even going to bother to turn these into meatballs or do anything other than throw it in there with like these nice flat surfaces. I want to take my time with this step. Achieving a really deep, even level of browning is going to translate to more flavor. Like, that's what we're talking about. That's the level of browning I want all over. So, I'm just going to scoop these out because our pepperoni and garlic are going to come right in. At this point, I want the heat to be somewhat gentle because I don't want
anything to burn. This fond is really good. It's really going to help us maximize the impact of that relatively modest amount of meat. What we have here, we have lightly toasty, lightly crispy pepperoni, garlic that is very tender and just a little bit golden. This is a great place to be. Tomatoes are going to come in now. Tomatoes are one more layer of how this sauce is going to come together. So, this we're just going to let simmer 15, maybe even 20 minutes. concentrate the tomatoes, really cook out their flavor, develop it, concentrate the sugars, the acid, everything going on in there, and then the meat's going to come back in. So, see how the sauce is starting to want to stick just a little bit. That's telling
me that, okay, we're there. The tomato is really fully cooked out. What I'm going to do at this step, I'm just going to mash it lightly just to break up those bigger pieces of garlic, any lingering bigger pieces of tomato. Now, our meat can come back in. I can also reintroduce a little bit of water just to preserve some of the sauciness here. Start to break up those pieces of meat. My goal is for this sauce to simmer together for about an hour. In the original dish, we had a low temperature oven braze for the sauce component was about 3 to 4 hours. So, it's not just about cost savings, it's about time savings as well.
Second key component of our lasagna, bashimal. In the original, you'd have to spend about $50 to get all of the ingredients necessary. In today's version, you can spend just 20. Bashimal is one of these oldworld sauces that works so hard for you. It also carries cheese flavors really well. Brings in that kind of that dairy forward kind of punchy element. My intention is that this bashamel is essentially identical in its effect to the original. There's one major exception, which is that unlike the original, today I'm going to use olive oil as the base of my rue instead of butter. You already had to buy the olive oil to sear off your meat, to sear off some of your aromatic elements. Why not use it in a second
place and make it do double duty for you? Here we are. Olive oil based R. That's a half a cup of olive oil. And I'm going to go grab my flour. So there is a very wellestablished tradition of oil-based RS. We see it in things like Cajun dishes. Anytime that you want a R that is very dark, it's going to come from a rue that was cooked out in oil instead of butter. The reason being in oil you can toast that flour very deeply without anything burning. Whereas in a butterbased R, the butter would have scorched and browned by the time the flour took on a deep level of toast. I want this to bubble, simmer, cook out, not necessarily get darker than this. Already the olive oil is giving it a little bit of a cast, but
it's going to even out by the time we've got all our milk in there. But I still want to cook this out. Still want to just do a light toast on the flour. Cook out that raw taste. So, another bigger swing that we took today. Okay. in addition to the lentils and the oil in the r is the inclusion of cheddar cheese instead of parmesan. It's hard to compete with parmesan on flavor, but in terms of the way that sharp cheddar can perform in lasagna carried by a voluupuous bashimal sauce, it's pretty compelling. And the thing about sharp cheddar, of course, is that it is so widely accessible. You could shop for this at your corner bodega deli. Any grocery store is going to have some version of this cheese. Pretty
reasonable size parmesan could easily run you 12,46 depending on the market. This pile of cheese about four bucks. Meanwhile, if it's okay, if it's not too much for you, could I talk about what's happening with our tomato sauce? The meat has started to incorporate into the sauce. This is a great time to add my lentils. So, two cups of lentils going in. That's not a ton. My hope is that they're going to kind of meld with the sauce, incorporate in, and that we'll be able to mash them up a little bit so that there's a pretty fluid transition between meat, lentil, and sauce. Keep going. Simmer that about 30 minutes or so more. Let the flavors melt. And I'm feeling pretty good about that. Besamel.
The thing that you have to understand about it is that where it starts out is so neutral. Part of why there's crystal hot sauce lurking like a shadow, okay, in the background. This is a couple of bucks. And it can add heat, salt, acid. Now we're getting somewhere. Now I'm getting a little bit of the crystal. It's the vinegar and the heat. It's actually really fun in there. We're going to bring in the cheese. High-sided pot is great just so you can really work this around. Make sure you're incorporating everything. Great. Bashimal ready. Ragu ready. Key thing is both of these have to taste good on their own or they're not going to taste good in the lasagna. First, the ragu on its own like the sense of meat forwardness to
it. I really like that. And the pepperoni is doing some quiet heroic work in there. It added just this little buzz of heat. Every ingredient represented here worked so hard to come together into something that feels like we used a heck of a lot more than a pound of meat and cooked it for a heck of a lot more than about 45 minutes. We turned something that was so neutral and frankly a bit blank and we turned it into a really compelling cheesy rich sauce. These sauces, the intention and the care that went into them and really making sure we had the best possible edit of ingredients, these are not dumbed down versions. These are not worse versions of the original. They're simply different.
They're just using different tools to get the same objective. This doesn't feel like, you know, freaky Friday lasagna. It's like, what is it? Tuesday. It's like terrific Tuesday lasagna. Everything's cool. All right, it's assembly time. My objective. Okay. So, remember in the original lasagna, we par- boiled those noodles so that they went into the assembly about halfway cooked. We're going raw noodles this time. It saves you time. Yeah, it's not necessarily saving you money, but the fact of par boiling noodles, I truly think it's something that you can skip.
I've seen that really work in the subsequent years, and that's part of what's going into my um my judgment on this today. So, we're going to start with a layer of about a cup and a half of sauce. More thin layers are great. I don't want any of the layers to be too thick. Okay. I think these are going to work best. I'm going to Okay, basically three is like a little bit scant, but I also think we're just going to shift up kind of where we arrange them for each subsequent level. I want to essentially paint the bashamel onto the noodles here. Okay, so that's layer number one. This is looking like a pretty heroic lasagna. At this stage of the game, it looks almost identical, you know, to the original version. Little bit of extra
cheese here. This will just mean uh the lasagna is going to brown even more readily when we do the uncovered phase of the bake. I'm really into how this is looking. I'm gonna oil up some foil just in case the foil dips down onto the surface. A little bit of oil does a really nice job of making sure that nothing sticks too badly. Cover it. We're going to get it into the oven. This part of the process is identical to the original. So 325 to start. covered until it's bubbling, totally heated through and uncover. Raise the temperature. Get that brown bubbling top. All right.
Oh, yes. This is what we're talking about. This is what the whole day was for. Look at that. All right, we are ready to start slicing into this bad boy. the corner slice, you know, first piece taken out, especially when it's a little on the warmer side. Uh, always a little bit of first pancake energy, so nobody, you know, scream or anything. That's That's looking pretty good. Wow. It's so meaty, savory. It's actually like kind of wild. The bameal, I think, is performing admirably in there. The pasta texture is very good.
The lentils feel very pleasantly incorporated into the meaty mixture. Certainly feels like a very luxurious celebratory lasagna. It doesn't feel like we held anything back here and that was really what we set out to achieve. Yesterday, I was describing to deputy food editor Hannah Asbrink what I was intending to do today and she was mildly outraged about the lentils questioning. You know, you had a few notes and I think part of the opposed but open-minded. Notable difference. Yeah, it's gorgeous. I will say it's very savory. I love a bashimal lasagna, too. So, I love that you leaned into that. Also, you know, being able to save money um is great, but the texture is so nice. The noodles are great. It's very
tasty, and the texture has not been compromised overall. So, I would consider this a win. I think the remarkable thing is we probably eliminated almost 2/3, at least 50% of the ingredients on the shopping list required for this dish. This, I think, was super valuable in showing that you can make something super impressive. Doesn't feel like you've capitulated. With a little bit of knowhow in the kitchen, I think you can make your ingredients and your budget work really hard for you. Sometimes that means taking a little bit of a leap of faith. But I think hopefully this will show that you don't have to feel quite so intimidated about how to solve the puzzle of affordability and
just how delicious, you know, your food can be that you put on the table every day.
