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Can You Make the Pasta Sheets For Lasagna Yourself?

You can easily make the pasta sheets for lasagna yourself from pasta dough. All you need is flour, eggs, salt, cold water, and oil. Knead these ingredients together with your hands for five minutes to form a firm, smooth dough. Sprinkle this with some durum wheat semolina, wrap it in cling film and let it rest in the fridge for an hour.

Portion by portion, roll out the pasta dough as flat as possible on a clean work surface sprinkled with semolina using a rolling pin. Then turn the dough several times through a pasta machine until it is only 1 to 2 millimeters thick and place it back on the work surface sprinkled with semolina. Then cut out 10 by 20-centimeter rectangles from the dough sheets.

For the lasagna, pre-cook the fresh sheets of pasta in boiling salted water for 30 seconds. Then carefully lift them out with a slotted spoon and rinse them with cold water. Then place the pasta sheets on a tray covered with a damp, clean kitchen towel. Then put a second, clean, and damp kitchen towel over it and put the whole thing in the fridge for at least an hour.

Now you can use the fresh, home-made pasta sheets just as you would store-bought lasagne sheets. If you have any leftover dough, you can freeze the rest and save for later.

If you want to make a classic Lasagna Bolognese (also called “al forno”) yourself, prepare a minced meat and béchamel sauce for the pasta sheets. Finally, you need freshly grated parmesan cheese.

For the bolognese sauce, sauté finely chopped onions, garlic cloves, carrots and celery in a large skillet with hot oil. When the onions are translucent, add fresh ground beef. Once the meat is brown and well cooked, add the chopped tomatoes, tomato paste, meat stock and some red wine. Finally, season the bolognese sauce with pepper, salt and oregano.

To make the béchamel sauce a success, melt the butter in a saucepan, briefly roast a bay leaf and stir in some flour with a whisk. Gradually add a little milk while stirring. Allow the sauce to boil again and thicken. Finally season them with white pepper, nutmeg, and salt.

Grease a casserole dish with a little fat and alternately layer pasta sheets, minced meat sauce and béchamel sauce on top of each other. Put the rest of the béchamel sauce on the last layer of pasta and sprinkle the lasagne with Parmesan cheese. Gratinate the lasagne in a preheated oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 35 to 40 minutes.

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Written by John Myers

Professional Chef with 25 years of industry experience at the highest levels. Restaurant owner. Beverage Director with experience creating world-class nationally recognized cocktail programs. Food writer with a distinctive Chef-driven voice and point of view.

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