Yesterday we made lasagna using our old standby recipe. It comes from a box of lasagna (see old family secret). I've never been one to like cooking my noodles. They always seem to rip and get mushy. So I've always used the ones that you don't have to cook. They tend to get crunchy on the edges though...not very tasty. Early last week we watched Alton Brown make lasagna in a crockpot. Well the recipe looked terrible (and the reviews online are really bad) but he did his noodles in a way we thought we would try. He laid them out on a pan and put boiling water over them for 30 minutes. They softened that way and sort of cooked, but not in a destructive kind of way. So we tried it. I took two jelly roll pans and laid out my noodles. My first batch of water wasn't quite boiling so we redid it. And it worked. After 30 minutes the noodles were very pliable but still not cooked all the way through. So they were very easy to work with. And the lasagna was probably the best we had in quite awhile because of that.
So there's today handy tip. We will definitely use that to cook lasagna in the future.
We use the no cook ones - for ease. We found that you have to spread the sauce and the cheese all the way to the edges to keep it from getting crunchy.
ReplyDeleteWe used to use the boil ones, but after the Christmas that we made 6 lasagnas, at once, we never wanted to see another boiled noodle again. :)
I like the idea of al dente, but you could probably get the same results just cooking them less in a pot a water.
Dang, now I want lasagna. :) [And we had spaghetti & Dad's meatballs last night. So fat chance.]