Food Notes: 3/4

Lasagna, Lasagne, Turkish Delight, and more.

I hosted lasagna Sunday. We returned from Florida last week, and my parents wanted to get together. I decided to make a lasagna.

I received a ceramic baking tray for Christmas back in 2023 and I’ve made a few smaller lasagna in it, but never really filled it all the way up. With just adults to feed, even a lasagna with just a few layers can last a long time. I wanted to finally test the depths of this tray.

Aside from my parents, I invited my brother and some friends. We had seven adults and two toddlers, so I felt confident in filling up this big tray.

Italian American lasagna is more often based on Neapolitan-style lasagna al forno — oven baked lasagna. My mother makes a meatless version of this with ricotta cheese and tomato sauce at Thanksgiving. That’s the style I grew up eating.

Two years ago, I attempted to recreate the spiral lasagna that helped make Don Angie a destination restaurant. It’s a complicated recipe, drawing inspiration from lasagne bolognese, a specific style of lasagna from the north of Italy, and of course creating stunning viral shape with extra crispy bits.

Let me explain now that lasagna actually refers to the noodles, the broad sheets that are the base of many pasta shapes, and that every region in Italy has local recipes for baked lasagna. What became popular in the United States is a hybrid recipe that combines elements of Neapolitan and Bolognese-style lasagne. A lot of this had to do with Stouffer’s frozen meals and American’s love of all things meaty.

As a side note, lasagna with an “a” is singular, but lasagne with an “e” is plural; a baked lasagna can be made from many lasagne noodles; the whole baked dish is referred to in the singular and the plural based on regional differences.

Traditional lasagna Bolognese has become a lot more popular in recent years, especially in Europe and in Italy generally. Tourist restaurants across the north will always have a version on the menu. The main components of the Bolognese lasagne are a meaty Bolognese ragù and Besciamella sauce. Tomato sauce isn’t traditionally used. That’s more common in southern recipes, especially Neapolitan lasagna.

T\he Don Angie recipe actually calls for using three sauces: Bolognese ragù, besciamella, and tomato sauce — they are an Italian American restaurant after all. Since following their recipe, I’ve been skipping the ricotta cheese and filling my lasagne with besciamella sauce.

The other important lesson that I learned from making the Don Angie lasagna was that I can buy whole pasta sheets from the local pasta factory. Savino’s Quality Pasta sells one-pound sheets of lasagna. I usually buy two and cut them in half to create four layers, but to fill the ceramic baking tray, I bought four sheets creating eight separate layers.

This dish was heavy when it was fully loaded with pasta, meat, sauce and cheese. It baked for about forty minutes emerging with this magnificent crusty cheese.

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