How to Make Restaurant-Quality Lasagna on a Budget

Oh boy, okay.

[Staff] This is BA's best lasagna.

Deep dive into the-

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 wanna 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.

I got a version I'm gonna do today

that's gonna cost about 50.

I'm Chris Morocco

and we are making my inflation-friendly lasagna.

We're clapping back at capitalism today here, people.

[upbeat music]

[tray rattling]

Not even gonna need that.

Done.

One more [tutting].

The original version of lasagna and today's version

both have three components.

You've got the meat-based ragu, the bechamel,

and then you have the assembly with the pasta.

We're gonna to start today with the meat sauce.

[upbeat music]

Lentils.

Okay, pitchforks down.

Just stop writing the comments.

I know, I know,

and we're gonna talk about it and it's gonna be fine.

We're cooking these lentils like pasta.

That means generous amount boiling salted water.

It's 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 gonna 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 gonna work harder for you.

And listen, and in the original recipe, I used six cloves,

but I figured, if you're gonna buy a head of garlic,

let's just use the whole thing, right?

It's not gonna be too garlicky.

Moving on to pepperoni.

So this is a six ounce 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 calzones, and hoagies, and things like that,

but the fact is pepperoni gives you

really good bang for your buck,

but it's also gonna 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. [knife chopping]

We need ingredients that maybe have multiple facets to them,

that can do multiple things at once.

A couple of tablespoons of olive oil.

Everything I'm doing right now

[pan rattling]

is gonna be to maximize the potential

and the impact of one pound of meat.

In the original dish, there was three pounds.

It was two of ground pork, one of ground beef.

I'm just gonna use one pound of ground beef today.

Part of the solution to how you're gonna make it work

really hard for you is gonna be

to really aggressively brown it.

You can see oil is lightly smoking.

I'm not even gonna bother to turn these into meatballs

or do anything other than throw it in there

with like these nice flat surfaces.

I wanna take my time with this step.

Achieving a really deep, [meat sizzling]

even level of browning is gonna translate to more flavor.

[meat sizzling]

Like that's what we're talking about.

That's the level of browning I want all over.

So I'm just gonna scoop these out

because our pepperoni and garlic are gonna come right in.

At this point, I want the heat to be somewhat gentle

because I don't want anything to burn.

This bond is really good.

It's really gonna 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 gonna come in now.

Tomatoes are one more layer of how this sauce

is gonna come together. [spatula clinking]

So this we're just gonna 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 gonna 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.

[spatula clinking]

What I'm gonna do at this step,

I'm just gonna 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 braise

for the sauce component.

It was about three to four hours.

So it's not just about cost savings,

it's about time savings as well.

[upbeat music]

Second key component of our lasagna: bechamel.

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.

Bechamel is one of these old-world sauces

that works so hard for you.

It also carries cheese flavors really well

and brings in that kind of that dairy forward

kind of punchy element.

My intention is that this bechamel is essentially identical

in its effect to the original.

There's one major exception,

which is that, unlike the original,

today, I'm gonna use olive oil

as the base of my roux 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 roux.

That's a half a cup of olive oil

and I'm gonna go grab my flour.

So [plate rattling]

there is a very well-established tradition

of oil-based rouxs.

We see it in things like Cajun dishes.

Any time that you want a roux that is very, very, very dark,

it's gonna come from a roux 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 butter-based roux,

butter would've 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 gonna even out

by the time we've got all our milk in there.

But I still wanna cook this out,

still wanna 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 roux,

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 voluptuous bechamel 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 gonna have some version of this cheese.

Pretty reasonable sized Parmesan could easily run you

12, 14, $16 depending on the market.

This pile of cheese,

about four bucks. [grater rattling]

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 gonna 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.

Bechamel.

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 gonna bring in the cheese.

High-sided pot is great

just so you can really work this around.

Make sure you're incorporating everything.

Great, bechamel, ready.

Ragu, ready.

Key thing is both of these have to taste good on their own

or they're not gonna taste good on the lasagna.

First, the ragu on its own.

[upbeat music]

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 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.

[upbeat music continues]

Oh.

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.

[upbeat music]

All right, it's assembly time.

My objective, okay?

So remember in the original lasagna,

we parboiled 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 parboiling 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 judgment

on this today.

So we're gonna 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 gonna work best.

Okay, basically, three is like a little bit scant,

but I also think

[noodles cracking]

we're just gonna shift up kind of where we arrange them

for each subsequent level.

I wanna essentially paint the bechamel

onto the noodles here.

[bowl rattling]

Okay, so that's layer number one.

[upbeat music]

This is looking like a pretty heroic lasagna.

At this stage of the game, it looks almost identical,

you know, to the original version.

A little bit of extra cheese here.

This will just mean the lasagna is gonna 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 oil 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 gonna get it

into the oven. [foil crackling]

This part of the process is identical to the original.

So 325 to start,

covered until it's bubbling, [pan rattling]

totally heated through.

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.

[upbeat music]

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,

always a little bit of first pancake energy,

so nobody, you know, scream or anything.

But that's looking pretty good.

[upbeat music continues]

Wow, it's so meaty savory,

it's actually like kind of wild.

The bechamel I think is performing admirably in there.

The pasta texture is very good.

The lentils feel very pleasantly incorporated

into the meaty mixture.

It 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 Hana 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.

[both laughing]

but open-minded.

Notable difference. Yeah.

It's gorgeous, I will say.

It's very savory.

I love a bechamel lasagna too,

so I love that you leaned into that.

Also, you know, being able to save money 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 two thirds,

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 know-how 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.

[upbeat music fading]