Lasagna and Other Adventures in Pasta

I made lasagna al forno today. I made the meat sauce as usual, except I added some pancetta. This actually was really good except it rendered a ton of fat into the sauce that I had to skim off. Next time I should probably render the fat first before adding into the sauce. The other difference was that I used Kirkland brand canned tomatoes and they didn’t cook down as nicely as San Marzano tomatoes. Not sure why, but the sauce was thinner. Tasty, but thinner.

As for the lasagna sheets… I had bought a big box at our local Costco and didn’t realize they were not oven ready but needed 15 (!) minutes of boiling. Except I didn’t even have a pot big enough to fit them. None of my pots nor the instant pot were big enough. But thank Kenji there is a section on pasta in the Food Lab and it states that you can just soak lasagna sheets for 30 minutes in warm water and the heat of the oven is sufficient to cook them. I soaked them and the became soft and pliable, but I did end up cooking them for 3 minutes in the instant pot because I wasn’t ready to commit to such a drastic step yet. But they came out perfect.

The other thing I learned is that 2 packs of Costco lasagna sheets is easily enough for three (!) lasagnas… More on that in the next post.