Lasagna

UPDATE: Best meat sauce so far was the spicy sausage take on Babish below, with addition of 1lb of veal and browning the meat pretty well. 50% ipsola tomatoes and 50% whole foods brand. Result was fantastic with the rigatoni. Did not require any additional salt.

I've done two different lasagnas now, currently in process on a third. Both of the ones to date were Babish:

https://www.bingingwithbabish.com/recipes/ziti-lasagna

https://www.bingingwithbabish.com/recipes/2017/8/22/lasagna

I actually did the Babish ziti first, and that was pretty good. The Babish lasagna 2nd time worked better, though; the ziti had me and Layla breaking out more with whiteheads, and wasn't as filling.

Ziti I did pretty much directly by the book, except with spicy sausage instead of sweet. The lasagna I actually did using the sauce from the Garfield episode but otherwise based on the Carmela one. Top layer of that was with the leftover Carmela sauce. Overall this was very filling and satisfying.

2nd lasagna was straight up Garfield recipe. This one was...bland? I wasn't a fan. I think the difference is in the sheer volume of tomatoes. I did reduce the Garfield sauce more than I planned to the 2nd time, but I do remember something similar going wrong with the first one so that's probably not why the second lasagna wasn't as good. The selection of ricotta may have played in here as well, hard to say.

Today's try is using Carmela's method for two different batches of sauce, one with mild sausage one with spicy. We'll do spicy for the top layer again and the others with mild, and experiment with sweet sausage next week. Due to space constraints in the dutch ovens, we decided not to add extra water (and buy another dutch oven). Only other difference is marmite.

It's pretty noticeable (to me) that Babish's Garfield approach has a full mirepoux mix as the base for the sauce, same as the Bon Appetit ragu recipe. I think this works for the ragu, but might be bringing too much to the party for the lasagna - simple ingredients may be better.

We also shredded some of the mozarella last time, vs. exclusively slicing the first time. This time I've put the mozarella logs in the freezer so we can slice thin and see if that helps.

A note on ingredients, by the way:

* Best tomatoes appear to be either Isola (Whole Foods) or the ones from Trader Joe's. Most of the others hold their firmness more than I'd like, though we'll see how that plays out. Isola are also a pull-tab to open which speeds things up a bit. Unfortunately, these are $3-4/28oz vs. $1.50 for store brand, but I'm relatively ok with this.

* Best ricotta appears to be the Basket brand. It's only a few dollars more than Whole Foods' store brand and the difference is pretty ridiculous.