lasagna: the build

Thursday night, I rolled out pasta sheets and made a lasagna, which I then par-baked. I'll finish the monster Friday morning; it needs another 30-40 minutes of cooking before I lug it into work. It's an almost literal monster for sure; I wonder how much it weighs.

Below: me and my pasta sheets:

How's it hangin'?

A closer look:

Top rack:

I've taken the sheets off the rack and have begun the boil-and-shock process described in Adam Ragusea's video. This involves boiling the pasta sheets for two minutes, then moving them immediately into a bath of ice water. Once the sheets have cooled, they need to be moved onto clean towels (Scott brand paper towels, in my case) and patted dry. Once dried and rested for a few minutes, the sheets are ready for stacking inside the lasagna.

Here's the boil:

Here's a wide shot of the assembly line:

I had brought out my meat sauce and cheese mixture to allow them to reach room temperature for maximum spreadability:

Exposed:

Pan: buttered.

Below, the build begins: sauce, pasta, cheese, repeat. I managed only seven layers, which meant only two layers of pasta. Since I had so much spare pasta, I wrapped it up and will take it along with me in case there's any whining from the crew about a lack of pasta: I'll simply boil the spare sheets and slap one on my charges' plates.

I had envisioned making twelve sheets of pasta: four sheets times three layers. The sheets ended up being larger than what I needed, and I discovered that I needed only three sheets per layer, plus the little trimmed bits to cover any exposed spots. Here's the build, in progress:

Nearly done:

Spare sheets, wrapped and ready:

A wide shot of the final product, topped with a mixture of el-cheapo Parmesan and low-moisture mozzarella (which is also the el-cheapo kind):

Lastly, the food-porn shot:

The idea was to par-bake the lasagna before I went to sleep, then to bake it the rest of the way just before going to work. I'll have shots of the final product later on Friday.