lasagna: gone

The lasagna was a hit, and it's now all gone. We four guys ate about 90% of it right there in the office; everyone had two servings. What was left was taken home by my Korean coworker, who called his wife and asked whether it'd be okay to bring home some more of my food (he had taken some some leftover spaghetti sauce last time). He told me that his wife shouted, "What're you asking me for? Just bring it home!" I consider that a compliment. And I think I may have a fan of my cooking outside the office now.

I had brought along the extra pasta, some sprinkling cheese (Grana Padano, a mild cousin of Parmigiano-Reggiano), and the lasagna itself, which was a heavy bastard. I'm actually shocked we all ate as much as we did—especially my boss, who is as big a guy as I am, but who doesn't seem to eat that much. (He's nine years older than I am, so he may have learned some prandial life-lessons that I have yet to learn, e.g., how to pace oneself.)

When I tried to pull the lasagna out of my oven during this morning's final bake, the wire rack inside the oven suddenly collapsed (that's never happened before), probably because of the awkward way that I'd been tugging the rectangular baking pan out of the oven. The lasagna fell with a heavy clunk, finding itself at an awkward angle. It had been put together very sturdily, though, so only a tiny bit of grease from the red sauce leaked out. I managed to extricate the lasagna before anything horrible happened (all without burning myself), and then I turned the lasagna around and reinserted it so that the surface of the dish would be evenly heated (I love how my oven has top burners that can function like a broiler; thanks, Charles). A few minutes later, and the lasagna was done. I left it in the oven to cool down a bit; in the meantime, I prepped for work. Disaster averted. In the picture below, however, you can see the wrinkling in the top cheese layer, caused by the lasagna's drunken lean inside the oven:

My apologies for the ugly shot that follows, but here's my plate, with a partially eaten first serving of lasagna on it:

The whole thing looks like a horrible, bloody mess, but I have to say that it tasted pretty good. My American coworker, the one whose wife is a chef, declared my lasagna better than the one his wife had made.* She apparently belongs to the Béchamel school of thought, but my coworker further complained that she had mixed together her cream sauce and her meat sauce before assembling the lasagna, and he didn't like the diluted effect that such mixing produced. I saw a photo of my coworker's wife's lasagna, and I told him it looked gorgeous. He made a face and complained about taste and texture. Not having eaten the Missus's lasagna, I'm in no position to judge it. All I can affirm is that it looked mighty fine.

In other news: my pasta roller already seems to be dying on me. It's a cheap piece of crap, and I really ought to shell out for a better roller. I'll see what I can find by shopping around here in Korea as opposed to relying on GMarket or other local online providers. I might try Amazon if I'm desperate; we'll see. My roller is still usable, but I just can't use the three widest settings on it without it seizing up on me while I'm turning that crank. Very annoying.

This turned out to be an eight-layer monster. Here's how the layers went, from bottom to top:

1. meat sauce (leftover spaghetti sauce)
2. pasta
3. cheese mix (mozz, parm, romano, garlic powder, parsley)
4. meat sauce (leftover spaghetti sauce)
5. pasta
6. cheese mix (mozz, parm, romano, garlic powder, parsley)
7. meat sauce (leftover spaghetti sauce)
8. one final sprinkle of a mozz/parm combo

Somehow, it all remained inside the baking pan. Getting the pan into my No Brand heavy-duty shopping bag proved to be a chore, but I managed to do it without spilling anything or burning my fingertips. Lugging the bag to work was a chore, though; as I wrote earlier, the lasagna was pretty damn heavy. It was a bit like carrying two gallons of milk. How'd we eat all that?

The homemade pasta tasted pretty good, even on its own. I now have what I consider a standard formula or recipe for pasta: one medium egg per 100 grams of flour, one pinch of salt per 100 g of flour, and one "glug" of olive oil per 300 g of flour. I saw some online chatter about not putting salt in your pasta because the salt crystals can tear up the dough when you roll everything out flat. That confuses me, though: if the salt dissolves, even partially, when it combines with the moisture of the eggs and the oil, craggy salt crystals shouldn't be a problem. Am I missing something? I haven't suffered any torn dough yet, so I feel that the warning about salt can be safely ignored. If you've suffered a salt-related pasta disaster, send me pictures as proof of the danger. I'd really like to see this problem up close.

Anyway, the process of making this lasagna was rather lengthy, but overall worth it. I finally got rid of my extra meat sauce, and the meal made a few people a little happier. I now have a lot of extra pasta to deal with; luckily, I have some leftover cheese mixture and some pesto. In my apartment building's downstairs grocery, they sell prosciutto, so I might buy some of that and see what sort of mischief I can make with all these carby leftovers. Onward and upward.

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*To be fair, she was trained to cook Korean and Japanese food. She's very interested in Western food, but for her, that's more about tentative exploration than deep dedication to proper form and technique. As I noted before, though, her red-velvet cake was bang-on delicious. I think she's making an effort to be as true as possible to the Western dishes she encounters. It's too bad, really: my coworker doesn't read my blog, so he has no idea I'm praising his wife's cooking off in some obscure corner of the internet.