Lasagne alla bolognese

Lasagne in Bologna is egg pasta, ragù, besciamella and parmigiano. That is the whole list. No mozzarella, no ricotta, no boiled egg, none of the things the dish picked up on its way around the world, all of which are fine in their own right and are not this.

It follows the ragù, which needs three hours, so this is a two-session dish unless you made the sauce yesterday. Most people in Emilia did make it yesterday.

Ingredients

Serves 6, in a dish about 30 by 20 cm.

	Metric	Imperial
Egg lasagne sheets, ideally green with spinach	250 g	9 oz
Ragù alla bolognese	1 full quantity	1 full quantity
Parmigiano reggiano, grated	150 g	5.5 oz
Butter, for the dish	20 g	0.75 oz

Besciamella

	Metric	Imperial
Whole milk	1 litre	34 fl oz
Butter	80 g	3 oz
Plain flour	80 g	3 oz
Nutmeg	a scrape	a scrape

Method

1. Besciamella. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, and cook the paste two minutes without letting it colour. Add the milk a little at a time, whisking, then simmer 10 minutes until it coats a spoon. Salt, nutmeg. It should be pourable, not stiff.
2. If using dried sheets, blanch them a minute in salted water and lay them out on a cloth. Fresh sheets need no blanching.
3. Butter the dish and put a thin layer of besciamella on the bottom so the first sheets do not stick.
4. Build: pasta, ragù, besciamella, parmigiano. Repeat. Aim for six layers, and keep each layer of ragù thinner than instinct suggests.
5. Finish with besciamella and parmigiano, never with bare ragù, which dries into a crust.
6. Bake at 180C, 350F, for 35 to 40 minutes until the top is brown and the edges bubble.
7. Rest 20 minutes before cutting. It will not hold a slice straight from the oven and it is not meant to.

What goes wrong

It is dry. Too little besciamella, or a ragù that was already too reduced. The besciamella is the moisture in this dish, which is the job people expect the mozzarella to do in other versions.

It slides apart on the plate. Layers too thick, or cut too soon. Six thin layers hold; three fat ones do not.

The top is leathery. Finished with ragù rather than besciamella.

It tastes flat. Under-salted besciamella. A litre of milk needs more salt than it seems to.

Why it works

Starch from the flour holds the milk in a suspension that stays stable in the oven, so the sauce moistens the pasta without weeping. Egg pasta absorbs that moisture and softens, which is why dried sheets need blanching first and fresh ones do not. The parmigiano between layers browns slightly and glues them.

At the table

A primo, portioned in the kitchen and brought out already cut, which is why the resting matters: a slice lifted from a tray that has not settled arrives on the plate as a landslide.

It is Sunday and holiday food, made in a quantity that assumes people are coming. In Emilia it is the tagliatelle sauce given somewhere else to go, and the green pasta version, lasagne verdi, is the one Bologna considers standard.

Nothing accompanies it. A salad afterwards, a secondo if the day warrants one, but nothing on the same plate.

There is no mozzarella in it, and this is the point most versions abroad get wrong. The white in the layers is besciamella. Mozzarella releases water and turns stringy, which produces the long cheese pull that photographs well and makes the dish wet.

It reheats better than almost anything else here, and the second day is not a compromise. A tray made on Sunday morning is eaten again on Monday and nobody apologises for it.

What an Italian would say

In Bologna, that the pasta should be green, made with spinach, and that this is a real distinction rather than decoration. That the ragù goes on thinly and the besciamella generously, which is the opposite of how it is usually built abroad. And that leftover lasagne, cut cold and fried in a pan the next day, is better than the first serving.