Three Meat Lasagne with Handmade Pasta and Crème Fraîche

I won’t lie, this started out as an attempt at a 1 hour lasagne. I feel there’s a market for that. And while I considerably missed that target, the end result of 2 hours wasn’t too shabby, considering the pasta had to be made from scratch and rolled out. But using crème fraîche instead of making a béchamel sauce really does save time. I reckon if you used dry lasagne sheets, pre-boiled, you could potentially have this on the table in an hour and a half. But then you’d be reading a different recipe, on a different blog, wouldn’t you? As for me, I’ve a reputation to uphold.

I call it… Fraîche Lasagne. It’s a pun, see? ‘Cause it’s made with fresh pasta sheets. But it’s also made with crème fraîche. See? Do you get it? It’s GENIUS!

I’ve got chills. Really. Now just tell me what to do.

    Make a well in your sieved flour and crack your eggs into it. Whisk them up and draw in the flour, mixing into a very firm lump of dough. Knead the dough to smoothen it, then wrap in cling film.

    Chop up plenty of streaky bacon and fry it in the biggest pan you’ve got. Add chopped garlic, then minced beef and pork. Dice onions and slice mushrooms, then throw them in. Fry until the mince is completely browned.

    Squeeze in some tomato paste and dump a load of oregano, basil and thyme on top. Slice up a couple of chillies and add to the pan, along with bay leaves and some salt and black pepper. Fry for a few more minutes.

    Empty in a few tins of plum tomatoes and break them up a little. Slice a courgette and an aubergine into 1cm thick rounds, scatter these into the sauce and let stew for 10 minutes. Pour in as much red wine as you’re willing to spare and stir before half covering the pan with some kind of lid.

    Unwrap your pasta dough, break it into four and start rolling them out. Use some extra flour to stop the sheets from sticking to the counter or the rolling pin. Make them as consistently thin as you can. Once you’ve developed a newfound respect for Italian housewives, take out your lasagne dish.

    In a bowl, mix a whole lot of crème fraîche with plenty of parmesan and half a ball of chopped up mozzarella. Spread just one spoonful of meat sauce onto the base of the dish, then make a layer of pasta, then the crème fraîche, then a real layer of meat sauce, and so on. Finish with the crème fraîche and top off with the remaining cheese. Pop it in a hot oven and cook until the top crisps up nicely. Keep away from orange cats.

But… Fraîche means fresh. It’s just in French. It’s not a homophone, it’s literally the same word.

…

Nobody likes you, you know that?
God! Here, just take the recipe and go.

Ingredients

For the Lasagne Sheets

• 400g plain flour (or TIPO 00 flour if available)
• 4 large free range eggs

For the Meaty Sauce

• 300g streaky bacon
• 500g minced beef
• 500g minced pork
• 6 cloves of garlic
• 3 large red onions
• 100g mushrooms
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 2 tbsp oregano
• 2 tbsp basil
• 1 tbsp thyme
• 5 bay leaves
• 2 chilli peppers
• 3 tins plum tomatoes
• 1 aubergine (you know, the big purple fruit of the plant that looks nothing like an egg)
• 1 large courgette
• 1/2 a bottle of the cheapest, shittiest red wine money can buy

For the Creamy Sauce

• 1 litre crème fraîche
• 120g parmesan
• 1 ball of mozzarella

Say whaaaaaaaaat?!

Yup, you read right. Crème Fraîche, a little cheese, and nothing else. Ready to have your world rocked?

By the way, this makes a huge amount of lasagne. You could halve the ingredients and you’d still have a buttload of food. But have you ever heard someone say “Oh no! If only we had less lasagne…”? Yeah, didn’t think so.

It’s also worth noting that the “Meaty Sauce” part of the lasagne really isn’t fussy about what meat you put in it. That’s why everybody just calls it Your Mama sauce. You can partially, or even wholly, substitute in sausage meat, chorizo, pancetta, veal, boar, anything at all (Italian sausage works particularly well). Just use whatever’s available to you.

    Get the ball rolling with the pasta dough. Dump the flour through a sieve and onto your counter. Make a hole in the middle and throw in the eggs after you give them a quick beating. Mix it all together, don’t be afraid to get messy. Keep bringing all the flour in until you’re left with one single, yellowish, tough, crusty ball of dough. Press, squish, push, stretch and otherwise knead the dough until it smoothens out a bit. This should take about 5 minutes and some elbow grease. Pasta dough needs to sit for at least half an hour before you roll it, so wrap it completely in cling film and set aside.

    With that out of the way, it’s time to go ahead with the meat sauce. Start by cutting up your bacon into little bits. If you don’t have a sharp knife, using a kitchen scissors is a good trick. Heat up a little bit of olive oil to a medium-high heat in either one humongous pan, or two normal sized ones. If you use two, just try to split the ingredients relatively evenly between the pans as you add them.

    Fry the bacon for a few minutes, and chop up your garlic. Add that to the pan, followed straight away by the minces. Break up the lumps of mince as best you can and keep it moving, browning on all sides. While that’s happening, dice the onion into little pieces and add it to the meat. Slice up your mushrooms (I used portobello, but any type are fine) and throw them in too.

    Squirt in the tomato paste and sprinkle in all the dry herbs. Thinly slice the chillies and lightly crush the bay leaves in your palm before adding them too. Mix it all into the meat and keep frying for another few minutes. (If you want to use fresh herbs instead of dried, take about a handful of each and strip the oregano and thyme leaves from their stems. Shred up the basil leaves and add everything to the pan later on, at the same time as the wine. Dry herbs aren’t “worse” than fresh herbs, they just have a different taste and require a longer cooking time.)

    Crack open the tins of plum tomatoes and pour in. Add a sprinkle of sugar and mash the tomatoes a bit with your spoon or spatula or whatever to break them up a little. Slice up your courgette and aubergine. I got nice big fat ones, and cut them into thick circles. Add them to the sauce and let them soften. This should take maybe 10 minutes.

    Now you can add the red wine. It’s a shame to use good wine in a slow cooked sauce, so use any old plonk. Well, new plonk i guess. I don’t really know how wine works. All that’s important is bad wine is cheap, but tastes pretty much the same as good wine would after you cook it this long. Plus it discourages the “one for you, one for me” method of cooking which might leave you on the floor before we’re done here, seeing as we’re using at least half the bottle. Now half cover the pan with a lid, which will help speed up the stewing while still letting the sauce reduce a little.

    Okay, while the sauce is getting all drunk (not to mention delicious and flavoursome), you’re going to make the pasta sheets. I won’t sugar coat things, it’s a bit of a workout. Just think of it as earning your lasagne. So start off by unwrapping the dough you made earlier and cutting it into quarters. Take each quarter at a time, and sprinkle some flour on the countertop and your rolling pin before rolling it out as best you can. The dough will be very firm, and not too compliant to your efforts. Keep at it though, really putting all your body weight into it and flipping the dough over every now and then to make sure it’s not sticking. It’s also a good idea to flip the dough the other way too, as you may find that one arm is stronger than the other, for reasons that we won’t go into here, making the dough uneven.

    When the dough is as flat as you can make it, you should have a nice, long strip of dough in front of you. Hold it up to the light to check for any particularly thick parts, and flatten them out with the rolling pin. Congratulations! It was tough going, but you’ve made your very own lasagne sheets, crafted with love! Take a breath and enjoy the moment. Now do it again with the other 3 lumps of dough. They’ll be crafted with determination, rage and desperation, in that order.

     Wasn’t that fun? I’m sure people with pasta machines are laughing their asses off at you right now. But it’s okay, because we’re at the home stretch. Grate most of the parmesan and half of the mozzarella into a bowl. Add all the crème fraîche and mix. That’s it, that’s the white sauce. No flour, no cooking, no nothing. Crème fraîche and cheese. Bam!

    So turn the oven on to 180ºC and take out a dish (or two) for the lasagne. First, spread just a little meat sauce on the bottom of the dish. This will make sure the pasta doesn’t stick. Alternatively, you could rub it with olive oil, but the sauce is already right there, and after all that pasta rolling I don’t feel much like moving. So on top of the sauce, lay your first sheets of pasta. Try to avoid overlapping the sheets. Feel free to cut them to fit. Then on top of the pasta, spoon on plenty of the white sauce, followed by plenty of the meat sauce. Then do another layer of pasta, and repeat. Make sure to finish with the white sauce layer, and sprinkle it with the rest of the parmesan and mozzarella.

    All that’s left now is to bake it in the oven. Put them in as they are, no need to cover with foil or anything like that, and cook for about 20 minutes. Fresh pasta cooks much faster than dry pasta, so it’ll be done quicker than maybe you’re used to. Take it out when the cheese on top has gone brown and crispy, but before it burns. Cut out a steaming hot slice, let it cool a little, then sink your teeth in.

Then wake from a food coma 3 hours later and wonder where all the lasagne could have gone.

(There is not a food in the world more perfectly suited for freezing than lasagne. That is, if it lasts that long. Cooking up a huge batch like this means that you can have it for dinner once a week for a month. Or once a month for a week, if you're so inclined.)