9

When I cook lasagne most of the filling slides out between the pages. How do you make the filling stay in its place?

Bar Akiva
  • 5,835
  • 23
  • 74
  • 116
  • 4
    Possible duplicate of [How to layer a Lasagne](https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/15119/how-to-layer-a-lasagne) – Luciano May 23 '17 at 10:50

2 Answers2

19

Time...lasagna needs to allowed to rest for a while before serving. At least an hour. If you try to serve it straight out of the oven it will slide all over on you. Time will allow the cheeses and other filling to firm a bit to give you the distinct 'layers' that you want to see out of a traditional lasagna. I would even recommend making your lasagna the day before you plan to serve it and chilling it over night and reheating just before service.

Cos Callis
  • 18,155
  • 6
  • 60
  • 93
  • 2
    i general I agree but over an hour of rest time seems a bit excessive – celeriko May 23 '17 at 11:50
  • 3
    @celeriko the 'minimum' time required is going to depend on everything from your choice of cheese, thickness of your sauce, material the baking dish is made from... . I use an hour as a guide because it allows me to pull the lasagna and then do any other meal prep before serving. Certainly one 'could' serve it sooner and get good results. – Cos Callis May 23 '17 at 12:42
2

How exactly are you constructing your lasagna? If you stack it like this: noodles, red sauce, ricotta cheese, mozzarella, noodles, then it is going to make a mess. I construct my lasagna in an alternating pattern: noodles, red sauce, noodles, ricotta cheese, mozzarella, noodles, red sauce... and so on. And be conservative with the ricotta layer. If you're putting an inch of ricotta between the noodles, it's going to be difficult to keep it together. One last suggestion: make the red sauce as thick as possible. If you're using watery sauce, it will want to fall apart. And I agree with Cos Callis - time is your friend.

Snapdragon
  • 121
  • 2
  • 5
    Lasagna is traditionally made with [Mornay sauce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornay_sauce) (but with Italian cheeses rather that Gruyère) - this will set when cooling down. I have never heard about it made with ricotta cheese... – Boris the Spider May 23 '17 at 07:04
  • 1
    @BoristheSpider I make a great pasta dish with courgettes and ricotta cheese and lasagna sheets ... but I wouldn't call the finished product Lasagna :) – Bob Tway May 23 '17 at 08:08
  • 5
    @BoristheSpider Most times I've seen it done with a simpler sauce here in Italy, i.e. [besciamella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9chamel_sauce), which has no added cheese. Here is the link to the Italian Wikipedia page on [besciamella](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besciamella). – LorenzoDonati4Ukraine-OnStrike May 23 '17 at 08:17