 Hear those sirens? They're coming for it. I'm guilty, it's the best lasagna you've ever had. I'm guilty, I'm guilty, I'm guilty. This episode is about lasagna! Lasagna is pasta, cheese, and sauce, layered and baked into ooey gooey goodness. It's elementary. Hi, don't say hi. My name is Todd Coleman. I'm the Creative Content Director at the Spruce Eats. And today, I'm gonna show you the classic Spruce Eats lasagna. That's perfect for any occasion. I'm also gonna branch off into two other lasagna versions. One that's keto with cauliflower noodles, and one that's like on the rush, on the go. I can't bother with layering, skillet lasagna. Once you make all three of these recipes, you're gonna really understand what makes lasagna lasagna. This is the best lasagna to learn because it has all the classic elements. It's what you expect from a lasagna and it delivers. Ready? First, you turn on the heat. All right, first I'm gonna start with the sauce. Little bit of olive oil into the pan. When you start a sauce, you always start with the aromatics. Typically that's onion, drop in the oven, drop into the skillet, you wanna hear that sizzle. Trusty wooden spoon, this is my favorite tool in the kitchen. It's what everyone's been using for centuries. Why change? Garlic, let's get this peeled. And I'm gonna push it off into the onions. I'm gonna start adding my dried herbs into this because I want them to bloom in the fat instead of adding them into the water. The taste will be slightly different, but it makes a big difference kind of in the end. So you can see here, we've got our aromatics going, sizzling, popping, starting to brown. Next is the tomato paste. You wanna add it into the aromatics when they're getting nice and browned so you can caramelize it and deepen the flavor. Again, we're building flavor at this point. We're adding backbone. That's gonna make a huge difference in the end. That is super fun. You want it to change color. They're from a bright red to a burgundy and it's getting deeper and deeper and deeper. You want it to be like a brick, a brick color. All cooking is is like adding heat and acid and things to transform the ingredients. So you want to see, always see a big change and I like to push things to the edge because I learned that when you do that, you take it a little bit further, a little bit browner, more caramelized. It really pays off big flavor in the end. Now we're gonna add our ground beef. This is a meat sauce, right? It's a bolognese. It's a ragout. What is that? It's a long-simmered meat sauce usually with tomato. That's tangy, tons of umami. Unbelievably flavorful. Most people will be stirring like crazy because they're afraid it's gonna burn. Don't worry about that. Let the ingredients do their thing. This has been happening for centuries. Browning onions, browning garlic, browning meats. This is nothing new under the sun, right? So once it's sort of brown like this, I'm gonna pop in a little water to kind of release all this stuff. This is what we're looking for here. This shows you it's ready. The fat has separated out of the solids. You see that? That means it's ready. Most people don't cook down their base enough. This is one of the hallmarks of good cooking. If you just let things simmer and live for a couple of minutes because you're in a hurry, it's not going to taste as good. This is one of the reasons why restaurant food or the home of a really great amateur chef, you're like, wow, how did this happen? It's the same recipe. It's just how you cook it, how you manipulate it, right? Time to dump in the tomatoes. You see how glossy this is? Because this is a meat and rich sauce, right? It's not just a tomato sauce with some meat on the side. Really luscious. You can see here the waves. This is a gravy. This is the ragout. This is a bolognese. I love to stir in a figure eight motion. Sounds a little bit silly, but it guarantees that you hit all the sides of the pan. The sauce is basically ready. It's time to boil our noodles. It's not lasagna without ribbons, people. You've got to have the ribbining noodles. See these ridges? Steam comes off. So I'm going to add a little oil to the water, to prevent the noodles from sticking. A lot of people say that it doesn't work, but I believe it does. All right, I'm going to add the noodles to the pasta. I'm going to add the noodles to the water. Ready? The sauce is looking great. You can see there's little bubbles here, tomato foam, a little little oil and fat from the meat. A lot of people boil the pasta noodles until they get so soft and opaque. You don't really need to do that. I kind of want to par-cook them a little bit because they're going to be putting them with a lot of liquid, right? The sauce, the cheese kinds have become molten. It's a very moist thing. It's a very wet thing, the lasagna when it goes into the oven. So the noodles will absorb some of that sauce, just like they would like cooking in the water. So I'd like to back up a little bit on the cooking time, okay? I don't time anything ever. A timer for me sort of like adds anxiety to cooking. You just have to keep a watchful eye over everything. You know when things are done, you've had lasagna before, you know how long pasta needs to cook. I forgot the noodles here. You can see there are steamy, tangly mess. Wow. Everything that's good about the world is in cooking. I'll add a little bit of that water to the sauce as it's boiling. And that's going to thicken it a little bit. Give it some body. I'm also starting to marry the flavors ahead of time. I'm lost in the sauce, people. It's time to strain the noodles. I'm gonna pull some parchment paper out, put it on this sheet pan, coat it with a little bit of olive oil, print the noodles from sticking. All right, I'm laying the noodles out into beautiful little rolls here, super organized. Now we're ready to assemble the lasagna. Now a lot of people when they're reading a recipe, they get really worried. It says add a third of this or a little bit of that. Don't worry about it. You're just making layers, okay? So we're gonna start here in a heavy duty casserole, your classic nine by 13 for the classic lasagna, okay? You can use a Pyrex, you can use this ceramic. Anything will work, okay? First we're gonna a little bit of sauce just to coat the bottom so that the noodles don't stick. Now I'm gonna add a little bit of noodles, little bit more sauce or gravy or ragu. I like to run it down. The Olympic bobsled of noodles. So we're gonna do some dolloping here. What I love about ricotta is it's kind of like cottage cheese on steroids, right? It's creamy, it's a little bit curdy, but it's like super, super, super rich. Now I'm gonna add a little bit of Parmesan. I'm gonna take our fresh motes. We're going crazy here, we got three cheeses. This is our first layer. It's looking really good. It's symmetrical, it's ooey-gooey, but you can already see where you don't have to worry about how much is in each layer because it's just all coming together. It's a big pasta dish. Wow, so rich, so delicious. I'm not gonna lasagna number one because I grew up with it and it's a comfort food. I like it because it's ooey and gooey and you know what's gonna satisfy whoever you're cooking for, including yourself. Cooking is kind of like a dance, a terrible dancer, but I like to move with the flow of the dish. So I'm gonna mix in prettier dollops here and not spread them on top because this is our presentation side. So exciting to see this come together. So one thing I like to do is take a block of Parmesan at the end and I also use this to garnish to sort of use the even better product at the top, whereas the type of Parmesan that we used in the middle is kind of gonna melt a little bit better. I'm gonna put some black pepper on the top. All right, 375 degree onion. It's gonna take like 30. Yeah, you bake in an onion. Everyone's ovens are different and you're just gonna want to keep a watch on it. It's gonna be really hot and melty and bubbly and that's when you know what's done. Let's go. Ready? All right, our classic best or best classic lasagna is ready. Let's get it. You gotta serve this hot. Bam! Look at the gurgle. Look at the gurgle. Gurgling means it's hot enough. It's basically reached boiling point. Look at the steam and the dangling curtains of noodles. Oh my God, it's so luscious. Okay, we're gonna get a nice hunk for the plate. Oh, that looks so good. Look at that cheese. Ah, you can see that melting on the top. This is gonna elevate it even further, right? Hear those sirens? They're coming for it. I'm guilty. It's the best lasagna you've ever had. I'm guilty, I'm guilty, I'm guilty. Flavor blast it. Go big or go home. Mm, mm, mm. Yes, it's so good. It's called the best classic lasagna for a reason because it's the best and it's the most classic. You can't go wrong. It's nutty, it's sweet, it's salty, it's tangy. It's like poetry. It's sauce, cheese, and pasta. These are the fundamental ingredients of lasagna. They work for a reason, people. Just make it. You're not going to be disappointed. All right, we've made the best classic lasagna, but now we're diverging. The first variation is keto cauliflower lasagna. The big difference in this is that we're making noodles out of cauliflower instead of using flour noodles or semolina noodles, okay? You've heard of the cauliflower pizza. This is next up, the cauliflower lasagna. You heard it right. Gonna take the cauliflower. I like to do a circular v-cut. Okay, here you have your cauliflower. Why cauliflower for the cauliflower pizza lasagna? Because it adds tremendous body and weight, right? It's almost, it gives you that kind of mouth feel of flour sort of. It's also a blanch the way it's grown so it resembles kind of that noodle color. Okay, we're gonna break these off. We're gonna keep them raw. And then we're gonna grate them on the side of the grater. You can do it like this. You can do it also in a food processor or a mini chopper. Look at that, look at that. Woo! All right, so what we're gonna do with this cauliflower, rice grated mess as you call it. We're gonna transfer to super hot skillet to kind of dry it out. Hear that? Starting the sizzle and steam. Want to release some of that water. And you want the pieces to kind of have more character and sort of separate, okay? I'm gonna pre-mix the batter that this cauliflower was going in. So I'm gonna come right over here. We're gonna do two eggs. I would juggle them for you, but I can't. Then I'm gonna add some mozzarella cheese, okay? I'm gonna add some Parmesan cheese. Again, you're seeing this divergent version is got some of the same flavor profiles here. We've got Parmesan, we've got mozzarella. We're gonna add one of my secret ingredients, garlic powder, and we're gonna do some Italian seasoning. Gonna add a little pepper. Gonna come back and I'm gonna check on my cauliflower here. Let's go. You can see the steam's coming up. Before it was kind of a homogenous mass and now it's starting to separate. Save this for a snack. Actually, I need a snack. You know what that means? Branch. Now we're gonna dump it into our batter. We're gonna start to stir quickly. We don't want the eggs to curdle from the heat. I'm gonna add a little pepper. Okay, so we got it mixed up here. You can see it's a nice ooey-gooey mass. Really delicious looking. It's almost like a batter from potato pancakes or latkes. Looks exactly like this. I'm gonna add it into the pan. I'm gonna spread this out. Wow, this really smells good. All right, we're ready to go. All right, the noodles are ready, let's pull them out. Look at that. Wow, it really looks great. All right, now we're moving on to our sauce and ricotta filling. Let's go. Olive oil, it's sort of similar to the one before, except this one we're adding some sweet or hot Italian sausage to it, which just bumps it up even more. It's a great move to mix up things like this. For this one, I'm making kind of a quicker sauce. I'm not sweating out, browning everything like I did before to develop the flavor. I'm showing you kind of a quicker method. This one is more like, it's time to get dinner on the table as fast as possible. All right, I'm gonna start breaking up the meat and the sausage, really getting in there, hammering away. I'm breaking up the meat, okay, but I'm not turning it. If I flip it now, it's gonna steam because the top is so cold and very wet and things haven't browned that much in the bottom. I really wish you guys could smell this. Hopefully one day, YouTube will invent smellarama and then just like, smellarama should be right up there. Probably you should move it ahead of the driving car. All right, you can see in here, it's starting to brown and gurgle. This is not the classic, okay? This is the keto cauliflower lasagna. It can be flexible. You can take U-turns. You can take alternate routes, okay? Like the scrape and move and bigger hunks. All right, hear that really rapid intense sizzle here. They got the fat going, everything. Now it's time. It's telling us, right? You can hear it. It's telling us it's ready for the next step, right? It's telling us it's ready. It's gurgling, saying, ah, I have the tomatoes. Okay, I'm adding the tomatoes. All right, gonna add frozen spinach. There's not too much of a difference, but what I also like about it is you're able to get some fresh veggies in with the cauliflower and cauliflower is incredibly cheap. It's great. It's batch cooking at its best. We got this going. You can see it's starting to gurgle. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. It's talking to us. Move it down to a simmer here. So now I'm gonna make my ricotta filling. We're gonna take our ricotta here, which again is, you know, super creamy. Fatale, fatale, fatale, fatale is a technical term. You know, pros only, okay? Please. Now we're gonna add some mozzarella. We will accept nothing less than the ultimate spruce eats cheese pull. So I'd help you out that you guys use that. Some of it's going into the filling and some of it's going into the layers. What's the difference? Nothing really. It's just a ooey gooey mess of deliciousness. So don't really worry about it. So ricotta filling, let's mix it up. If you're in North America, stir counterclockwise. If you're in Australia, stir clockwise people, okay? It's a dad joke. Our sauce is done. I'm turning off the heat. This one's got a lot more meat to tomato in it. Looking good, looking good, looking good. Look at our nudes. We're not going crazy with the layers here. It's just two layers. Easy to assemble. It's gonna be just 20 minutes in the oven. You're gonna be eating this before you even know it. So this one is a lot wetter when it goes into the oven than the classic best. It's a lot more sauce than noodle ratio, right? You can see it's very rich. You can see the speckles of spinach in there. That's really great. You wanna create, again, crosshatches here. There's no cheese pull. If the cheese is like this, it's not gonna happen. You want everything to be like this. We're gonna add some sauce. I'm gonna do some dollops again. On top, I'm gonna take my more expensive artisanal sort of parm and I'm gonna finish. Make it rain, make it rain, make it rain. One last step. We're gonna drizzle some heavy cream over the top before it goes in the oven. Why? Because it's delicious and two, because it's keto. Full fat, full flavor, okay? This smells unbelievable. Wow. All right. Dig in deep, pull that out. Wow. You gotta have cheese dripping off the edge of the plate for that extra little ooey-gooey moment. You can see the layers here. You got cheese on top. You got the meat sauce popping out of the edges. This looks amazing. It's keto, it's low carb, it's gluten-free. It's not a substitute. It tastes just as good as the original. Oh yeah. Look at that. Mm, mm, mm. So good. The plus-plus on this one is it was kind of like a nutty undercurrent that's coming in from that toasted cauliflower. Completely unexpected and absolutely delicious. So good. This is serious, people. This is delicious. This is our keto cauliflower lasagna. Check it out. Spruce-eat style. Lasagna hotline, Todd Coleman speaking. You want a lasagna that's faster than your average lasagna? Well, I've got just the thing for you. The skillet lasagna, which is different in that it's all made on the stove top and you break up the noodles into bits and it's kind of like a big, wet, messy deliciousness right in the skillet. You don't have to go into the oven. And if you want a lasagna with all the classic flavors, pasta, sauce, and cheese, this is for you and you can get probably this onto the table from cooking to start within 20 to 30 minutes. Can you believe that? Let's get started. We're gonna start with our sausage. You want this pan scorching. Fat's starting to render out. I'm gonna add a little bit of our seasoning. This could be dried basil, Italian seasoning, dried oregano. You know the drill. You can also add it with the sauce, but this is the way I like to go. And you may have noticed something very different about this one. No onions and no garlic. Why? Because we're using a store-bought marinara sauce and it's got all these things in it. Onions, garlic, the rest of the stuff you need. Let's go. Okay, I'm gonna add some water to this. Basically, we're having sauce plus the cooking liquid. So I'm gonna absorb and gel up as it cooks, okay? I'm gonna throw on a lid. Get that boiling really quick, okay? And then I'm gonna just take the noodles. I'm not gonna lay them in like that. I'm gonna break them into shards. This way they're gonna cook quickly in the sauce. You gotta get this wet, right? You don't wanna have dry noodles sticking out, okay? You wanna cook. So just scoop them in there. So I'm gonna add some pepper and some salt. Like I see it's boiling through the lid. I'm gonna turn it down and let it simmer for 15, 20 minutes, okay? Of course, you can add any noodles you would like. Spaghetti, papadelle, rigatoni, ziti. But you know what? That wouldn't be lasagna. Let's go, guys. Let's get this lasagna done. It looks amazing. Now we're gonna finish it off with, guess what? The cheese. Again, cheese, pasta, and sauce. Those are the pillars. It's all about that. Cheese, pull. Get it melted in there. It's looking really good. Smells amazing. I'm gonna dollop some ricotta. All these things are the same motions, same ingredients, different styles. The thing they all have in common. Unbelievably delicious. We're just gonna warm in the ricotta. We don't need it to be crazy hot. We're not looking for this to be brown. This looks really good, guys. This is incredible dinner. Everyone gather around here. We're gonna start plating this guy. Wow. Creamy, ooey gooey. The strings are just falling all over the place. So good. I'm gonna eat all of this myself, guys. This is serving one today. And this is the easiest of the bunch. Is it the most delicious of the bunch? Let's wait and see. Some basil to this. You can do fresh parsley, pepper. All right, here we go. Mmm. Oh. This one may be the best, guys. Cheese pull. Oh, this is great. Today we meet three different lasagnas. A classic kind of bolognese style lasagna. A keto lasagna with cauliflower noodles. A skillet lasagna. They all have the trinity. The trinity, what's that? Sauce, cheese, and pasta. Nothing's better than that. That's about all we've got today. But don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe to The Spruce Eats for more episodes of its elementary and other amazing cooking videos on every subject imaginable. See you soon. If you don't get me positive comments on this video, I will find you, okay? I'm also a private detective.