A New Pasta To Enjoy

To cap off 2015, I made the second-best lasagna that I have ever had.

The best was at one of the Wolfgang Puck restaurants in Las Vegas many years ago. It was light and fluffy and I don’t even know what they did.

Last week, Whole Foods had two different brands of fresh gluten-free lasagna noodles, Manini’s and RP’s, so we decided to make a lasagna after our holiday travel madness. Which meant today.

I couldn’t find the recipe I usually use, which is probably a good thing – it usually ends up a watery, floppy mess. So I began researching lasagna recipes. The base is of course the tomato sauce, hence the tomato sauce recipe post yesterday.

Alton Brown did a slow cooker lasagna on Good Eats, and he avoids the water issue in two ways – by not actually using tomato sauce (he places sliced tomatoes in the lasagna instead so it turns into a sauce during baking), and by adding flour and powdered goat’s milk that soaks up the excess water and turns into a besciamella sauce while baking. Which is pretty smart.

The besciamella sauce is traditional in Italy, but ricotta mixtures are more common in the U.S. Which is what I am used to. And I like my tomato sauce too much to try his method. I wanted to try adding powdered goat’s milk, but I couldn’t readily find any, so I tried an experiment – I made a slurry with a few tablespoons of arrowroot powder and added that to the tomato sauce.

That did the trick. The lasagna came out nice and solid with no water. It was really good right out of the oven, and it is always better the second day so I’m looking forward to breakfast tomorrow.

I really like the RP’s lasagna sheets. They are a good size (four filled out my casserole with just enough overlap) and handled nicely. They don’t have any rice in them, but are made from millet, tapioca, sorghum, and amaranth.

The Manini’s lasagna sheets are rice-based and have eggs in them. They are nice and big, but I found them difficult to handle after cooking. So I’m trying these without precooking.

I’ll document the lasagna recipe and post it tomorrow.

EDIT – I initially had the two pasta brands reversed; this has been corrected.