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<\/a>\nOnce it’s had a nice long soak, you add in the rest of the flour, and the water that I’m PRETTY sure should have been called for in the recipe, but wasn’t.\u00a0 Also a LOT of yeast.\u00a0 (garlic for scale)<\/p>\n
Turns out if you break down the gluten overnight, even though you no longer have any salt to slow the yeast down, you still need a lot of it to overcome that lack.\u00a0 It’s a weird balancing act.\u00a0 It also has a VERY long knead time, which was not aided by the fact that our Kitchenaid overheated after the first minute.\u00a0 Arm day!<\/p>\n A few rises and shapings later, we had some nice loaves. The final product will be at the end.<\/p>\n Next up, Bolognese sauce!\u00a0 You start by making a soffritto consisting of carrots, celery, and onions, processed pretty fine.<\/p>\n The meat does get a LITTLE tomato paste. It also gets wine.\u00a0 When I went to the liquor store to look for something Italian that wasn’t too expensive to put in a sauce, but wasn’t too cheap to drink the rest of, the associate recommended a nice Chianti. Anyway, let’s finish this ragu. It should ideally be hydrated with homemade stock, but failing that, we used store bought with a few packets of gelatin added.\u00a0 And with that, it just goes on the stove to simmer for three hours.<\/p>\n However, there is another sauce in a classic lasagna Bolognese, and that’s a creamy B\u00e9chamel.\u00a0 Frankly, ours never thickened, and I’m not sure it actually added anything to the final dish.\u00a0 But we made an attempt.<\/p>\n For the final assembly, we had purchased fresh lasagna noodles, and then had to contend with the massively contradictory opinions as to whether they should be cooked or not.\u00a0 We opted to boil them very briefly and then shock them in ice water.<\/p>\n This seemed a reasonable middle ground between the package directions of “4-6 minutes” and the more common internet consensus of MAAYBE put them in the same room with some lukewarm water.<\/p>\n And then it was time to build the thing. Sauce, noodles, b\u00e9chamel, Parmesan and on and on… Lasagna in the oven, it was time to make pesto.\u00a0 It was brought to my attention last time that we made an incorrect characterization of the price of pine nuts, by comparing them to Neodymium.\u00a0 Although it depends on where you source the Neodymium, and what form you get it in, it does appear this was a bit excessive.<\/p>\n Pine nuts, in fact, ONLY cost as much by weight as Holmium.\u00a0 Glad we got that sorted out.<\/p>\n Anyway, here’s the pesto in process. And here’s the pesto, the bread, and the rest of our antipasti:<\/p>\n Not a bad spread, huh?\u00a0 In addition to the bread and pesto, the plate on the right contains mortadella, Prosciutto Di San Danielle, Parmigiano Reggiano, mozzarella, and olives.\u00a0 The olives are from Peru, but we had them lying around, and they were a perfectly reasonable thing to add.<\/p>\n The bread was just as unsalted as advertised, but the texture came out perfect for soaking up the pesto.<\/p>\n And what about the lasagna?<\/p>\n Said Italian person ALSO provided us with dessert!<\/p>\n And that’s our first Italian meal!\u00a0 The plan is two more – the south, and then back to my Sicilian roots.\u00a0 Thanks to our guests for coming out and bringing dessert!<\/p>\n Recipes: When Leigh was in college, some of her friends had a really dumb game called “Tour de Beer.”\u00a0 They would go to the crappy campus bar, and attempt to work their way all the way across the taps, having one … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>
\nOnce that’s cooked down, in goes half the meat.\u00a0 This is a trick to allow you to get some nice browned flavor without drying out ALL of the meat.\u00a0 Since I had gone to an Italian grocery store with an excellent deli counter, we went with the fancy option of 1\/2 beef, 1\/4 pork, and 1\/4 veal.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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\nIn conversation, they also mentioned that the movie “Sideways” had caused sales of Merlot to drop measurably.\u00a0 I just hope that “Silence of the Lambs” did NOT have a corresponding positive effect on sales of Chianti.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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\nGotta say, we were pretty happy with that.\u00a0 And the actual Italian person we invited over confirmed that this was a reasonably authentic approach to a Bolognese style Lasagna.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThis is an ancestor of Tiramisu called\u00a0Zuppa Inglese\u00a0<\/em>or “English Soup.”\u00a0 “Soup” was apparently a relatively generic term in Italian cooking at one point that just referred to things soaked in other things.\u00a0 This particular trifle contains sponge cake or ladyfingers dipped in a liquor that originally got its bright red color from insect wings.\u00a0 And then the “English” part may or may not have been a dedication to Lord Nelson.\u00a0 Take that, Napoleon!<\/p>\n
\nBasic Ragu Bolognese<\/a>
\nLasagna Bolognese<\/a>
\nGenoese Pesto<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"