Skip Boiling Your Noodles: Ina Garten's Method May Change The Way You Make Lasagna
Hardly any meals are as comforting as lasagna. Admittedly a time-consuming meal to make, the dish is as decadent as it is delicious, with layers of noodles, creamy cheeses, and meaty sauce.
In Garten's Turkey Lasagna recipe, she instructs cooks to place their regular (not no-boil) lasagna noodles in a big bowl or baking dish of hot tap water to soak for 20 minutes. The idea behind this method is for the noodles to absorb some moisture without cooking them. When you cook lasagna using boiled noodles, you risk the noodles becoming overloaded with liquid between the boiling and the absorption of sauce while cooking. When that happens, the noodles can end up soggy and overcooked, which doesn't make for the most enjoyable lasagna. Garten's method still introduces liquid to the noodles — so you're not putting dry pasta in your dish — but allows them to cook naturally while in the oven.
Other lasagna-cooking tweaks
If you want to avoid the step of combining water and noodles entirely, no-boil or oven-ready lasagna noodles are an option. These noodles are already somewhat cooked (and thus exposed to some liquid), so you can just start layering with them the minute the other lasagna components are ready. Popular pasta brands like Barilla and Mueller's offer no-boil options.
As for the other ingredients, lasagna is pretty customizable. Garten's recipe, as the title indicates, uses turkey sausage to pack in more flavor (and avoid the dryness of ground turkey). Some people opt to ditch meat entirely, making lasagnas with seafood or replacing meat with vegetables like spinach. A word of caution about vegetable lasagnas, though: Vegetables can add a lot of moisture, which, as Garten's trick demonstrates, is not something you want much of in your lasagna. So if you're using vegetables, consider sautéing and drying them before adding.
You can also experiment with lasagna recipes, including by using alternative sauces, like pesto or, for a super creamy meal, Alfredo or white sauce. And if you want to take a shortcut that isn't just buying a frozen lasagna from the store, make one in the slow cooker using ravioli. As for sides, you can't go wrong with a bright salad to contrast the dense meal or with some tasty, buttery garlic bread for a truly indulgent dinner.
