Quick-ish Meat Lasagna

With optional short cuts like dressed up ricotta instead of béchamel, no boil noodles, and store bought tomato sauce, you can still make a damn good lasagna

There's no super fast way to make homemade lasagna, but I’m going to share my method which takes about 20-30 minutes to put together and and hour to bake.

Traditional lasagna is a labor-intensive dish that requires a good deal of time, patience, and multiple steps. A slow cooked ragù. A creamy béchamel made from butter, flour, and milk. Hand made fresh pasta sheets that call for mixing, kneading and rolling out dough. It’s a labor of love that rewards you with a meal that’s hearty, comforting, deeply flavorful and often reserved for Sunday dinner or special occasions due to the time and care involved.

I started making lasagna as a teenager at my grandfather’s house in upstate NY. He had 9 children and 25 grandchildren and a summer house that was always full to the brim. His six daughters took turns for the most part making dinner and I usually helped. No boil needles were not a thing at the time. The main “short cut” they used were to skip making béchamel and use a ricotta mixture instead. I learned from them to economize by using half cottage cheese for the ricotta (which you can absolutely do - it tastes the same.) They made a simple ragù with canned tomatoes, onion, garlic, celery, carrots, and ground meat from the back freezer. (My grandfather would buy half a cow every summer - we had two giant freezers of butchered beef, white bread from his favorite Italian restaurant in Syracuse, boxes of Mercer’s ice cream, and frozen concentrate cans of orange juice, lemon aide and fruit punch.) You can use good store bought marinara and brown your own beef to make a fairly quick ragù substitute.

In the decades since, I’ve honed my recipe for quick-ish, delicious lasagna: store bought tomato sauce, no boil lasagna sheets and a ricotta mixture instead of béchamel. If you prefer traditional boiled noodles, use them. Or if you want to make your own ragù, by all means for for it. It’s worth investing in a good marinara. I like Rao's.

NOTE: You don’t have to layer everything in an exact order. I experiment with different methods. Some people want minimal pasta so I do a layer of sauce AND ricotta between each layer of pasta. Some people like a layer of pasta beween the sauce and cheese. However you layer it, it will be good. The recipe below has the instructions to layer it like I did in the video, but just know you can layer things in any order as long as you don’t have dry noodles for your top layer. You want either meat sauce or ricotta to sprinkle the mozzarella over.