A fresh look at Lasagne

We invited Alex Mackay to share his love of food and cooking with Grana Padano ambassador chef Danilo Cortellini. The conversation starts with the importance of preparing food using quality ingredients, combining flavours and why good food is a labour of love! 

Once again, Danilo Cortellini and I are enthusiastically gathered around Grana Padano. It’s the middle of June at Taste of London, the rain beats across the tent as we happily talk and taste over a crowded cooker. I am learning to look at Lasagne in new light.

Lasagne brings Danilo beautiful memories of his Nonna’s Sunday lunches and provides the added pleasure of lunches with his wife’s family who hail from Emilia Romagna. He’s a Lasagne expert, both in the kitchen and at the table. His approach is rooted in respect, like with any variation on a great dish, it’s important to first know it’s origins and evolution. To have cooked and eaten a recipe many times, to know it intimately, so that if you change it, you care enough to do so with good reason, not just for a glitzy flash in the pan.  As variations go, this is a whopper, a meat-free, aubergine and Grana Padano lasagne, that is left to set, sliced and then pan-fried.

We agree that lasagne shouldn’t be a dry chunk, but a saucy number that oozes across your plate and into your mouth. We also agree that every lasagne is made better with lashings of Grana Padano to season it from the inside out and make the flavours soar. But is there really anything new to say about lasagne? Danilo says yes. He says that the crisp and cheesy parts on the top and corners are the best, so he set out to create more tops and corners to crisp up. 

He starts off by shaping a hole in his flour for the eggs with the bottom of a bowl on a wooden board. “I could make it in a bowl” he says, but I make pasta like this for the romance.” Why not? I think, let’s find romance wherever we can. He draws the ingredients together and kneads the pasta, stretching and pulling to get the gluten in the flour working so that the dough becomes elastic enough to be rolled very finely. In true siesta style, after all this vigour, the finished dough needs 30 minutes rest so that it is not too elastic, or it’ll bounce back as you roll it.

We’re often told by the producers to use their dried lasagne sheets directly, Danilo says that if you buy them dried you must boil them first, it’s only when you make and use fresh pasta sheets that you can cook them through absorption.

While the dough rests, Danilo takes me through his sauces. His ‘easy’ tomato sauce just depends on good ingredients, tinned San Marzano tomatoes (A plum tomato with a low water content) onions and/or garlic, olive oil and basil. No need to cook for more than 15 minutes, then plenty of tasting and seasoning.

The Grana Padano Bechamel/Mornay sauce, depends on cooking the flour properly at the outset so that you avoid any lumps. Danilo says that you can add the milk gradually to be safer, but we add it all in one and never once do we stop stirring and checking. The sauce becomes creamy and smooth, richly scented with Grana Padano which gives a more punchy, deeper flavour. I make it a different way, but with very similar results, the trick, like with so much of cooking, is to approach the sauce with care from start to finish.

Danilo insists that it’s vital to season every component of the lasagne as the fresh pasta absorbs not only the liquid, but the flavour. Tasting and seasoning every element of every bit of food you serve is the easiest way to make your food taste better. For years now, I have thought of Grana Padano as an exciting 'colour' on my 'palette' of seasonings, not only to add its own flavour, but to enhance others.

For a practical flourish, he lines the dish first with butter then greaseproof paper, first to make the paper stick, then to make it easier to get the lasagne out later. Once baked, chilled, sliced and fried, the result is like a deliciously crunchy rainbow, giving way, as a nod to his Nonna perhaps, to a good few spoonfuls of Grana Padano sauce that he hustled into the bowls before putting the lasagne on top. It’s a light and lovely way to take a fresh look at lasagne.

The recipe for Pan-Fried Aubergine Lasagne with Tomato, Basil and Grana Padano has been kindly shared with us by Chef Danilo Cortellini. You can also try his recipe for Grana Padano Cheese Ice Cream with Caramelized Figs and Walnuts - a new twist on pairing two classic ingredients - cheese and figs.