Sauce for lasagna
One of my favorite dishes is lasagna (in the Marche it's called Vincisgrassi), and specially the sauce in it. I actually make two sauces for my lasagna. One is a tomato based and the other one is a bechamel sauce. Naturally i don't put the same amount of both sauces in it. The bechamel is just to make the lasagna more creamier. I remember when my grandmother used to make it on a Sunday lunch... The whole house used to smell of it... Heavenly...
Now how do i make the tomato based sauce. Let's start with the ingredients:
- Olive oil
- bacon grease (just a small piece)
- 500 grams of minced meat (i use 50/50 pork/beef)
- 2 bottles (750 ml each) of tomato puree (aka pasata)
- 1 l of milk
- 1 carrot (chopped into fine pieces)
- 1 stem of celery (chopped into fine pieces)
- 1 onion (chopped into fine pieces)
- 1 marrowbone
So how do we start... You take a big pot on your stove and put in some olive oil and your bacon grease.
You heat it up until your bacon grease looks see through. Now it's time to put in your minced meat. You leave it to simmer. When your meat is nice and brown, you put in the carrot, onion, celery and your marrowbone. Leave it just to sweat a bit and then poor in your 2 bottles of tomato puree and the milk.
Bring this all to a boil and leave it on a low fire for at least 2 hours. After these 2 hours you season with salt and pepper (how much is up to yourself) and remove the marrowbone and bacon grease. Now the sauce is ready to be put in your lasagna.
Next time i'll show you how i make my bechamel sauce.
The best thing about lasagna is the leftovers for the day after. I don't like to heat the whole thing up in the microwave oven. I prefer to heat it back up in a saucepan.