If there is one meal that combines everyone’s favorite foods into one hearty, heavy dish, lasagna is it. Lasagna is a relatively versatile dish, able to accommodate a few different kinds of dietary restrictions, and it can also be a very heavy meal, able to feed a small family for a couple days, depending on how much there is and how much everyone wants to eat.
While many people enjoy finding a good lasagna at the store to cook, there is nothing that is more rewarding than cooking a full lasagna by yourself.
However, as with many things in the cooking world, there are some aspects of cooking that you may not think about until you encounter them. In this situation, you might come to realize that you aren’t used to cooking with lasagna sheets.
Lasagna sheets refer to the large, sheet-like noodles that are commonly used in lasagna to create the layers that everyone loves.
No matter whether you are making a meat-lover’s lasagna or you are making a vegetarian-friendly lasagna, or you are trying to make something that has the best of both worlds, you are ultimately going to need to learn how to cook lasagna sheets, as these are an integral part of lasagna as a whole.
There are two main ways that you can cook lasagna, and each method holds its own solutions. The solution that will work best for you will depend entirely on how you cook your lasagna.
There are some people who assemble their lasagna in the pan in which they intend to bake the lasagna. This means that there is no need to cook or alter the noodles beforehand, although this can cause some issues if you do not take the proper precautions with the sauce.
There are also some people who prefer to prepare the noodles first so they are ready to be used as soon as you finish creating the bulk of the lasagna. For these people, problems can occur when the lasagna sheets begin sticking to each other in the boiling water, as it can be hard to pry the noodles apart without breaking them.
The solution to each of these issues will not apply to the other method, so it is important to have a solid grasp of how you are going to prepare your lasagna. Once you know what you are going to be doing, you can begin to look at potential solutions for your dish to make sure that you will not encounter any problems with your noodles.
Before you know it, you will know how to make the perfect lasagna dish.
Keeping the Noodles from Sticking to the Rest of the Lasagna
When you are preparing the lasagna in the pan that you are planning to cook the whole dish in, one of the common issues that can occur is that the noodles stick to the rest of the sauce and they are not very cooperative with the rest of the dish.
This can be incredibly frustrating when you are trying to set your lasagna up so that it not only tastes good, but looks good as well.
Typically, when you are baking lasagna in this fashion, one of the things that you will need to pay attention to is the order in which the ingredients go into the pan. Some people might want to try to use a lasagna sheet as a “base” for the sauce, meat, and cheese, but this is not how lasagna is traditionally baked.
Trying to do this will often leave you with a burnt noodle, and nobody really wants one of those.
If you want to make sure that the lasagna sheets aren’t too sticky compared to the rest of the sauce and meat in the lasagna, you will want to make sure to add extra water to the sauce you are using in the lasagna.
You can use a liquid ingredient with more flavor if you prefer, such as beef broth, but you need to make sure that when the lasagna bakes, the lasagna sheets will be able to absorb the liquid, as this is what will keep the sheets from sticking to everything else.
While this might cause the sauce to appear watery at first, and the taste may not be what you want it to be, you need to factor in the fact that as the lasagna cooks, a fair bit of that water will be absorbed or evaporate entirely, meaning that if the lasagna is properly cooked, it will not be nearly as watery when you take it out of the oven.
What happens here is that the excess water (or other liquid) is absorbed by the lasagna sheets. When the lasagna sheets have enough water absorbed into them, they lose some of that “sticky” property that many people dislike, leaving you with a tasty, complete lasagna by the time it is done cooking.
With that being said, if you boil the noodles before you start building your lasagna, the lasagna sheets will have already absorbed enough water and won’t be able to take much more. This means that you should not boil the sheets and add extra water to the sauce of the lasagna, or you might mess up your recipe entirely.
If you want to boil the lasagna sheets, there is another method that you can try to keep the sheets from sticking to each other.
Keeping the Noodles from Sticking to Themselves
When boiling lasagna sheets to turn them from a hard noodle to a soft and pliable layer of your lasagna, there’s a good chance that the sheets will end up sticking together.
As with many different types of noodles, lasagna sheets are not extremely durable and can be easily torn. This means that when you try to pull the lasagna sheets apart, you run the risk of tearing them up, which is a problem.
Instead, when you are boiling the sheets, you will want to add just a tiny dash of olive oil to the water. As many people know, oil and water fundamentally do not mix, so you will not have to worry about this affecting the boiling lasagna sheets too much.
From here, you can continue boiling the sheets of noodles as you otherwise would, waiting until it becomes time to strain the boiling lasagna sheets.
When you are straining the sheets, the oil that you added to the water should leave a tiny, thin coating of oil on the lasagna sheets themselves. With the oil physically separating the sheets of noodles from each other, you won’t have to struggle nearly as much to keep the noodles from sticking to each other.
Instead, you will be able to pull them apart much more easily, allowing you to easily separate them when it comes time to begin building the lasagna itself.
The lasagna sheets should theoretically keep this sheen of oil on them until you begin preparing the lasagna. This will also help to ensure that everything stays where it is supposed to when you are cooking your dish, meaning that you won’t have to worry about the lasagna sheets sticking to the sauce or cheese that you are adding to the dish.
When using this method, if you tried to add water to the sauce of the lasagna, the already-boiled noodles wouldn’t be able to take in and absorb that water. This means that it would leave you with a somewhat watery and tasteless lasagna sauce, and this is something that nobody wants to have happen.
In order to ensure that your lasagna turns out the way you want it to, you should be sure to use the method that pertains to your lasagna specifically.
Sarah is the founder of Baking Kneads, LLC, a blog sharing guides, tips, and recipes for those learning how to bake. Growing up as the daughter of a baker, she spent much of her childhood learning the basics in a local bakery.