I’m curious. I have always bought Lasagna noodles, but I make my pasta. Not real sophisticated by I can make a decent dough.
If I roll my own Lasagna strips, do I dry and then cook? Do I cook briefly, or do I just construct with out cooking the noodles?
Thanks…
Welcome to Hungry Onion!
Are you rolling the pasta by hand or with a machine? I’ve only done the latter for lasagna, and rolled it to thinnest setting, translucent enough to see your hand through it. There is no need to dry the pasta if there is egg in it (in my experience, rolled eggless pasta for tagliatelle needs time to dry before cooking otherwise it comes out mushy).
As per Marcella Hazan’s instructions, blanch small batches of just rolled noodles in boiling salted water for a few seconds, until the water comes back to a boil, plunge into ice cold water, drain and let rest on a towel. They won’t have those silly fluted edges, so don’t worry if they break during the process— no one will notice!
Marcella says that baking uncooked pasta results in gummy noodles, and that reflects my experience cooking a dry pasta that way. I’ve not worked with “no boil” lasagna noodles, but I suspect they’re not as good as what you’re whipping up in the kitchen.
Agreed - no need to dry an egg dough and a quick one minute plunge into boiling water and then into ice water to stop the cooking.
If you’re rolling by hand, I roll out sheets that I cut the size of my lasagna pan (one big square). They are a little harder to handle than strips but makes putting the lasagna together super easy. And any odd edge pieces I use in the middle layers.
Thank you!
I use a machine only because I tried rolling and I did not get the layers evenly pressed so one layer wound up a little thicker than the other. I will continue to blanch the noodles.