Why You Might Want To Blend The Meat Sauce For Your Next Lasagna

There are several unexpected ingredients you can add to a lasagna to deepen its flavor, such as fish sauce, truffles, or even coffee. These fixings imbue the ragu with heaps of savoriness and a rich aroma. However, there's another way to elevate those luscious layers that involves a simple technique rather than additional ingredients: Blending the meat sauce.

Now, when we say blend, we're not talking about whizzing up your ragu until it looks like a smoothie. We're suggesting that you pop the sauce in your processor and pulse it slowly to transform any uneven, chunky nuggets into a slightly finer grind that's easier to distribute across your baking dish. Or simply use a stick blender right in the ragu pan, like this Amazon Basics multi-speed hand blender.

This technique is useful if you've made your meat sauce with ground beef that has a coarse consistency, included an additional extra, such as crumbled sausage, or combined a couple of proteins, like veal or pork, in the mix to boost flavor. Blending your ragu regularizes the texture of your meat sauce so you can disperse it more evenly when assembling your layers of bechamel, noodles, and cheese. This means every strata has a uniform consistency and flavor, making each comforting bite as yummy as the last with the perfect ratio of meat sauce to pasta. Plus, when the even-textured meat sauce is spread across the noodles, each layer is able to cook through at the same rate thereby creating a cohesive dish, bubbling with cheese. Once cooked, your portioned pieces of lasagna will also look symmetrical and restaurant-worthy.

Another benefit to blending your meat sauce is that it makes the consistency of the ground beef more palatable to youngsters who may have an aversion to chunkier textures. The meat becomes almost silky and rich, melding wonderfully with al dente lasagna noodles. Moreover, you can camouflage other ingredients that might not be to everyone's tastes more easily to boost that silkiness further. For example, chef Emerile Lagasse likes to add chicken livers to his lasagna, which melt into the sauce, lending it an unctuously rich quality. Processing the sauce a little once it's cooked is a great move to help any larger bits of liver seamlessly mix into the beef, along with any other veggies or meats sauteed at the start, such as diced pancetta or ham.

If you prefer your lasagna to be chunkier with a rustic feel, skip the blending stage. Instead, simmer your meat sauce for longer so the larger ground pieces of beef have plenty of time to tenderize and exchange flavors with the other elements of your ragu. We're talking at least two hours simmering time for the best results. Once assembled, feel free to top your lasagna with unique cheeses, such as pecorino Romano, fontina, or taleggio, for a richer cheese pull or golden, crispy topping.