Why Precooking Lasagna Sheets Might Be A Big Waste Of Time

Lasagna is a real project meal — a delicious project, but a project nonetheless. If you want a truly delicious lasagna, like a classic lasagna Bolognese, you are essentially making an entire pasta dinner before you make a whole second meal out of it by turning it into a casserole. You don't want to be using pre-grated cheese because it doesn't melt nearly as well as fresh, and a jarred sauce is never going to touch something homemade. So where can you make the process more efficient? Well, the good news is that one of the most annoying parts of making lasagna, pre-cooking the pasta sheets, may be totally unnecessary.

We're not just talking about no-boil lasagna noodles either. It turns out that if you are making a lasagna with enough moisture (from the cheese, the sauce, or both), then the noodles should cook through in the oven with the rest of the dish, no boiling required. That's no challenge, because who likes a dry lasagna anyway? And it's welcome news because boiling lasagna noodles is one of the most tedious parts of the process, as the slippery noodles can be hard to handle after being cooked and quickly get sticky and gummy if left out for too long before assembly. The only real precaution you need to take is making sure that the noodles are completely covered in sauce, the dish is well covered by foil while it cooks, and the oven time is long enough to cook them through — at least an hour.

If you still feel a little nervous about tossing uncooked lasagna in the oven, then no-boil noodles are still a great alternative. No-boil lasagna sheets are made through a unique process that pre-cooks and dehydrates the noodles in the factory. So when the noodles are laid in the pan and baked, they reabsorb moisture from the sauce. In fact, there are some reasons to prefer no-boil lasagna to traditional, even if you don't need to precook either. No-boil noodles are usually thinner than traditional ones, which is actually closer in texture to fresh lasagna. And the moisture absorption also means that the noodles absorb more flavor and get more integrated into the dish. So while you don't need no-boil sheets to make lasagna easier, don't turn up your nose at it as just some modern fad either.

What should you do with that extra time? How about doing a little research into making your next lasagna even more special? There are plenty of unique cheeses for lasagna that you can experiment with. Or you could look up all the wonderful regional variations of lasagna that you can make, like pesto-based lasagna Genovese or the eggplant-starring lasagna alla norma. Or maybe just take an extra minute to grate some fresh nutmeg onto your dish. When prepping your lasagna sheets takes less time, it leaves the door open to improve your lasagna in so many different ways.