Getting Your Lasagna Right
This thick and delicious Neapolitan lasagna is cooked with fresh egg pasta, meat sauce, meatballs, ricotta cheese, and provola, which is always on Italian tables. It is not unexpected that multiple places claim to be the birthplace of lasagna, one of the world’s most well-known and adored foods. Both Naples and Bologna make this claim. When lasagna finally made it to Bologna, it wasn’t until the 14th century that it experienced several influences that helped it develop into what we know it as today. In this case, egg pasta was used in place of the wheat sheets, and cheese was added to the mix.
The beef sauce must be completed first, typically made even the day before. It requires browning ribs and pig sausages with chopped onion, blending with red wine, and adding tomato sauce at the end. When the meat is finished cooking, please remove it from the sauce and combine it with some ricotta cheese. Next, prepare the lasagna sheets and hard-boiled eggs separately in two pots of boiling water. Then, make the meatballs by combining ground beef, eggs, bread, salt, and parmesan cheese to create balls that will later be cooked.
The only thing left to do is to put together the various levels by alternately layering lasagna sheets with sauce and ricotta, meatballs and pecorino, and bits of eggs with fior di latte (or provola). Finish by adding a pastry layer coated with tomato sauce and pecorino cheese and baking it for about 30 minutes. The Neapolitan lasagna is now ready for consumption! This meal is vibrant and intricate, requiring a lot of time and patience to create. It starts with the traditional Neapolitan ragù, which needs to be simmered, or “pippiare,” as the locals refer to the sound of the sauce barely boiling and exploding one little bubble at a time. Although the sauce can simmer indefinitely, it’s usually accepted that 4 to 6 hours would be enough.