NATURAL HEAVEN HEARTS OF PALM BOLOGNESE SAUCE LASAGNA - By Chef Nicola
This lasagna is a wonderfully simple baked pasta dish that’s perfect in almost every way. The only thing that would make it better would be if it were twice the size, and all for you!
The thing that we really love about this recipe, aside from the fact that it’s incredibly low carb compared to more traditional lasagna recipes, is that the ricotta layers throughout the recipe feel utterly wonderful. A number of other, similar, recipes to this one encourage the cook to crack an egg into the ricotta and combine some grated mozzarella in there too. This has never seemed quite right to us, and now that we’ve had lasagna this way, we know why! We can honestly say that we’ll never be going back to making lasagna the way that we did previously. We urge you to try this recipe, even if for no other reason than to try this wonderful method.
Ingredients
- Bolognese sauce, either jarred or homemade
- 1 packet of Natural Heaven lasagna sheets
- 1 tub ricotta - around 300g
- 1 cup grated mozzarella
Method
- This is a really pleasantly simple dish, so we don’t even have to prepare any obscure odds and ends of sauce before we get started cooking other ingredients. We would recommend, though, that you peel the lasagna sheets apart from one another, and lie them out on a damp tea towel. This will ensure that they’re moist enough when baked, later, while also ensuring that you’ve got easy access to them, and don’t have to peel the sheets apart while you’re also layering the dish in the lasagna dish.
- Preheat your oven to 200˚C, and make sure that you’ve got room in the middle of the oven for the lasagna dish that you’ll be using.
- We recommend using a glass baking tray for this dish, as this tends to cook more evenly across the surface of the glass than other options do.
- Layer the ingredients in the glass baking dish. Start off with some of the bolognese sauce. You don’t need much - just enough to prevent the sheets from sticking to the base of the pan. Spread the sauce out across the base of the pan, and then place the sheets across the top of that sauce. On top of the sheets, spread some ricotta in a fairly thin layer.
- Continue layering the various ingredients in that order (red sauce, pasta, white sauce) until you run out of ingredients. When you get to the final layer of the lasagna, sprinkle the mozzarella across the top surface. Try to ensure that you get as even a layer as possible, as any peaks will brown too quickly. It’s even worth pushing the cheese around a little to ensure it’s pleasantly flat.
- Bake the lasagna in the oven for twenty to thirty minutes. At which point, the cheese on the top should be well browned, and the bolognese sauce should be bubbling up around the edges - perfect!
- Serve the lasagna, with either a side salad or some chunky french fries, depending upon how hungry you might be.
