100 Layer Lasagna | Anything With Alvin

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layer

s of the meat, the cheese, you know, the béchamel barely visible, but that makes it creamy and delicious. - Everything is a little bit of bolognese sauce.

One slab will be well-cut

lasagna

. - Oh my god, that's so beautiful. - Hello. Welcome back to another episode of Anything With Alvin, where I try to create a fun meal out of the videos I like to watch in my free time. In this episode we are going for a 100-

layer

lasagna

, which is a dish that, although it may seem crazy, is served in a couple of restaurants around the world. This particular one is served at La Palma Restaurant in Toronto. Now, I've had a little experience making this before, but the restaurant version of this dish looks very exciting.

The enormous lasagna baked in a huge pan, which is baked, cooled and cut into small sections to be served crispy to diners. And I think it's a great idea. So we'll do it because it's fun. The first thing is the pasta. Now we could use store-bought noodles, but I think they would be too thick. So we need them very, very, very thin to be able to layer them properly. To make it much easier, we will use the help of two food processors, 16 cups of all-purpose flour or 2080 grams, 24 eggs in total, half a cup of olive oil and eight teaspoons of kosher salt.

These ingredients will be divided evenly between each food processor and pulsed until they have almost reached the ball stage. Then I'll put them on our work surface with a little flour and knead them for about 10 minutes until the good stuff softens and my wrists are a little sore lately. So after getting down on my knees for a bit, I'll ask Rachel to come and do a lot of the heavy lifting. Thank you, Rachel. You are doing this much better and you definitely know how to knead pasta dough much more than I do. These two balls of dough have been wrapped and kneaded very well.

They will go to the refrigerator and rest. We would repeat our entire process again. Now that our dough is prepared, we move on to the sauces. We will start with our meat sauce, which requires a fair amount of vegetables. First, I'm going to coarsely chop eight large carrots, peeled. These will simply be cut into small pieces and you will see why in a moment. Then we will continue with 16 celery ribs or celery stalks with the edge trimmed and again cut into thick pieces. Instead of chopping all of these vegetables by hand, I thought we might as well lean towards the food processor for this one because it will still cook everything and would probably make a smoother sauce.

We will put the carrots in one food processor and the celery in another. Just bombarding them until they've basically completely broken down. What a beautiful color we have here. All of these vegetables will be combined in one giant bowl, just like our onions. I'm going to go ahead and take eight large onions, peel the skin off and cut them into halves before throwing them into the food processor. We will also use 20 layers of garlic divided between the food processes. These will be bombarded until they become a flavor situation and join the rest of our vegetables to join a giant vegetable party.

It looks like mashed potatoes. It's funny how the one who had the carrots stained the onion so that it didn't look like an orange cream. Now that our vegetables are ready, it's time to give them a good cook. So, into a huge Dutch oven, probably the biggest one we have. We're going to go ahead and put in two sticks of butter, and once it's simmering, we're going to go ahead and add all of our vegetables, mix them together, and let them cook and soften. This is going to take a while. So while that's happening, we'll go ahead and start our meat mixture separately.

In a large roasting tray, we will add half a kilo of bacon, cut into small pieces. We'll let the fat brown on its own, and once it's crispy, we'll add three pounds of ground beef and three pounds of ground pork, breaking up those clumps and mixing them together until they've all started to get a nice dough. color in it. Once everything was fully combined, I decided it would be a good idea to speed things up by dividing them into two saucepans each just to create more surface area and not boil all the time. Half of the vegetable mixture will be placed in a large wok and the meat mixture will be divided between two evenly sized stainless steel pans.

Now there's a lot of grease coming out of one of these and I don't think we need that much, so we're going to go ahead and use some paper towels to remove a lot of the excess grease. Once the meat looks really browned and starts to crisp on all sides, we'll transfer one pan back to the first one because it's now shrunk a little. We're going to go ahead and add six cans of tomato paste to our crispy browned meat and rice mixture. Stir that in, let the cooking come down, and then you'll deglaze that empty pan with a bottle of red wine while we put the other bottle of red wine into our meat mixture.

Oh look, fire. That's ok. Now that the red wine is also cooked and much of the alcohol has had a chance to evaporate, we're going to put this beautiful meat mixture back into our vegetables, dividing it in half between each one. Then they'll take some milk, four cups between them, and we'll also add four cups of broth between them to add a little seasoning, some flavor, and some liquid. Once the liquids have been added, we will remove both from the heat and transfer the mixture from the wok to an oven-safe stainless steel pot. Now we will add nine cans of pureed tomatoes to both, as well as four tablespoons of brown sugar per batch.

I love adding a little brown sugar to my pasta sauce just to emphasize the sweetness of the tomatoes. Now once they're done, they're going to go into a 350 degree oven for about two to three hours until they're nice and bubbly. Now that we've accounted for our huge amount of meat sauce, it's time to work on the white sauce for our lasagna. Instead of a ricotta-based filling like many Western lasagnas, it would probably make much more sense to take inspiration from Italian lasagna. So my way to go is a slightly thinner white sauce. In a large pot we are going to melt and brown two sticks of butter.

Normally it doesn't brown, but I like to brown the butter because, well, it has a little more flavor. Once the butter has browned evenly, I add a cup of flour and stir to make sure the raw flour flavor has cooked down. Then, once the roux has formed well, we can add a gallon of whole milk, slowly, making sure it has a chance to work out all those lumps before adding more, kind of like making a crepe or pancake batter. Once the milk has been added slowly and our sauce looks relatively lump-free, we'll bring it to a simmer to give the flour time to thicken the sauce.

Then we'll add our seasoning, about 10 seconds of fresh nutmeg into the sauce, a tablespoon of ground pepper, and a tablespoon of salt. Our white sauce is now ready. Now it's time to turn those pasta balls we ate earlier into as many lasagna sheets as possible. Now, in the 100 layers explained by the restaurant, there are actually 100 layers of pasta. It's 33 layers of pasta, 33 layers of red sauce, and 33 layers of white sauce finished with a layer of pasta or a little more white sauce on top. So we're going to need about 33 layers of freshly made lasagna sheets, which is quite a lot of pasta.

So we're going to try to make them really nice and thin. I'm taking each of these pasta balls, cutting them into quarters, and working with them one at a time. I'm starting from the lowest setting, which is the thickest and going down to two and then rerolling it by folding it over itself and starting again from one. This will create a little more chew and better structure for our lasagna noodles. So I like to do that at least once before proceeding to roll it to its thinnest shape. These are going to be very, very thin because I'm going to go down to an eight.

Meanwhile, Rachel is there helping me, but she has to use the hand crank while I enjoy the luxuries of an electric pasta maker. Thank you Rachel for making this video possible again. After these leaves get super long and thin, I'll go ahead and trim them into large, flat leaves. Approximately the width or length of our hotel tray, the process takes us approximately two hours. It's a lot of rolling, cutting, trimming, hand flowering and just trying to balance this pasta delicately on the back of your hands. But it's a lot of fun to play with a large amount of pasta dough, almost like curtains.

After our pasta dough has been rolled out as flat as possible, shaped, and trimmed, we'll go ahead and cook these pasta sheets. Now these are super thin and made with fresh pasta. They only need about a minute in boiling water to cook it. So I have three saucepans here, both with boiling salted water, and we're going to cook all of these pasta sheets to make sure everything is ready for our assembly. Now, for the difficult task of making and layering all 100 layers, I have a huge hotel tray. The largest we could find for commercial sales, which is about six to seven inches deep and the size of a sheet tray, half a shape to be exact.

First, I'm going to put a little bit of oil and oil down the sides of this pan and then I'm going to put down enough sheets of parchment to make sure that as we layer this, it comes off easily, thinking ahead. Then we start our layers. We start with a layer of pasta and then a layer of meat sauce, which we have to be relatively not so generous with as we need to be able to make sure we get as many layers as we can. So first we'll start by spreading a thin layer over the entire pasta and giving it a few tablespoons of béchamel right on top, making sure it smooths out as well.

Three layers down, 97 to go. We will repeat the process over and over again, starting with the pasta, continuing with the meat sauce and spreading a thin layer of béchamel on top. About 15 layers, I forgot we were supposed to add cheese too, so on top of the béchamel I'm sorting out a good parmesan which doesn't count as a layer but should add a little flavor. And after about an hour, we're about halfway done. We're up to 50 layers and well, there's 50 more to go, so we just buckle up and get to work. Pasta, meat sauce, bechamel, cheese, pasta, meat sauce, bechamel, cheese.

It's quite satisfying to see this thing growing taller and taller. After about two hours or so, we realized we were out of dough and were counting the entire time. Steve and Rachel have been carefully watching my layering process and counting each time we go up to a different layer. We made it to 88 layers before we ran out of pasta, but we still have leftover meat sauce and béchamel, so let's go ahead and keep going. Rachel and Kendall found some dried lasagna noodles in a box that lasagna is usually made from, so we'll cook them and use them to fill the remaining layers.

I'm not saying it's fate, but the amount of dry lasagna noodles we boiled took us to 100 layers without extra. Now I think that's great. For the final layer, I take the remaining béchamel and put a lot of grated parmesan cheese on it, mix it together and layer it on top so it's nice and crispy. We'll put this in a 325 convection oven for about three hours. It was going to be very late by the time the lasagna finished cooking, so we asked Andrew to help us keep an eye on it and take it out after the three hours.

So thanks Andrew for doing that. Oh, it's a little crunchy and probably burnt on top. I probably should have turned off the convection at some point. That was our mistake, but thanks to Andrew for getting this out, covering it properly, and making sure it's sealed well. Andrew is now going to put this inside his outdoor grill, which is turned off because it's so cold outside and that seems to be the best way to refrigerate this naturally because it won't fit in the refrigerator. This is me coming to collect my prize the next day. Let's go ahead and take this down and see what we have.

Oh yeah, the top layer is definitely a little charred for my taste and I like crispy lasagna, but I think this one will probably be inedible. Let's remove the top layer and see. Let's treat that as a sacrifice for the other 99 layers. Oh yeah, don't eat that. It's definitely burned. After trimming out the parts that are a little too dark, it's time to turn this thing around, which is crazy to say, oh, it's almost gone.it will fall. Simply better. Go ahead and turn it around. Boom, that looks great. Very nice color on the outside. She didn't even need the scroll, it just slipped away.

Perfect. Now that's a lot of lasagna. Now for the reveal, we're going to go ahead and trim the sides to keep them as decorations and snacks and also to create cleaner cuts so we can see the layers. Oh here we go. Wow, that looks great. It's like a huge super-compressed lasagna brick, which is exactly what we did. It's always interesting to me that even though we lay everything flat as we put it together, you always get these interesting wave patterns that continue. I'm not exactly sure why that happens, but it looks pretty cool. I want to clean this up and make sure all the sides are trimmed and nice and square.

Be sure to save all those scraps as snacks for later. And then we'll go ahead and just for fun, we'll grate a bunch of cheese and put some parsley on top, although this won't be the final way we'll serve this, but I will say it's a pretty good lasagna. because of its size. You can't really hear it, but everyone in the studio is crowding around and laughing, taking pictures of this crazy thing we did, and I think that's usually a good sign. So at the restaurant, what they do is make it to a size where they can cut it into really nice, clean portions so they can brown it during service.

So that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to go ahead and cut a nice inch-thick slice of lasagna, make sure it's trimmed to a normal serving size, and we're going to brown it in a pan with a little bit of butter to make sure it gets crispy, once it's browned on both sides and each side has had a chance to caramelize and get nice and crispy, we're going to go ahead and get ready to serve it with a nice puddle of our leftover meat sauce and a generous amount. serving of grated Pecorino Romano cheese and a pinch of freshly chopped parsley to complement the final dish.

And I present to you our version of the 100-layer lasagna found in restaurants around the world. But the real question is, after all this work, all this work and all that time, what does it taste like? You need that extra sauce for moisture and extra cheese for saltiness to make this little block of seared lasagna even tastier. I think it's a great way to start lasagna instead of having to scoop it out of a nice plate. We also made sure that absolutely 0% of this lasagna was wasted. All those scraps and lasagna leftovers were going to be trimmed and cut into large portions for our entire studio to take home.

Each person probably took home one to two giant one-gallon Ziploc bags of lasagna chunks. It will be a great vacation. - Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today's episode. They have been a great partner in supporting the Babish culinary universe and bringing my websites to life. From websites to online stores, domains to analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for you to build your online presence. They also have SEO tools so more people find your site in searches more often. If you want to try it out yourself, you can start your free trial today by visiting squarespace.com/babish to get 10% off your first purchase. (brilliant music)