Mary Berry's warning over cooking 'perfect' lasagne with best results
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If the pasta layers in your lasagne are always a bit chewy and hard in places, celebrity chef Mary Berry has solved the problem with her faultless method for the perfect Italian dish. There’s nothing better than coming home on a cold day to a hearty, warming, home-cooked dinner you’ve already prepared. Lasagne is the ideal dish to whip up at the weekend when you have more time to enjoy the cooking and if it doesn’t all get gobbled up then, you can freeze some for those busy week nights further down the line.
Celebrity chef Mary Berry is the Queen of cooking and she first showcased her recipe for lasagne on TV in the 70s when she used dripping to fry the meat and vegetables. She still recommends this method if you want a "really meaty flavour" but recognises that olive oil is the healthier and preferred option these days. And, for the "perfect" results, she suggests leaving it to set for six hours before tucking in.
Since then she’s spent a lot of years nailing her method for the perfect lasagne and there’s one area she urges caution over if you want satisfyingly soft pasta layers. If you follow her recipe, which involves letting the finished dish sit for six hours after preparing and before cooking, she says you won’t ever need to pre-cook your pasta sheets. As well as the resting period she allows, the ratio of sauce to pasta means the sheets will be cooked to perfection.
However if you don’t have time to wait before cooking, or prefer more pasta to sauce, she advises pre-cooking your sheets so they don’t end up chewy. You could also use fresh pasta which never needs pre-cooking. Mary’s recipe below serves 8-10 so is ideal for a big dinner party or for batch cooking. You could also use it to make two separate lasagnes - one for dinner and one for the freezer.
