I’ve already met my favorite lasagna, and her name is A Nice Lasagna (by Julia Turshen in Small Victories). We became acquainted one evening in a cabin in the North Woods of Wisconsin as snow fell quietly outside. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it? We’ve learned each other’s love languages and speak them whenever opportunity strikes. She gives me gifts and acts of service. I shower her with words of affirmation and offer her the loving touch of a fork. We both share quality time, particularly with three of my dearest friends involved. For a short sweet season, these friends and I lived in Chicago. But in July 2017, we scattered to the four corners of the country. Now we come together once a year in October to stay up late and chat over red wine, pie, and of course, A Nice Lasagna.
When I turned to nothing fancy’s pasta section and saw A Very Good Lasagna, I was skeptical. Could A Very Good Lasagna even approach the perfection of A Nice Lasagna? Only one way to find out.
Allow me to evaluate A Very Good Lasagna through the only lens available to me -- a comparison to A Nice Lasagna. I’ll evaluate them on several key criterion.
Sauce - It’s the best part of a lasagna and both sauces are truly excellent. Truly! And I’m quite particular about my tomato sauce!
Very Good - This sauce recipe calls for both crushed and whole peeled tomatoes. The whole tomatoes are squashed by hand, which creates a nice combination of small-medium sized tomatoes and some casual tomato juice. In true Alison fashion, anchovies add some salty umami. Finely chopped garlic and onion complete this well balanced sauce. One more benefit of this recipe is there’s no need to wait for the sauce to cool before assembling the lasagna because the noodles are parboiled (which I’ll get to, not a fan).
Nice - Only whole peeled tomatoes allowed here, crushed by hand in a large bowl. (If you’ve never had the pleasure of crushing tomatoes by hand, then I suggest trying it soon! Just be sure to wear something you don’t mind getting squirted with tomato juice.) Then there’s garlic, salt, and the X factor ingredient: creme fraiche. I think adding a tangy, creamy cheese to the sauce itself is actually another level of genius. Sadly, this sauce does need to fully cool before use so that it doesn’t make the noodles soggy. Which adds another hour of preparation time.
Cheese
Very Good - Fresh ricotta, fresh mozzarella, and shredded parmesan make a tasty, but wet and clumpy combination. It was hard to evenly distribute the wet clumps of cheese across the pan, not to mention messy.
Nice - The cheeses used here are much easier to handle and distribute - just shredded mozzarella and parmesan. The third cheese is the creme fraiche in the sauce. This recipe also calls for lots of torn basil leaves, which I missed in Very Good.
Noodles - I went Gluten Free in August, and this was my first GF lasagna. I was very pleased with the GF noodles I found--I barely noticed they weren’t regular noodles. These long noodles are made with brown rice, and didn’t leave me feeling bloated afterward. Here they are for reference.
Very Good - Okay, here was my main sticking point with this recipe. Parboiling the lasagna noodles. The noodles did cook nicely because of the parboil, but it’s a pain to keep them from sticking and adds yet another step to the assembly.
Nice - No boil, no fuss, still cooks great. (Julia tells you how to make your own noodles, but I don’t have the time or patience for that.)
Layers
Very Good - He has 4 layers, which is a beautiful thing!
Nice - Julia just tells you to keep building layers till you run out of room. But since the sauce is a bit chunkier, I’m usually only able to fit 3 layers in my pan.
Leftovers - I don’t appreciate how noodles continue to absorb sauce as they keep in the fridge. Since I love sauce so much, I like to have extra to spoon over my leftovers.
Very Good - Uses every last drop of sauce in the lasagna. I appreciate the math here, but I wouldn’t be mad about more sauce.
Nice - There’s usually a cup of sauce left over to use however you see fit.
The Final Verdict: A Nice Lasagna still takes the cake, but I’ll give it to Alison. Her’s was a very good lasagna.
24 recipes cooked, 201 to go.
