Truely Home Made Lasagna

Part of balancing our lives and having a healthy diet requires planning ahead.  Particularly when our meals involve something as complex as lasagna.  In this case our lasagna is entirely local, although the meat and dairy does not come from our yard. 

To start with we will make the noodles.  We start with wheat berries which we grind into 2 cups of flour. 

 

We mix this with 2 eggs, water and a bit of oil (also not from our yard).  We kneed this into a ball.  Then put it threw the pasta maker on the lowest setting until it feels smooth. 



Once the dough is smooth we lower the width until we have it thin enough.  At this point we cut the noodles to the appropriate length for our pan.  Using a ravioli cutter allows us to cut the noodles and make them look like professional noodles. 

We then hang the noodles to dry.

Lasagna obviously also requires mozzarella and ricotta cheese.  We have made  cheese before on this blog.  For mozzarella we start with milk and add citric acid (1.5 teaspoons in .5 cups water for every gallon).  Heat to 55 degrees.  Heat it to 90 degrees stirring constantly.

Add .25 teaspoons liquid rennet in .25 cups water (for every gallon) and stir for 30 seconds.  Let it sit 5 minutes.  It will then form a curd.  Cut the curds and heat them to 105.

Scoop out the curds with a slotted spoon and put into a microwavable bowl.

Microwave on high for one minute and drain off the whey (keep for ricotta).  Stretch and kneed the cheese.  Microwave 2 more times at 35 seconds until it stretches.

Then when it is smooth and shiny roll into a ball.  Let it set before shredding. 

We have shown how to make ricotta:
http://newworklifebalance.blogspot.com/2014/05/making-ricotta.html

We have also made pasta sauce before as well, this allowed us to use our canned sauce:  http://newworklifebalance.blogspot.com/2014/10/making-tomato-sauce.html
Cook the beef and mix it with the sauce.

From there mix the mozzarella and ricotta and an egg.  Cook the pasta and layer sauce, pasta, cheese, sauce and meat, and repeat.  We also included fresh basil in one layer.

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes then add mozzarella on top and cook an additional 5-10.