Making lasagna with fresh pasta is not the same project as making lasagna with dried pasta sheets. It is a longer project, a Sunday project, a project that requires flour on every surface and a certain willingness to commit to the whole thing from the start. But the result is so far beyond the boxed-pasta version that the effort calculates differently once you have tasted it. The fresh pasta sheets become part of the dish in a way that dried pasta never does — they absorb the ragù and béchamel and lose their distinct identity as pasta, becoming instead the connective tissue that holds the layers together and makes the whole thing cohesive rather than stacked.
This is the lasagna you eat in Italian homes. Not the lasagna of Italian-American restaurants, with its thick pasta and excessive ricotta. The home version: thin pasta, restrained béchamel, a ragù that has been cooking since morning, the whole thing resting quietly in the oven while the family has an argument about something unrelated to food.
Fresh Pasta and the Italian Home Kitchen
Fresh pasta in Italy is not an artisanal specialty or a restaurant affectation. It is simply how pasta is made in certain regions and for certain dishes, particularly in Emilia-Romagna — the region that runs across northern Italy from Bologna to Rimini — where the egg-rich pasta tradition is so entrenched that dried pasta is considered suitable for certain sauces and fresh pasta for others, and the distinction is not debatable.
For lasagna, the position is unanimous: fresh pasta is correct, dried pasta is a compromise. The egg in the fresh pasta dough — typically three to four yolks per hundred grams of flour — creates a pasta with a richness and color that dried pasta cannot replicate, and a texture that is slightly yielding without being soft, that holds its structure through the baking process while becoming integrated with the sauce in a way that dried pasta, however well soaked, never does.
Learning to make fresh pasta in Italy — whether in a cooking class in Bologna, at a market demonstration in Florence, or simply by watching and attempting to replicate what a nonnahas been doing for fifty years — is one of the most directly transferable travel experiences in all of food travel. The technique is genuinely learnable in an afternoon. The feel of properly worked pasta dough, the visual cue that tells you when it has been rolled thin enough, the way it relaxes and smooths as you work it — these are things that watching once makes understandable and practicing twice makes habitual.
Bologna’s Mercato di Mezzo and the surrounding streets in the old city have multiple pasta shops — sfogline, the women who have been making fresh pasta professionally their whole lives — where you can watch the process and buy the pasta to take home. Watching a sfoglina roll a sheet of pasta by hand to a translucency where you can read through it is one of the genuine small pleasures of Italian travel.
The Pasta Dough
The standard Bolognese ratio for lasagna pasta is 100 grams of 00 flour per egg, using a combination of whole eggs and yolks for richness. The 00 designation refers to the fineness of the grind — finely milled soft wheat flour that produces a pasta with a silkier texture than all-purpose flour. It is widely available at Italian specialty shops and many grocery stores. All-purpose flour works if you cannot find 00, producing a slightly more robust pasta that is less silky but entirely good.
The dough needs to rest for thirty minutes after kneading — this relaxes the gluten and makes rolling significantly easier. Do not skip the rest. Pasta dough that has not rested will spring back as you roll it and resist reaching the thinness that lasagna requires.
Roll the pasta as thin as you reasonably can — setting 5 or 6 on a pasta machine, or thin enough to see your hand through when held up to the light. Thick lasagna pasta is the most common home lasagna mistake and it produces a dish that is heavy and stodgy rather than the layered, cohesive structure that fresh pasta lasagna should be.
The Recipe
Ingredients (serves 8)
For the fresh pasta:
- 300g (about 2½ cups) 00 flour or all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting
- 2 whole eggs plus 2 egg yolks
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- Pinch of salt
For the ragù (start this first — it needs at least 2 hours):
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- 1 medium onion, finely diced
- 2 medium carrots, finely diced
- 2 stalks celery, finely diced
- 3 oz pancetta, finely diced
- ¾ lb ground beef
- ½ lb ground pork
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 1 cup dry white wine
- 1 cup whole milk
- 1 cup beef stock
- Salt and black pepper
For the béchamel:
- 5 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 5 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 3 cups whole milk, warmed
- ½ teaspoon salt
- Pinch of white pepper
- Pinch of nutmeg
For assembly:
- 4 oz Parmigiano-Reggiano, freshly grated
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
Instructions
Make the ragù. Heat olive oil in a heavy Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the pancetta and cook until the fat renders. Add onion, carrot, and celery and cook over medium-low heat for 15 minutes until completely softened. Add both meats and break up thoroughly. Cook until browned, about 8 minutes. Add tomato paste and cook 2 minutes. Add wine, raise heat, and cook until almost evaporated, about 5 minutes. Add stock. Reduce heat to very low, partially cover, and cook for 2 to 3 hours. In the last 30 minutes add the milk. The finished ragù should be dense and barely saucy. Season well.
Make the pasta dough. Mound the flour on a clean work surface and make a well in the center. Add the eggs, yolks, olive oil, and salt to the well. Using a fork, begin beating the eggs, gradually incorporating flour from the inner walls of the well. When the mixture becomes too thick for a fork, use your hands to bring it together into a rough dough. Knead vigorously for 8 to 10 minutes until smooth, elastic, and silky — it should not stick to the surface and should spring back slowly when poked. Wrap in plastic and rest for 30 minutes.
Roll the pasta. Divide the dough into four pieces. Working with one piece at a time (keeping the rest wrapped), flatten with your hand and feed through a pasta machine starting at the widest setting. Fold the sheet in thirds and feed through again at the widest setting 3 to 4 times, folding between each pass, until the sheet is smooth. Then progressively roll thinner, one setting at a time, until you reach setting 5 or 6 — very thin, almost translucent. Cut into sheets that fit your baking dish with slight overlap. Dust with flour and set aside on a clean towel.
Blanch the pasta sheets. Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Blanch the pasta sheets for 30 seconds each, then transfer to a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking. Lay flat on clean towels to dry. Blanching is necessary for fresh pasta lasagna — uncooked fresh pasta will absorb too much liquid from the sauces during baking.
Make the béchamel. Melt butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add flour and whisk for 2 minutes. Add warm milk in a slow stream, whisking constantly. Cook until thick, about 8 minutes. Season with salt, white pepper, and nutmeg.
Assemble. Preheat oven to 375°F. Butter a 9×13 inch baking dish. Spread a thin layer of ragù on the bottom. Add a layer of pasta sheets. Spread ragù, then béchamel, then Parmigiano. Repeat for 4 to 5 layers, ending with béchamel and Parmigiano. Dot the top with butter pieces.
Bake. Cover loosely with foil and bake 30 minutes. Remove foil and bake 20 to 25 minutes more until golden brown and bubbling. Rest for 20 minutes before cutting.
The Sunday Lunch Tradition
In Italian families, Sunday lunch is the meal that everything else in the week orbits around. It is the meal that takes all morning to prepare and all afternoon to eat, that produces more food than anyone should reasonably consume and gets consumed anyway, that brings together multiple generations and produces the specific kind of family argument that is also a form of love. Lasagna is the Sunday lunch dish in Emilia-Romagna and in many other Italian regions, not because it is complicated — it is not, once you have done it a few times — but because it rewards the time investment of a Sunday morning in a way that most dishes do not.
The lasagna that sits for twenty minutes after coming out of the oven is not the same dish as the lasagna cut immediately. The resting time allows the layers to set, the sauce to absorb into the pasta, the whole structure to consolidate into something that can be cut cleanly and served in cohesive slices rather than collapsing. The Italian insistence on this rest is not patience for its own sake. It is knowledge accumulated over many Sunday lunches of what happens when you do not wait.
For everything you need to plan an Italy trip see our complete Italy itinerary. For more Italian recipes from our travels see our Authentic Italian Red Sauce and our Gordon Ramsay Lasagne al Forno. For where to eat in Italian cities see our Florence food guide.
