- Hey, guys, it's Candice, the Edgy Veg,
and today, I'm going
to show you how to make
a traditional, delicious, comforting,
like your Nonna made it, lasagna.
(upbeat music)
Lasagna's Italian, right?
- [Man] It is, yeah.
- It's truly Italian.
It's not like Olive Garden Italian?
- [Man] No, no, definitely not, no.
(Candice laughing)
Definitely not, it is a
traditional Italian dish.
- Gotta check with the Italian in the room
before I start spouting
things that are not real.
(digital beeping)
So today,
I'm going to show you
how to make a delicious,
traditional meat sauce from scratch.
I'm going to show you
how to make a wonderful,
cheesy, creamy vegan bechamel.
And then, we're gonna
throw it all together,
put it in the oven,
and hopefully, end up
with a delicious lasagna.
There's a bunch of different
ways that you can make lasagna.
Now, you can do a more
vegetable forward lasagna,
where people add in spinach
and eggplant and zucchini and whatever.
But I'm just choosing to do the bechamel,
meat sauce, and noodles.
If you have a wonderful tofu ricotta,
you can use that as well,
and there's also a couple companies
out there that are making ricotta.
First thing I'm going to
make is the meat sauce
because it has to simmer
for about 20 to 30 minutes
to marry all the flavors together.
For the meat sauce, we are going
to do the traditional mise en place.
So for the mise en place,
we have the onions,
we have the carrot, we have
the garlic, oil, of course.
For the tomatoes, we have tomato paste,
crushed tomatoes, and then, the passata.
We have chili flakes, basil, and oregano.
And for our meat, we have
just traditional cheap
and cheerful veggie ground round.
For the passata, so we
have the crushed tomatoes,
which is cooked,
and then, we have the passata,
which is uncooked, drained.
You put tomatoes through a sieve,
so it doesn't have any of the skins.
It doesn't have any of the
seeds and it's uncooked.
First thing I am going to do is heat up
some olive oil over medium heat.
That's how you start every single
delicious recipe, isn't it?
And then, we're going to throw our onions
and garlic and carrots in.
Usually, you also have
celery in a mise en place,
but I didn't do that today.
Couldn't actually tell you why.
I just didn't feel like
adding celery today.
There's no other reason.
(food sizzling)
(light clanking)
I'm going to cook this for
about eight to 10 minutes
or until you can really smell that garlic.
You want the garlic to be fragrant,
but you want the carrots to be soft.
I'm going to add a pinch of salt
just to draw out some of the moisture.
Let it cook.
I'm gonna come in every couple minutes
and just give it a good stir
and let it cook until it's nice and soft.
Now, we are going to take
our veggie ground round.
Add that.
(food sizzling)
Get in there.
There we go.
Just cook that until it's heated through.
You only need a couple minutes.
All right, now I'm going
to add the passata.
(food sizzling)
You want all of it, yes.
And then, our crushed tomatoes.
Our tomato paste.
Then, we have no bouillon,
vegetable bouillon cubes.
And our spices, we have the chilies,
the basil, and the oregano.
And mix that all together.
(food sloshing)
'Kay, I'm going to season it
with salt to taste and some pepper.
Cover it and just let it cook
for a bit, 20 to 30 minutes.
(soft grinding)
The second thing I'm going to make
for our lasagna is the bechamel sauce.
Now, a bechamel is a
really great, creamy base
for any pasta sauce that you're making,
really any sauce that needs a cream base.
It's also really good if you
want a cheese substitute,
so if you want something to be creamy
and cheesy without actually using cheese,
it's a really nice base for that.
It's a really nice, neutral base.
Today, I'm just going to add
a little bit of onion powder,
some vegan cheese.
Now, this is totally optional.
If you don't have access to vegan cheese,
you can just leave this out
or use nutritional yeast.
I decided to use vegan cheese
and a pinch of nutmeg to get
that really nice, homey flavor.
The first thing that I'm going to do
is heat my vegan margarine
over medium heat.
Now if you don't have
access to vegan margarine,
you can also use oil.
I like to use a stable oil
like coconut or avocado,
but I always have access to vegan butter,
so I just like to use that.
When doing these vegan versions
of traditional recipes,
I do like to try and stay
as traditional as possible.
So using the fun vegan products
that are out on the market
that I have access to
is the most traditional way of doing it,
so I like to kind of make
it as authentic as possible.
Okay, I'm going to add in my flour
and just whisk it constantly.
You're gonna end up with
this nice, thick paste.
You wanna cook that for about
two, three, four minutes,
until you've cooked out that flour flavor.
If you ever make a
bechamel or have a bechamel
that tastes a lot like flour,
it's because you didn't cook it enough
in this stage to cook
out the flour flavor.
Like bread, when you
make bread with flour,
the reason why it tastes like bread
and not like flour is because it's cooked.
I am going to slowly whisk
in one cup of milk at a time.
(metallic scraping)
Gonna do one cup.
(food sizzling)
Whisk it into a paste and
then, slowly add in the rest.
(metallic scraping)
(upbeat music)
Now that all of my soymilk is in the pan,
I've increased it to medium.
I'm going to just whisk in
(soft tapping)
onion powder and pinch of nutmeg.
(metallic scraping)
I'm going to whisk constantly
until it thickens up.
All right, I have turned down
the heat all the way to zero.
Coulda just said that I turned it off.
I'm going to add in one
cup of vegan Parmesan.
Again, this is completely optional.
(metallic scraping)
You can also do this with
nutritional yeast or both.
Stir that in until it melts
and then, season it with
salt and pepper to taste.
(metallic scraping)
Ooh.
(metallic scraping)
All right, nice and thick.
So we want our bechamel to be nice
and thick, but you
still want it to be able
to move it around and have
it drip off the whisk.
So many people leave comments
like, "Pasta contains eggs."
Usually, dry pasta from a store does not.
Voila.
Sometimes you have to break them.
Okay, the first thing we are going to do
to build our lasagna is add a
layer of sauce to the bottom.
You want about a cup to a cup and a half.
(pasta snaps)
Here we go.
All right, put your apron on,
so you don't get it all over yourself.
Meat sauce.
This time, you want about two cups.
You want to make sure that
everything is completely covered.
Err on the side of
saucier than not because
your noodles are gonna
absorb some of that moisture.
So if you're doing two
cups of the meat sauce,
meat sauce, quote, unquote,
then you want to do about
one cup of the bechamel.
So that's half a cup.
You could totally whip out,
I don't know, three or four of these.
Throw them in the freezer
and then, have the easiest dinner ever
when you don't feel like cooking.
And then, just repeat this
until you've run out of noodles.
Just make sure that your
top layer is meat sauce
and then, bechamel on the top.
(upbeat music)
Now that I'm done layering this guy,
now, this is a little bit smaller.
this is a, I think it's
like a 10 by seven pan,
maybe, or 11 by seven.
So it did two layers of each.
Now, I'm going to cover this with foil
(foil rustling)
and I'm going to bake that for 25 minutes.
Take the foil off
and then, bake it for another 10 to 15
until it's nice and bubbly.
(upbeat music)
All right, guys, there you have it;
a delicious, vegan lasagna.
I'm so excited and it's gonna be so good.
I just want the cheese!
There we go.
(laughing) That is so good.
Take a moment to mourn all of
the terrible vegan lasagnas
I've had in the last eight years.
May you rest in peace and
never come into my life again.
This is so good.
You have to make it.
It's actually really easy.
Takes about the same amount
of time as it would take you
to make a normal lasagna, which
is already time consuming,
but the substitutions
are not that different.
It's really good.
I mean you could give this to anyone
and they wouldn't know the difference.
I truly don't think that
they would really miss
any of the cheese or any of
the meat. This is so good.
Hey, yo.
See, this is what all the pitter-patter
of little feet is in the background.
So good.
(shoes clacking)
I'm so excited.
Guys, we have to eat it!
- [Man] Come try.
- Molly, come try!
- [Candice] Okay guys, what do you think?
- Yeah, that's fucking good.
- That's really good.
- That's on par.
- Yeah?
- That bechamel.
- [Candice] That bechamel's good, right?
- Yeah.
That's it.
- That is really good.
Holy shit.
It's funny 'cause I've never
had a bechamel in a lasagna.
Usually, we'll do without the cheese
or like my grandmother's
would, but this is like bomb.
This is really good.
- Yay!
You definitely have to make this.
Let me know if you love lasagna
by giving this video a big thumbs up.
Let me know in the comments section below
what recipe you would
like to see veganized.
And if you're new here,
hit that Subscribe button
and the bell notification
and I will see you
and you will see this face every Tuesday
and Thursday at 4:00 p.m.
Okay, bye.
