How To Make Classic Italian Lasagna
By: Sheri Wetherell
Published: January 31, 2013

Laura Vitale from Laura In The Kitchen shows us how to make a classic Italian meat and cheese lasagna. Watch and learn how to make her grandmother's meat sauce, then put it all together in one tasty dish. Watch the video below for her easy to follow instructions.


Hi guys, I’m Laura Vitale. In this episode of Laura In The Kitchen, I am finally going to make something that I’m getting a lot of requests for, is my lasagna. Right, this is a basic meat and cheese lasagna, that’s what we’re going to do. So we’re first going to start to make our meat sauce. And this is what you need for the meat sauce. You need some ground up sausage – Italian sausage, you’re going to need to some ground beef, some tomato puree, some chopped up onions, some red wine, of course salt and pepper, extra virgin olive oil. Now, this is just a basic lasagna recipe that has been handed down to me by my mother, by my grandmother. I do make a dozen different lasagnas. I make vegetarian lasagnas, seafood, white lasagna, holiday lasagna. But this is the basic, okay. So let’s go to the stove and start cooking that meat sauce.
	I have a large pot here without about three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, pre-heating fried onions, putting my onions in. Isn’t that a beautiful sound? I have this over a medium high heat. And you want this to cook down and caramelize and it’ll take about four to five minutes and then we’ll add in our ground beef and our ground sausage.
	Now, my onions are nice and they’re not really browned or anything yet and that’s fine, they’ve been cooking for four minutes because now I’m going to add in our ground meat - our ground sausage and ground meat. And you want to break this up. Now, growing up my grandmother used to make teeny, teeny, weeny meatballs out of this ground, you know, ground meat and ground sausage. I don’t have the patience for it. There is no way I’m going to sit there and make hundreds of these teeny, tiny meatballs, literally it took all day. But she had me to do it, that’s why she did it. So my mother just used to cook the ground beef and ground sausage like so. So that’s how I do it. You know, I want to make sure that it’s delicious but I also want to make sure it doesn’t take me all day. And I think, you know, that’s a lot, it’s a big … I think people always say that they don’t do something because it takes too long. But you’re not doing anything to it, you’re putting it together but then it cooks by itself. So we’re just going to break this up. You want to just break this up and you want to let this cook until it’s all the way cooked through or mostly cooked through, and it’ll take about 10 minutes or so and then we’ll add the wine and the rest of the ingredients.
	Now, my sausage and ground beef have been cooking together with the onion on medium heat for about five minutes. And as you can see, it’s just about cooked all the way through but that doesn’t matter. Now I’m going to add in the red wine. Mm, I just know this is going to be delicious. And now this is going to be much more, you know a meat sauce that you’re going to need to assemble your lasagna.
	Watch the video above or here for the rest of the instructions.