Bechamel tastes better, is harder to make, and has more calories. My mum always used bechamel, but I use ricotta, unless I’m making it ‘her way’, for the kids.
Spinach was popular all over Italy in general, nothing to do with Florence in particular. Catherine being Italian, she was used to it and naturally wanted to continue enjoying it in France. It was the French who made the association between Florence and spinach just because their queen was from there.
The restaurant I worked in some 40 years ago offered lasagne Florentine and they certainly used béchamel in that. I mean I understand liking ricotta, but spinach on lasagne or any other baked pasta definitely calls for béchamel.
I’m speechless. The reason Italian food (real Italian food) has such worldwide renown is because the quality of the original ingredients used is stella. Pasta dishes included. The freshest tomatoes, the finest olive oil, the sharpest lemons.
Sugar is not corn syrup.
When you’re talking about sweeteners dissolved into a sauce, it’s a pretty fine distinction. What, IYHO is the meaningful difference?
It was a revelation to me when I stopped being a Ragu-eating student, and followed an actual recipe for italian tomato sauce. It was so bloody easy and only has about four ingredients in it.
Oh yeah, I’m no chef by a long shot, but I make much better sauce today. That first one, I was just kind of amazed that it tasted exactly like jarred Ragu.
When I was first learning to cook, I fell into the fallacy that if my food wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t spiced enough. Oh, how wrong that was. Looking back at most of my early attempts at pasta sauces, I basically dumped everything but the kitchen sink into them. Gobs of dried Italian seasoning blend, bouillon cubes, seasoned salts, onion powder, garlic powder, Worcestershire sauce, probably even some ketchup at some time as well. And I’m sure I made a run through spices like nutmeg, cinnamon, and the such (hey, I re-invented Cincinnati chili!) It was all just so much a mess. It was a series of “taste. hmm … still needs something” and grab something random from the spice rack. (And the “still needs something” was probably just salt.)
Then, in my early 20s, I simplified and learned that just good tomatoes (and canned are usually preferable unless it’s tomato season and you have access to fresh-picked fruit – which I actually did when I finally figured out how to cook), a little bit of olive oil, onion or garlic, and optional hot pepper made for a fantastic tomato sauce. Salt to taste, and accent it with a fresh herb like basil or parsley, and you’re golden.
The only jarred sauce I’ve discovered that I could stand these days is Rao’s. But ain’t no way I’m paying like $8 a jar for that, when I’m comfortable making it from scratch without much bother for a third-to-quarter of the price. But, yeah, Ragu and Prego – I just don’t like them anymore. (Although, wait, there is now the Prego Farmer’s Market Line – I believe I had that at my MIL’s house and it wasn’t terrible.)
How do you determine the sharpness of a lemon before you cut it? I’d love to know how to do that.
And I agree somewhat; ingredient quality is definitely part of the equation, but a lot of it is more because the cuisine itself is excellent. I mean, you can make a perfectly delicious, if inauthentic “lasagna” out of dried pasta, hamburger meat, canned pasta sauce, grocery store ricotta and grated “parmesan” from a can.
THAT is why Italian food is great- even when abused or reinterpreted a dozen ways, it’s still tasty. Mexican food is similar- pretty much anything can be put in a tortilla and become part of a taco and still be tasty.
French food is a bit more finicky- I wonder if it’s because a lot of Italian and Mexican foods were originally peasant foods, even if they were peasant special occasion foods, while a lot of French cuisine derives from a more upper-class culinary origin.
I mean, when other countries eagerly adopt even your recipe for “Whore’s noodles”, that kind of tells you that you’ve hit on a winning system. Italian food: So easy to make good, that even a hooker can get it right.
Ricotta or béchamel? I never knew the latter was a choice. I’d love to try it, but I’m too lazy to actually make lasagna and every frozen version I’ve ever found has been made with ricotta. Is there any respectable chain of Italian restaurants that serves the béchamel variety? I’d even try Olive Garden just to get an idea of what it should be like.
Ditto.
Which supports my point that noodle based italian food is pretty average. There isn’t much difference between good and great, so it’s not really worth too much effort. A lot of the non noodles based dishes can be spectacular, a lot of the seafood dishes can be almost life changing.
Yeah, it’s like making a custard layer. I’ve had lasagna with bechamel, but it’s a bit too, I don’t know, soupy? for me. Also, a little richer. I think the ricotta adds a slight tang. Bechamel’s fine. I just prefer ricotta.
We used cottage cheese when I was growing up, and our family was poor. Once I could afford it, I always used ricotta after that. Cottage cheese is too nugget-y to make a good custard.
Fructose ratios.
I’ve had some pretty life changing pasta dishes in my time. I don’t agree with your view at all.
Wikipedia says that bechamel is a roux of butter, flour, and milk.That sounds like something I’d add to baked mac n cheese (along with cheese, of course) but I would never have considered it as a substitute for ricotta in lasagna. Obviously people do use it, so I’ve learned something.
The biggest compliment my cooking has ever received was my mother gasping and exclaiming that my penne in tomato sauce were “just like the godmother’s!” Her godmother was from Napoli, apparently the “cook things as God ordained” gene skipped both grandma and my mother but revived in me.
That there is a lot of people there who can’t take the care needed to cook things properly doesn’t mean there is no difference between a perfect dish and a mediocre version of the same. Or an abysmal one, and as Epicurus is my witness I’ve encountered some “Italian” dishes that weren’t good for pig fodder.
Ok, while I have everyone’s attention, I’ve noticed in this and other threads that Americans sometimes use ‘noodles’ to refer to pasta in general? Is this right? Or is it just for long thin pasta like spaghetti or linguine.
Full disclosure, I would only use ‘noodles’ to refer to the long thin things that typically come with cuisine from the Far East. Not Italy.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but long before I became a sophisticated, cultured, erudite, globetrotting European-based Gentleman of Leisure, (
) I was a kid from a middle-class family in decidedly unsophisticated Salt Lake City UT., and I have never used “noodles” to describe pasta of any kind, instead using the specific name of any given type of noodle e.g. rigatoni, linguini, lo mein, etc.
Noodle sounds childish and imprecise to my ears.