I have cooked lasagna, conservatively, 12 or 15 times in my life. That's probably not a big number relative to, like, I dunno, a Bolognese nonna or whatever, but it's certainly enough times to have gotten the gist of the enterprise. If I am not (and I am not) a Lasagna Master, then I think that I am at least, like, a Lasagna Yeoman. A Lasagna Journeyman. Until this week, what I'd never done even once was to make a bad lasagna.
Done un-badly, the whole thing—how I've done it in recent years, anyway—is somewhat labor-intensive but fairly straightforward. It does not involve any advanced techniques, exotic ingredients, or fussy exactitude. Lasagna is not easily screwed up; that is one of its principal virtues relative to other things you can do with its ingredients. You throw together a Bolognese ragù (this deserves a couple hours to simmer); you make bechamel sauce with ricotta, finely chopped basil or parsley, and grated parmigiano reggiano stirred into it (best to wait until the ragù is effectively done, so that you don't have to tend to it with one hand while whisking milk into bechamel with the other); you shred some low-moisture mozzarella; and you boil some lasagne pasta juuuuust until it approaches the outer ranges of al dente doneness. In a deep baking dish, you lay down some ragù, then a layer of pasta, then some bechamel, then some mozzarella, then another layer of pasta, then the ragù, then pasta, then bechamel, then mozzarella, and so on. When you get to the highest layer of pasta, you top it with ragù, then top the ragù with a bunch of the shredded mozzarella and some of the grated stuff. You cover the whole thing with foil and sock it into a hot oven for a while, then you take the foil off and stick it under the broiler for a few minutes to get the cheese all bubbly and golden-brown on top. Then, crucially, you let it rest for at least an hour, so that it can set, so that you can serve it as big cubes of lasagna rather than a sloppy wet mess.
Here is how one dumb mistake spiraled out into an Actually Bad lasagna. The dumb mistake—or the first one, I guess—came when I had the thought, Hey, lasagna! at the grocery store in the middle of the afternoon and did not immediately append the word tomorrow to it. This meant that I would have to work fast—never my best setting!—in order to get a properly set lasagna ready by a normal-ish dinnertime in my household.
The germ of that Hey, lasagna! thought was me walking the aisles of the store and brainstorming dinner ideas on the basis of what I thought I already had to work with. I knew—or thought—that we'd had a box of dried lasagne gathering dust in the back of the pantry for over a year. The second dumb mistake was trusting this thought—or really any thought originating in my head—and so only buying one box of dried lasagne, instead of double-checking or hedging by buying two boxes. The third dumb mistake came after I got home from the store, when I immediately launched into cooking the ragù, again without verifying that I had two boxes of pasta. In fact I did not check at all until more than 90 minutes later, when the ragù had already been simmering for over an hour and I already had a roux going in a second pan for the bechamel.
Did I have a second box of pasta? Reader, I did not. I also did not (and do not) have a baking dish the right size for one box worth of pasta, unless I wanted to make either a puny loaf-of-bread–sized lasagna that would use less than one box of pasta, or a sad, flat, thin lasagna that would use less than half the ragù I'd already cooked. Nor did I have time to drive back to the grocery store. Nor did I have a couple pounds of, say, ziti, which would have enabled an easy pivot to baked ziti. (I also, just to be clear, did not have the time, bandwidth, counter space, equipment, or willingness to roll out sheets of homemade pasta.)
So I decided that I would simply have to make do with fewer layers of pasta in the lasagna; there would have to be ragù and bechamel between each two layers of pasta, instead of alternating. Here is where, had I been working calmly and thinking carefully, I might have had the thought that this would mean a lasagna that would go into the oven with an unusually high ratio of liquid (from the ragù and bechamel) to pasta. I might then have thought to boil the pasta only until it had the very slightest bend, or not at all, leaving it maximally capable of spending time in close contact with all that liquid without turning into absolute mush. But I was not working calmly and thinking carefully, even to the extent that I am capable of doing that, because I'd started this whole thing in the middle of the afternoon instead of planning to do it the next day. I boiled the pasta al dente, ignoring a sort of vague nagging alarm-bell ringing in my head, and assembled the lasagna, and socked it into the oven.
It came out of there looking and smelling great. I tented foil over the top and let it rest for ... well, 45 minutes, instead of 60 or 90 or 120. Under better circumstances this would have been a dumb mistake, or anyway an unforced error, because it would have meant the lasagna would be wet and messy upon serving, instead of dense and shapely. But under these circumstances, frankly, it didn't matter: There had been nowhere for any of all that liquid to go except for into the pasta, out of which I'd pre-boiled nearly all its capacity to absorb liquid without turning to mush, and so which, unbeknownst to me, was already ruined in there. I might as well have served this shit with a fucking ladle.
All in all it still wasn't the very worst thing to eat: The ragù was rich and hearty; the bechamel, to the extent it hadn't just fully blended into the ragù, was creamy and smooth; the mozzarella was stretchy and decadent. That combination can only be so awful under any circumstances not involving a dustpan of swept-up barbershop clippings. But the poor sodden lasagne could contribute no structure, no bite, no textural interest whatsoever; it was like I'd tried to make lasagna with sheets of notebook paper instead of pasta. Moreover there wasn't anything holding the other elements apart from each other, both because they'd all been crammed together between the layers of pasta and because the pasta had cooked away to the consistency and structural integrity of Cream of Wheat. So instead of ragù and bechamel, this lasagna had the two of them blended together into a sort of pink-colored creamy slime—fine-tasting, sure, but still wholly wrong.
Perhaps the best feature of a good lasagna is that the leftovers are even better the next day, when the whole thing is even more fully set and the flavors have had a whole night to come together. These leftovers were downright nasty. The pasta had virtually dissolved. It was like eating lasagna-flavored baby food.
So, there you have it. The key to making Actually Bad lasagna isn't any one of the bad choices that went into this one, but rather the shabby pointillist image they resolve to when you pull back a few feet and take them all together: Me, with my entire arm jammed up my nose, standing in the aisle of the grocery store with a saucepan on my head and Kleenex boxes on my feet, looking at the clock on my phone upside-down and going Guh hyuk hyuk, lasagna sounds good, guh hyuk hyuk hyuk. Somebody should put my pots and pans in a locked dispensing cabinet like the meds in a hospital.
