Lasagne ai fungi per Becs

A veggie bake to make carnivores swoon

As promised, the veggie-forward sequel to Lasagne alla Bolognese. Enjoy!

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I love having vegetarian guests for dinner, if for no other reason than it challenges my inner carnivore to produce something as deeply satisfying as the Maillard reaction without involving meat and heat.

So when our friend Becs came over for lasagne night, I thought I’d make one just for her alongside my classic Lasagne alla Bolognese. The idea was to incorporate something fungi-based but not a minced mushroom mixture trying desperately to be a ragù. I wanted the shrooms to have room to shine so my starting point was to revert to a tried-and-tested method that I’d normally use to make a side dish and then see what not-so-secret ingredient I could add to elevate it into a dish that might even give the meat-eaters food envy.

Garlic, butter, and wine are classic partners and I’ve often used thyme to add a little punch to the mushroom party, particularly when you cook them skewered over coals. But for this version something magical happens when you use sage as your main herb. It adds a deep, earthy quality that delivers a truly delicious undertone when it melds with the other ingredients.

The premise here is that all we’re really talking about is the filling: the rest of the lasagne is made exactly the same, with the same layering of béchamel, Parmigiano and lasagna pasta sheets as the Bolognese version. And importantly, it also stands up proudly on the plate, as any good lasagne should.

Cooking the shrooms

Quantities are a bit of a moveable feast but for a basic blueprint, you will need:

500g Portabellini or brown mushrooms

one tablespoon of vegetable oil

one tablespoon of butter

four tablespoons of minced garlic

four tablespoons of minced fresh sage

125ml (half a cup) of dry white wine

salt and pepper to taste

small handful of sage leaves

Trim the stems off the mushrooms and chop them up into quite small pieces. Take about a third of the heads and cut them into thick slices. Take the remaining heads and cut them into quarters, or halves if they are very small. You want some mushroom pieces that are about the size of small olives. The end result is going to be a small quantity of ‘mince’, but the majority will be bite-sized mushrooms cooked to perfection (some with a distinctly round shape) and lending a meaningful texture to each layer of the lasagne.

Get a pan medium hot, add the oil and then add in the mushrooms all at once. What you’re looking to do is cook them relatively high and fast until you start to see the edges of the shrooms getting a little brown and crisp.

As soon as that happens, turn the heat down a little, make a little space in the middle for the butter and as soon as its melted, add in the minced garlic and the sage leaves and stir everything around for 4 or 5 minutes until you start to really smell the aromatics. Now add the white wine, turn the heat back up, and deglaze the pan. It should bubble up quite fast and as it does so, use a wooden spatula to scrape up all the dark bits on the bottom of the pan. When the wine’s evaporated, remove from the heat. That’s it.

Now you just use the mushroom mixture instead of a ragù making the layers as you go (see the method in the link below). As a nice garnish, you can also take those fresh sage leaves and fry them off in a shallow pot of cooking oil. Get the oil hot and drop the leaves in and they will splutter a bit and then stop abruptly when the moisture is all cooked off. If they go very dark very fast, your oil is too hot. They should still be a bright green. Remove them immediately onto paper towel and you will have crispy, tasty, little decorations to sprinkle on top of the lasagna just before you take it to the table.

For the full lasagne method including béchamel, rolling pasta sheets, and layering, click the link below.