Have you ever wondered what to do with a surplus of lasagne sheets that seem to have been at the back of the press forever? As with much in life, soup is a good path to tread here.
"I would smash the sheets up really small with a little hammer, which is a fun job, or the kids can snap them with their fingers, then throw them into soupy stuff," says Claire Thomson, author of Home Cookery Year. This could, she says, be a courgette, basil, cream and stock number, or a seasonal minestrone. "With spring coming up, I'd say peas, broad beans, a nice soffritto" – chopped onion, carrot and celery – "lots of herbs, chicken or veg stock, and then broken up lasagne to cook in the soup."
That sentiment is echoed by the Rome-based food writer Rachel Roddy, whose new book, out in July, is The A-Z of Pasta. "I love lasagne sheets, and I'm a big fan of maltagliati," she says, using the Italian word for badly cut pieces. She breaks the sheets into shards and adds them to members of the thick-bean-soup family – pasta e fagioli, pasta e ceci, pasta e lenticchie; essentially, anything in which you might normally use small pasta shapes. Keep an eye on it while it's cooking, though, Roddy warns: "You'll sometimes need to add a bit of extra water so it stays soupy."
If you parboil them briefly, so they're floppy, you can then use a sharp knife to cut them into tagliatelle. Although they obviously wouldn't be very long tagliatelle
The brilliant thing about lasagne is, of course, that it can be treated simply as sheets of pasta. “If you parboil them briefly, so they’re floppy, you can then use a sharp knife to cut them into tagliatelle,” Roddy says. “Although they obviously wouldn’t be very long tagliatelle.”
For Mitshel Ibrahim, chef-owner of Ombra, a London restaurant that has been running lasagne Sundays during lockdown, cannelloni are the obvious answer. “I’d boil the lasagne for a couple of minutes, then stuff them with ricotta and spinach,” he says, “or with a Neapolitan-style ragu.” Roll into tubes, submerge in tomato sauce and pop in the oven until slightly crisp on top. Although, Ibrahim admits, this is “still a pasta bake of sorts”.
If you’ve got fresh lasagne sheets knocking about in the freezer, take your lead from the London pasta joint Bancone, which turns them into “silk handkerchiefs”. Cut the sheets into 12cm squares, then cook in a pan of salted boiling water for two to three minutes and serve with a walnut butter and confit egg yolk. Granted, that might be a bit more complicated than you’d like, in which case you could instead look to Liguria, in northwest Italy, and serve those pasta hankies with pesto alla Genovese.
If in doubt, though, make like Roddy and break up any unruly excess lasagne sheets, then store them in a jar with other shapes from near-empty packets. “One of the nice things about a mixed jar of pasta is that the cooking times are all a little bit different,” she says, which proves particularly popular with her partner, Vincenzo, who likes his pasta properly al dente. Then, Roddy adds, just start experimenting. – Guardian
