Friday, March 27, 2009

March Daring Baker's Challenge

The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.


This recipe did not work out for me. Everything felt wrong. There seemed to be wayyy too much spinach, so much so that the pasta felt a little stringy from all the fibre. The recipe asked for way too little eggs, I had to add twice the stipulated amount to get the dough to look like dough. But I must have added too much, because the dough became really wet. So I added more flour to try and correct the dough, and that didn't work at all.

And then, despite kneading the dough for close to an hour, it still stuck like a fiend, to EVERYTHING. Rolling it thin was no problem, the problem was getting it off the surface in one piece. And so in the end, I cut the dough into little balls, drowned it in flour, and rolled it out little by little, making patchwork lasagne layers.

Also, following the instructions for a thin layer each of bechamel and regu [I used canned pasta sauce. Busy month =(], the lasagne came out extremely dry. I felt like I was eating a solid block of carbohydrates.


But, during a very busy month, it was still fun to potter around the kitchen for a day, as it always had been and hopefully always will be =)

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Even though you weren't happy with the outcome, it looks beautiful and I'm sure it would taste great to most others..that counts for something, right? LOL Nicely done :)

BC said...

I'm sorry it didn't work out for you... but you have a great sense of humour about the whole episode. Happy 13th challenge!

Mary

Lauren said...

Your lasagne looks amazing!! I'm sorry it didn't work out though.

Chahira Daoud said...

I loved your lasagna
It looks sooo yummy
Chahira
Alex- Egypt
http://chahirakitchen.blogspot.com/

ice tea: sugar high said...

Sorry to hear it didn't work out in the end. It looked gorgeous though. Hope the next challenge will be better for you

Eva said...

Too bad it didn't work out for you. I ran my spinach through my magic bullet for quite a while that got rid of the stringiness. At least yours looks good even if you weren't happy with it.

Dragon said...

I'm sorry you had such difficulties with this month's challenge. The lasagna looks good at least. :)

Angelica said...

sorry to hear about your experience, but your pictures came out great! I also thought i did something wrong when making my dough, but it came together as i kept kneading and the liquid from the spinach came out. hope it works out better next time!

Karen said...

Yeah, sounds like the dough was a bit of a struggle. I can relate -- although my problem was I just couldn't roll it thin enough. Your pictures look yummy though!

Sapuche said...

Pasta is hard to make from scratch, but it seems that you learned a lot from the problems you encountered. Although the outer part looked dry like you said, the pieces you cut and photographed looked pretty incredible! Sometimes disasters in the kitchen are fun, and it's nice to hear you didn't get discouraged!

David said...

I recommend buying pre-made lasagna pasta strips. It goes so much easier!