Rustic Lasagna Baked in Cast Iron Skillets

For Christmas Day dinner we planned on making lasagna, and in keeping with the Homegrown, Homemade, Good Stuff for the Soul theme of this blog, we wanted to make sure we made as much from scratch as we could and include as many ingredients that we had grown ourselves - the tomato sauce had Roma tomatoes, garlic, basil, fennel seeds, oregano, a Calabrese pepper and parsley all from our garden, and the wine was from our Norton grapes. We made the pasta and rolled the lasagna sheets out with a pasta machine. And now that we have a wood-fired clay oven, it only seemed appropriate to bake the lasagna in it. Using cast iron skillets gave the lasagnas a very cool rustic look and cooking them in the wood-fired oven gave them a wonderful warm, but not smokey, aroma. We will be making them this way again! 

This will make enough for two 10" lasagne, for four to six people. 

I baked this for about 40 minutes in the clay oven, keeping an eye on it. 

*** To make these in a conventional oven, preheat to 375 and bake for 30 - 35 min.

So, here we go, follow along -

Ingredients for the pasta (or use store bought dry lasagna noodles)

3 cups all purpose flour

2/3 cup water

1 egg

Ingredients for the lasagna

tomatoes

grape tomatoes

onion

garlic

basil

flat leaf parsley

fennel seeds

oregano

Optional - hot chili pepper (keep whole)

2 Italian sausage links, casing removed

1 lb ground chuck

ricotta

mozzarella

pecorino

olive oil

salt and pepper

Procedure

Make the pasta dough by measuring the flour into a mixing bowl and forming a well in the middle. Add the egg and water to the flour and work them together until you get a raggedy dryish dough. With the help of a spatula, dump the dough out and on to a firm work surface and knead the dough for about 10 minutes (a plastic dough scraper is handy here) until it all comes together in a smooth firm ball. It will be stiff and difficult to work with at first  but don't add any more water until you see how the dough is forming up. You don't want it to be sticky and the moisture will be distributed better after it rests. Wrap it in plastic wrap and let the dough rest for about half an hour. 

While the dough is resting, put the sauce together - brown the meats and saute the onions.

Then roll the dough out into sheets with a pasta machine. Take it down to #6 - not too thin and not too thick and lay the sheets out to dry,maybe another 30 minutes.

Quick boil/blanch the pasta sheets for 1 minute. 

And immediately put in cold water to stop the cooking.

Quick boiling the fresh pasta sheets firms them up while at the same time giving them an elasticity. This is good because it makes them easy to work with and they wont easily tear. They also won't get mushy while cooking. Lay them out on damp kitchen towels.

The browned sausage and ground beef

For the sauce, used Roma tomatoes we grew in our garden this summer and froze, garlic, onion, basil, fennel seeds.

Cook the sauce until it is fairly dry.

Layer the ingredients just like a typical lasagna but start with a tablespoon of olive oil to coat the bottom of the skillet and up the sides. 

1 - A sheet of pasta and a layer of tomato sauce

2 - Add the sausage and beef mixture

3 - Then ricotta, mozzarella and pecorino and dusted with a little oregano

Repeat the layer and top with sliced grape tomatoes, cheese and parsley. Drizzle with olive oil

Oh yah! On the plate with some homemade wine.