Hey, remember this blog? Yeah, me too.
Anyway. Almost fifteen years ago, I posted here an account of my decades-long efforts to emulate the lasagna that my grandmother made for my family in my youth. In the intervening years I've made adjustments to my recipe. I actually swapped out fresh mozzarella right from Caputo's salt water tub for whole-milk mozzarella, also from Caputo's. Which I shred, rather than apply in sheets. This reduces both runniness and moisture in the finished baked product. This year, or next year, whenever I get around to making lasagna again, I'm going to strain the ricotta through cheesecloth for further moisture reduction.
I recently took a not-short road trip with my Aunt Catherine, now the sole survivor of the Petrosino family at whose ancestral home I spent so much time as a kid. Much family lore was revealed to me on this journey, including a lengthy clarifying of an issue that always kind of nagged at me, that is, how it was that my parents married in November of 1958 and I was born in August of 1959, and why there were no wedding photos. I'm saving that for my memoir, which this is not. Another thing I learned was that my grandmother had given Catherine a WRITTEN RECIPE for her lasagna, which Catherine would be more than happy to share with me. Would I find the secret at last?
Not really, unless the secret actually turns out to be putting more eggs in the ricotta — I generally have only added two. See below, and forgive the mispelling of "sauce," my grandmother's first language was not English.
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