NEVER Boil Your Lasagna Noodles Again - Try This Old ITALIAN Trick

Boiling lasagna noodles is the worst job in Italian cooking. They stick together in the pot, they tear when you pull them apart, they burn your fingers, and then the lasagna comes out of the oven and slides apart on the plate. Both of those problems come from the same mistake. A boiled noodle goes into the oven already full of water, so the sauce and the ricotta have nowhere to go but between the layers. My mother Filomena made forty pans of lasagna every Christmas in her little trattoria in Bensonhurst, and she never boiled a single noodle. In this one I count down her ten rules, and every one starts with plain instructions before I explain anything. Draining the ricotta, why the sauce should be a little looser than you think, the right mozzarella, sauce on the bottom first, noodles edge to edge with no gaps, thin layers and more of them, covering the top noodles completely, foil on and then off, the thirty-minute rest that makes it slice like a cake, and at number one, the old trick that replaces the pot and needs nothing but your kitchen sink. I also settle the ricotta against béchamel argument, and whether the no-boil noodles in the box are worth it. Same box of regular noodles you already have. No pot, no torn sheets, no sloppy slice. So tell me where you are cooking from, and what your family puts in the lasagna that nobody else does.