Italian · Pasta
Lasagne
About this recipe
Italian cooking is built on time-honoured regional traditions — pasta from the south, risotto from the north, the everyday economy of a Tuscan kitchen — where simplicity, seasonality, and respect for the produce typically matter more than complexity of technique.
As a pasta dish, Lasagne relies on the interplay of sauce, pasta shape, and the small science of pasta water — the starchy cooking liquid that thins the sauce and helps it cling. Two minutes of pasta-water finishing changes most dishes.
The scaler above rewrites every measurement to your target serving count, with proper culinary fractions (½, ⅓, ¼) instead of decimals so the recipe stays measurable. Cook Mode steps you through it hands-free.
Recipe data is sourced from TheMealDB's open community database; ScaleRecipe handles the curation, the scaling math, the editorial commentary, and the conversion utilities woven into each page.
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Method
- Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Use kitchen scissors to snip the bacon into small pieces, or use a sharp knife to chop it on a chopping board. Add the bacon to the pan and cook for just a few mins until starting to turn golden. Add the onion, celery and carrot, and cook over a medium heat for 5 mins, stirring occasionally, until softened.
- Add the garlic and cook for 1 min, then tip in the mince and cook, stirring and breaking it up with a wooden spoon, for about 6 mins until browned all over.
- Stir in the tomato purée and cook for 1 min, mixing in well with the beef and vegetables. Tip in the chopped tomatoes. Fill each can half full with water to rinse out any tomatoes left in the can, and add to the pan. Add the honey and season to taste. Simmer for 20 mins.
- Heat oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6. To assemble the lasagne, ladle a little of the ragu sauce into the bottom of the roasting tin or casserole dish, spreading the sauce all over the base. Place 2 sheets of lasagne on top of the sauce overlapping to make it fit, then repeat with more sauce and another layer of pasta. Repeat with a further 2 layers of sauce and pasta, finishing with a layer of pasta.
- Put the crème fraîche in a bowl and mix with 2 tbsp water to loosen it and make a smooth pourable sauce. Pour this over the top of the pasta, then top with the mozzarella. Sprinkle Parmesan over the top and bake for 25–30 mins until golden and bubbling. Serve scattered with basil, if you like.
Cooking notes
Pasta scales beautifully — water and salt should track the dry weight; sauce can be reduced slightly if you scale up beyond a single pan.
For volume-to-weight conversions of any ingredient — flour, sugar, butter, salts — use the ingredient converter. To translate the recipe's oven temperature between °C, °F and gas mark, see the temperature converter.
When you scale this recipe up or down, remember that cooking time does not scale linearly. A doubled cake takes longer, but not twice as long; a doubled soup takes roughly twice as long. The cooking-time guide gives sensible starting estimates by dish geometry.
Scaling notes
Scaling Lasagne
Lasagne is written for around four servings as it stands on this page — scaling it up for a party or down for a meal-for-one is the small math problem most home cooks face every week. Here's how this particular dish responds to scaling, what changes linearly, and what doesn't.
Pasta is among the easiest dishes to scale: both the water volume and the boil time stay almost constant. Doubling Lasagne means doubling the sauce (linear) while keeping the pasta-water salt at roughly 1 % of the water's weight regardless of batch size. The most common scaling mistake is over-salting the sauce because the recipe writer assumed a smaller starting batch.
Skip the math entirely — ScaleRecipe's scaler rewrites every ingredient line above with proper culinary fractions and smart unit promotion the moment you change the serving count. Open the scaler →
Beyond the recipe
Substitutions & make-ahead — Lasagne
Two things home cooks ask about most when they're outside the recipe's exact assumptions: what swaps work for which ingredients, and how the dish behaves when you make it ahead. Both depend on what Lasagne is doing structurally — here's the practical version.
Substitution ideas
Bacon
For the smoky-savoury layer: ½ tsp smoked paprika + 1 tbsp olive oil approximates the bacon backbone in soups and stews. For texture, pancetta, smoked turkey, or a quality vegan bacon brand. Maillard browning is the hardest to fake — no fat-free option matches the crisp.
Honey
Maple syrup substitutes 1:1 — slightly less sweet, similar viscosity, works in marinades and dressings. Agave nectar at 1:1 is sweeter and more neutral. For granulated sugar, use 1 cup sugar + 2 tbsp water per cup of honey (warm to dissolve before adding to the recipe).
For weight-based swaps and arbitrary quantities, the ingredient density converter and the cup-to-grams chart cover most pantry staples.
Make-ahead and storage
Pasta dishes split into two halves for make-ahead purposes. The sauce in Lasagne can be made up to 3 days in advance and refrigerated, then warmed gently while you boil fresh pasta. Cooked pasta itself doesn't store well — it absorbs water and turns starchy. If you must store the dish assembled, undercook the pasta by about a minute on day one so the reheat lands at al dente. Cheese-based sauces are best dressed at the last minute.
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Volume
Tablespoons, teaspoons, cups, ml, fluid ounces — every culinary volume unit, with US/metric/imperial cups handled distinctly.
OpenWeight
Grams, ounces, pounds, kilograms — exact for any ingredient, plus the volume-to-weight conversions for ~40 pantry staples.
OpenTemperature
Fahrenheit, Celsius, gas mark — translate any oven temperature, with notes on conventional vs convection.
OpenCooking time
The cube-root rule for scaling up, the differences between meat / cake / soup geometry, and sensible starting estimates.
OpenPan size
9-inch round vs 8-inch square vs 13×9. The math is surface area, not diameter — and the converter shows you both.
OpenLength
Inches and centimetres — for when a recipe says “cut into 1-inch pieces” and your ruler is metric.
OpenIngredient density
A cup of flour weighs 120 g; a cup of honey weighs 340. The full table of ~40 staples, with sources.
OpenOpen in main scaler
Edit the recipe text, scale by serving count, and copy the result. Same parser as the in-page scaler, more room to work.
OpenFrom the journal
Original essays on the small details.
The why behind the technique — original writing on the ingredient and equipment choices that separate a good cook from a frustrated one.
Reading a recipe like a chef
The 30-or-so recipe terms that show up most often, decoded
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Cooking for one — scaling principles
The math, the practical realities, and the recipes designed for one from the start
Read essayMay 4, 2026
How long do leftovers actually last?
Beyond the USDA's 3–4 days: the variables that actually determine the safe window
Read essayMay 4, 2026
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Where this recipe sits in the wider tradition.
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