Tucson, Off and On: Lasagne from Scratch

Our grandson has brought a new member into our family. She has a very different background from the rest of our family. She is a Tucson native who grew up on a mountainside amid a saguaro forest. Her family spent every summer in northern Italy, where she learned to speak Italian like a native. What’s more, she learned to prepare many Italian dishes, including lasagna alla Bolognese.

Yesterday, at my urging, she made that amazing dish from scratch for our evening meal. She came home from work at noon to make the dough, which she kneaded for 20 minutes, divided into two balls, and left them wrapped in the refrigerator while she returned to work. Regrettably I did not photograph the dough making, but I captured the noodle making in detail.

Here she has unwrapped the first ball of dough.

On a floured surface she rolled the ball into an oblong.

Next she turned on her nifty Italian pasta machine at the thickest setting and fed the oblong through twice.

She cut the somewhat flattened oblong in half and wrapped one half in plastic. Things dry out very quickly in Tucson, she says.

She fed the other half through the pasta machine numerous times, continually decreasing the thickness setting.

The dough became thinner and thinner,

and longer and longer until at last the sheet was so thin I could see her hand through it.

At last she cut the long ribbon of dough into three pieces on a lightly floured surface.

She repeated this process two more times, then decided to use the last bit to make fettuccine. The rolling procedure was exactly the same, but at the end she opened the top of the machine, exposing a cutting mechanism. And out came long, evenly cut strips of dough.

These she hung to dry on a clothes-drying rack.

Tomorrow I’ll post the lasagna assembly process. For now, it’s enough to say that I had no idea lasagna could be so delicious. These noodles are far better than the thick-as-a-board commercial noodles. A whole new dimension has been added to our family cooking repertoire.