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Prepared by: Larisa
10/23/2018 Cooking time: 1 hour 0 min
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This lasagna is prepared without the classic dough sheets; zucchini will replace them. A light, healthy, juicy and tasty dish of cottage cheese with vegetables. Can be served at any time of the day. See the recipe!
Cooking lasagna
Place the minced chicken in a deep frying pan and fry in oil until cooked, stirring all the time. Add tomato sauce to the minced meat, stir and after boiling, cook for ten minutes. The minced meat for dietary lasagna is ready. Combine grated sharp cheese and low-fat cottage cheese in a bowl and mix well. Next, you need to boil salted water in a large saucepan. Boil the sheets for future lasagna in boiling salted water until half cooked. Then immediately cool them in cold water.
Diet lasagna is ready for baking. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. It will take 30-40 minutes for lasagna to cook. Then remove the pan and, after removing the foil, generously sprinkle the top with grated Parmesan. After this, the dietary lasagna is returned to the oven for another ten minutes. Then, before serving the lasagna for dinner, sprinkle it with parsley and let it sit for another 15 minutes.
Optimal filling ingredients
The classic lasagna filling is a mixture of several types of minced meat. Most often it is beef and pork. However, in the case of a diet, it is better to give up high-calorie types of meat and switch to lighter varieties: turkey, chicken, rabbit.
Lasagna is highly variable. Mushrooms, low-fat fish, seafood, cottage cheese, lentils, asparagus and other types of vegetables can serve as dietary ingredients analogous to minced meat.
Cooking low-calorie lasagna
To prepare dietary chicken lasagna, it is best to use chicken breast. Cut the meat off the bones and remove the skin. Then cut the pieces of meat into small cubes. Next, finely chop the peeled and washed onions. The next component for dietary lasagna is fresh champignons. They also need to be washed and chopped. Cut the washed tomatoes, like all other ingredients, into cubes.
Heat the olive oil poured into a saucepan on the stove and first add the chopped onion. Fry until light golden brown and add chopped chicken to it. Fry the meat cubes with onions for ten minutes, during which you stir several times. Now you need to transfer the pieces of champignons into the saucepan. Sprinkle salt on top, and you can also use other spices to your own taste, mix and fry them for ten minutes.
The last component of the filling for a diet lasagna recipe is tomatoes. After adding them to the saucepan, you will need to simmer for only five minutes and turn off the stove. Now you need to prepare the sauce - finely chop the washed greens and place in a deep bowl, add 15% fat sour cream and 1% fat kefir, salt. Stir the lasagna sauce well.
Now it's time for the lasagna sheets. They need to be boiled in salted water or doused with boiling water, depending on the instructions on the package. Grease a baking sheet with olive oil and place lasagna leaves on it. Place about a third of the prepared filling on top. Pour some of the sauce over and sprinkle with grated hard cheese. Repeat these steps twice.
Pour all the remaining sauce onto the last layer of lasagna sheets and sprinkle with cheese. Low-calorie lasagna is ready to bake. The oven is preheated to the desired temperature of 180 degrees. Place the baking sheet in the center of the oven and bake for 35-45 minutes. The dietary chicken lasagna prepared according to the recipe should be left to cool for 15 minutes, then it can be served.
PP zucchini lasagna
Ingredients
- Zucchini – 500 g (1 piece)
- Tomatoes (large) – 2 pcs.
- Soft curd cheese – 150 g
- Bell pepper – 1 pc.
- Dill – 1 bunch
- Garlic – 1 clove
- Grated mozzarella (or suluguni) – 50 g
- Olive oil – 2 tsp.
- Salt to taste
Cooking method
Peel the zucchini and cut into thin slices. Wash the pepper and cut into strips. Chop the greens and squeeze the garlic through a press. Grease a baking dish with olive oil and place a layer of sliced zucchini. Place a layer of chopped pepper on top. Mix cottage cheese with herbs and garlic. Place pepper on top. Repeat layers again, add zucchini, tomato, pepper, cheese layer. Sprinkle the last layer of zucchini with grated mozzarella. Place the lasagna in an oven preheated to 180 degrees for 25-30 minutes.
Step-by-step preparation
Diet lasagna made from pita bread with vegetables is a dish that can be consumed by all those who count every calorie and prefer to eat only healthy and wholesome food. The preparatory process should begin by grating the peeled carrots and chopping the onion. A frying pan with refined oil is placed on the fire and heated. Then place carrots and onions in it, simmer the vegetables over low heat for ten minutes.
Next add tomato paste, salt and pepper. Simmer for another five minutes, stirring with a spatula. Minced vegetables for lasagna are ready. Next, you need to wash the young zucchini and cut them into thin strips. Then fry in a frying pan with oil for a few minutes on one side and the other. In a separate container, combine eggs, natural yogurt and a little salt. Beat the mixture with a whisk.
Place the first layer of Armenian lavash on the bottom of a refractory pan suitable for baking lasagna. Place a third of the fried zucchini strips on the pita bread. Place about a third of the minced vegetables on top and pour over the beaten mixture of eggs and natural yoghurt. Sprinkle grated low-fat cheese on top. Next is the second layer of pita bread and filling, and the final third layer, on which zucchini, minced vegetables and a mixture of eggs and yogurt are laid out in order. Sprinkle everything with grated low-fat cheese. Vegetable lasagna is baked at 200 degrees for 15-20 minutes.
Required Products:
- Lasagna sheets - 300 grams.
- Frozen spinach - 500 grams.
- Mozzarella cheese - 300 grams.
- Soy sausage - 500 grams.
- Ricotta cheese - 300 grams.
- Tomatoes - 500 grams.
- Chopped basil - 1/4 cup.
- Pepper - 1/4 teaspoon.
- Salt - half a teaspoon.
- Champignons - 400 grams.
- Water - 100 milliliters.
We will need
Lasagna is a layered noodle casserole with sauces: bolognese (meat) and bechamel (creamy). To prepare six servings of this dish you will need the following set of products:
- dry lasagna sheets (8-10 pieces);
- 500 grams of ground beef;
- five ripe tomatoes (or 400 grams of tomatoes in their own juice);
- one hundred milliliters of dry white wine;
- 150 grams of soft cheese;
- two onions;
- two cloves of garlic;
- basil greens;
- 800 milliliters of milk;
- 100 grams of butter;
- 100 grams of flour;
- nutmeg, salt, ground black pepper.
How to cook
Although this type of lasagna includes soy sausage and cheese with minimal fat content, it is dietary. To prepare it correctly, you need to use a recipe with a photo of dietary lasagna. You can turn on the oven immediately, as well as grease a deep baking dish. Next, bring lightly salted water to a boil in a large saucepan. Place lasagna sheets in it. There is no need to boil them until they are fully cooked; the cooking time should be reduced by three minutes from that indicated on the package. Drain the boiling water and fill the pan with the sheets with cold water. When the sheets have cooled, remove them from the water.
Let's move on to the filling. Cut the soy sausage into circles and fry in a frying pan over low heat with two tablespoons of oil. Place chopped champignons into the sausage, add hot water, stir and simmer, covered, for 10-12 minutes. Then add spinach to the pan, stir, simmer for another 5 minutes and turn off the heat.
Grate the washed tomatoes. Pour spices into a bowl: ground pepper, chopped basil and extra salt. Stir until the spices are evenly distributed with the tomatoes. Now you can start assembling the lasagna. Place lasagna leaves in the bottom of the pan and top with a third of the tomato mixture and sprinkle with half of the grated ricotta cheese. Then a layer of leaves, on which to distribute half of the sausage and mushroom filling. Sprinkle with a third of the mozzarella cheese. Next is a layer of leaves with tomatoes and ricotta cheese. The last layer is the dough leaves with the remaining sausage and mushrooms, and some mozzarella cheese. Cover with lasagna leaves and distribute a third of the tomatoes.
Cover the assembled dietary lasagna with baking foil on top and secure the edges of the foil well. The oven has heated up to 180 degrees while preparing the lasagna, place the lasagna in it for 60 minutes, after which you need to remove the foil from the lasagna and sprinkle with the remaining third of the mozzarella cheese. Return to oven for another 15 minutes. Turn off the heat and leave for another 10 minutes. Then you can take it out and serve it, cutting it into portions.
I think you’ve stopped being surprised that I post recipes on my blog. Let me remind you once again of my position - I believe that in order to lose weight, it is not at all necessary to give up everything that is tasty and appetizing. On the contrary, food during weight loss should be enjoyable.
Today's lasagna recipe will probably surprise many. Pasta, meat, sauce and all this for weight loss? Yes, friends, that's exactly it. Only we will cheat a little, and our lasagna will be low-calorie, but amazingly tasty.
Lasagna originates from Italy. There are many recipes for its preparation even in Italy itself. I offer you my recipe for making lasagna, as always under the motto: “Minimum calories, maximum taste” :-).
To prepare lasagna we will need:
- minced chicken -600 grams (it’s better to cook it yourself from breast);
- fresh champignons – 400 grams;
- bell pepper – 150 grams;
- cherry tomatoes – 200 grams (you can take regular ones);
- sour cream (10-15%) – 250 grams;
- low-fat kefir - 400 grams;
- onion – 100 grams;
- hard cheese – 40 grams;
- lasagna sheets (manufacturer Barilla, Italy) – 9 pcs.
- Parsley and cilantro
What sauces are suitable for weight loss
Sauce is one of the highest calorie ingredients in an Italian dish. By reducing its calorie content, you can significantly reduce the overall energy value of lasagna. An alternative to “Béchamel” can be sauces based on skim milk and kefir.
In the first case, 40 grams of corn starch must be dissolved in 500 ml of skim milk, then put the mixture to simmer over low heat. After thickening the sauce, add the necessary seasonings and a pinch of nutmeg.
The second option involves simply mixing kefir and sour cream with a fat content of no more than 15%. To enrich the taste, favorite spices and herbs are added to the resulting sauce.
Lasagna recipe
First, let's prepare the filling for the lasagna. To do this, fry the minced meat until half cooked.
Separately, fry the onions, mushrooms and bell peppers until half cooked.
Combine the prepared minced meat with vegetables and let cool.
Now let's prepare the lasagna sauce. The classic recipe uses Bechamel sauce. It is fatty and very high in calories due to the use of butter. The sauce that we prepare will be devoid of these shortcomings.
To prepare a light sauce for lasagna, mix sour cream, kefir, finely chopped herbs, add salt, ground pepper, spices (khmeli-suneli, coriander, oregano). The lasagna sauce is ready.
Now let's start assembling the dish.
Place the prepared lasagna sheets on the bottom of the lasagna pan. In my case, 3 sheets are enough. Barilla makes lasagna sheets that don't need to be pre-cooked, which greatly simplifies the recipe and cooking time.
If you can't find ready-made lasagne sheets, you can make your own.
To do this, take 3 cups of flour and gradually add 1 cup of cold water, then 2 eggs, 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil and salt to taste. Knead the dough thoroughly and leave it in the refrigerator for 1 hour. After this, roll out the dough into thin plates (2 mm), cut into wide strips and dry. Before placing in the mold, such “homemade sheets” need to be boiled in a large amount of water until half cooked.
Place minced meat with vegetables, tomatoes on lasagna sheets and pour the prepared sauce over the first layer. We repeat the operation 3 times.
We do not cover the last layer with lasagna sheets, but sprinkle with finely grated cheese.
Place the dish in the oven and bake for 30 minutes at 220 degrees.
Lasagna is ready. Bon appetit!
Friends, pay attention to how we have simplified the lasagna recipe. Instead of minced pork and beef, we took chicken, instead of a fatty sauce, we prepared a light one. As a result, the calorie content of our lasagna is 160 kcal/100 grams.
This approach is very beneficial for anyone who is losing weight. There is no need to forbid yourself your favorite dishes, you just need to try to make them lighter. Believe me, their taste will not suffer, and often even benefits.
Don't forget to comment on this recipe. Your opinion will be interesting to all blog readers.
We bring to your attention an unusual compromise option for preparing an amazing dish of traditional Italian cuisine. Today we will master a new original recipe - dietary lasagna with chicken and champignons, and even learn how to prepare sheets for this wonderful casserole. This dish is a vivid example of how, using exclusively familiar products, you can please your family and friends with a tasty and unusual treat.
How to Freeze and Store Lasagne Rolls
This dish can be prepared for a week's worth of batch cooking. You can freeze them in rolls or casserole style. A great dish for new mothers!
Freeze in rolls - Make the recipe as required, but instead of cooking in the pan, place on a small baking sheet and place in the freezer. After 1-2 hours, they can be put into bags and stored in the freezer. To prepare, you need to take out the lasagna rolls, place them in a mold on top of the sauce and cook according to the recipe. Baking time will increase by 1.5 times.
Can be frozen as a casserole. Cover the form with lasagna rolls with sauce and cheese with foil and place in the freezer. To prepare, defrost completely in the refrigerator in the vegetable compartment. Then you can put it in the oven for baking.
Chicken diet lasagna in the oven: classic recipe
Ingredients
- — 400 g + —
- — 200 g + —
- — 200 g + —
- - 1 PC. + —
- — 50 g + —
- — 250 ml + —
- Kefir (with 1% fat content) – 400 ml + –
- Lasagna sheets - 9 pcs. + —
- Greens – 1 bunch + –
- - to taste + -
- Spices - to taste + -
Cooking dietary lasagna with chicken and champignons
Before we provide you with a list of ingredients needed for our wonderful low-calorie lasagna with chicken and champignons, let’s focus on one small but important point.
If one of the ingredients of our dish is special sheets for lasagna, you are going to buy it ready-made, then be sure to pay attention to the method of preparing them.
Some manufacturers produce sheets that must be boiled until half cooked before use, others offer a ready-to-use product.
Cutting the main components of the dish
- First of all, turn the chicken breast or fillet into minced meat using a meat grinder or food processor.
Of course, you can also buy ready-made minced chicken, however, as a rule, such a semi-finished product is very fatty, which means that our lasagna will contain too many calories to be considered dietary.
- Peel the onion and chop into cubes.
- Wash the champignons and cut into thin slices. Experts do not recommend peeling them, since the thin skin contains many useful microelements.
- Heat a little oil in a frying pan and sauté the onion. As soon as it becomes soft, add champignons to it and fry for another 3-4 minutes. If you manage to not completely fry the mushrooms, it will be just perfect!
- In another frying pan, fry the minced meat in hot oil. An indicator of readiness will be a change in its color: from soft pink to light gray.
- Mix the contents of both frying pans, add salt to taste, season with spices (these can be ready-made compositions, for example “Italian herbs” or just a mixture of peppers).
Preparing kefir-sour cream sauce for lasagna
- First, thoroughly wash and finely chop the greens. Mix it with kefir and sour cream, salt (very moderately!).
“Assemble” the lasagna and bake in the oven until done
- Finally, we can “assemble” our lasagna, but first we will boil our sheets until half cooked, if required by the instructions on the package.
- Cover the bottom of the mold with sheets, lay out a small layer of our filling, tomatoes cut into flat slices (there is no need to cut the cherry variety!), pour in the sauce and cover the top with dough again. We should have three layers of sheets and filling.
- Sprinkle the top layer of filling with grated cheese.
- Place the mold in the oven preheated to 200°C. After half an hour, the lasagna is ready.
You can afford this lasagna with chicken, but without the traditional Bechamel and Bolognese sauces, even if you carefully monitor your weight.
For lasagna sheets, durum wheat flour is used, which is quite suitable even for preparing a dietary low-calorie dish.
How to make homemade lasagne sheets with your own hands
But what to do if there are no ready-made lasagne sheets in the store? In this case, we will learn how to cook them ourselves, then certainly nothing will stop us from delighting our family and friends with a great Italian appetizer at any time!
Dough ingredients
- Premium wheat flour - 3 tbsp. (approximately 0.5 kg);
- Eggs - 2 pcs.;
- Cold water - 1 tbsp.;
- Vegetable oil - 1 tbsp.
How to bake sheets for dietary lasagna with your own hands
- Sift the flour and collect it in a slide.
- As a rule, at this stage, all culinary recipes drawn from other sources unanimously recommend pouring water and oil into the center of the slide, breaking eggs, and then kneading the dough from all this. However, if you do not possess this virtuoso skill, then you can do exactly the opposite.
This approach is understandable: even if you always buy the same brand of flour, there is still a chance that this time its quality will be slightly different. Therefore, you can easily mix water, eggs, oil, salt and simply add flour to them (as much as needed).
- The dough must be thoroughly kneaded, so we continue to knead until the dense but elastic dough does not lag behind the hands.
- Now he needs to “rest” in a cool place. To do this, wrap the dough mixture in cling film and place it in the refrigerator.
- Divide the “rested” dough into portions and roll out thinly (no more than 2 mm in thickness).
- We cut the finished sheets so that they fit comfortably in your form and let them dry.
Before using directly, boil the lasagna sheets until half cooked.
Low-calorie lasagna with chicken: recipe in a slow cooker
You can also cook dietary lasagna with chicken in a slow cooker..
This time we will move away from the classics, and to create the “pride of Italian cuisine” we will take thin sheets of Armenian lavash.
Since this is a fresh, yeast-free dough, its use will not make our dish too high in calories, but it will significantly simplify and speed up the overall cooking process.
Ingredients
- Armenian lavash - 300 g;
- Minced chicken (made from fillet) - 600 g;
- Fresh champignons - 350 g;
- Cherry tomatoes - 12 pcs. (or 2 regular);
- Onion - 1 pc.;
- Carrots - 1 pc.;
- Hard cheese - 40 g;
- Ketchup - 400 ml;
- Natural yoghurt (without additives) - 150 g;
- Herbs, spices, salt - to taste.
How to make dietary lasagna with chicken in a slow cooker
- First of all, we clean and wash the vegetables and mushrooms. Then chop the onion, grate the carrots on a coarse grater, and cut the washed champignons into thin slices.
- Turn on the multicooker and select the “Frying” mode.
- Place vegetables into the bowl. When they become soft, add the mushrooms; after another couple of minutes, add the minced meat. Lightly fry until the minced meat changes color. Transfer the finished filling to another bowl.
- Mix ketchup (you can choose any type) with yogurt. If desired, it is at this stage that you can add your favorite aromatic seasonings.
- We cut the lavash sheets and place one of the pieces on the bottom of the bowl. We spread the filling quite thickly on it and cover it with a sheet of pita bread, which we generously grease with yogurt and ketchup sauce, then the filling follows again.
- Thus we continue to alternate layer by layer. Place the last piece of pita bread on top, season it with sauce, close the multicooker lid and select the “Baking” mode. After 20 minutes, sprinkle the lasagna with grated cheese and continue baking for another 20 minutes, until fully cooked.
This lasagna without Bechamel sauce in a slow cooker turns out incredibly juicy and tasty.
Bon appetit!
All pasta lovers somehow have to forget about their favorite dish when it comes to dieting. After all, in order to keep your figure in great shape, you have to limit yourself in the consumption of flour products. Or maybe there is a compromise?
Let's prepare lasagna according to a special dietary recipe. The dish turns out just as tasty as the traditional recipe, but contains fewer calories.
For this recipe you need the following ingredients:
- 1 zucchini (medium size);
- 3 tomatoes;
- chicken breast (1 pc.);
- 4 cloves of garlic;
- wheat and oat bran;
- 150g low-fat cottage cheese;
- 1 yogurt (without additives);
- basil (dried or fresh).
Cooking process:
- Wash and peel the zucchini, cut into pieces and place in a blender. Grind until the mixture resembles a puree. Squeeze out excess liquid through a sieve so that the dough is not too liquid.
- It's time to prepare the lasagna dough. Take a plate and mix the zucchini mass, cottage cheese, egg white and lastly add oat bran (chopped). Look at the consistency, at first four tablespoons are enough, let them swell for 15 minutes, then add 3-4 more). You should have a dense dough. We begin to knead it, adding four tablespoons of wheat bran (crushed), a pinch of salt. The resulting dough should be placed in the refrigerator for half an hour.
- Now it's time for the sauce. Finely chop the garlic, fry it in a frying pan until browned, then add the tomatoes (peeled and cut into cubes).
- Grind the chicken breast in a blender and add it to the sauce, then the basil. Add salt and simmer over medium heat until the chicken is cooked (white).
- In a separate bowl, beat 2 egg yolks, yogurt (200ml), add a little salt.
- Remove the dough from the refrigerator and roll it out into layers. To prevent the dough from sticking to the rolling pin, place a cut plastic bag between the dough and the rolling pin.
- Take a mold, pour a little sauce (with yogurt) on the bottom, then the dough, tomato-chicken sauce on top, and so on in several layers. Pour the rest of the yogurt sauce on top and sprinkle with grated Parmesan.
- Place our lasagna in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes at 180 degrees.
Recipe Dietary lasagna with champignons
This recipe is already more reminiscent of a traditional dish. 100g contains only 83 kcal (8g proteins, 1.6g fats and 8.9g carbohydrates). To prepare this lasagna, take:
- lasagna sheets (120g);
- chicken fillet (300g);
- champignons (170g);
- carrots (70g);
- 1 onion;
- kefir 1% fat (300ml);
- 1 tbsp. sour cream;
- 2 cloves of garlic;
- 3 tomatoes;
- 30g cheese (hard varieties);
- ground black pepper (3g);
- salt and pepper to taste.
Cooking process:
- The chicken fillet needs to be chopped. Take a frying pan and fry it over medium heat, seasoning with salt and pepper.
- Chop the onion very finely, grate the carrots on a fine grater, cut the tomatoes into cubes. In another frying pan, fry onions, carrots, mushrooms and tomatoes. Season with salt and pepper.
- Combine chicken with vegetables. Remove from heat.
- Next you need to prepare the sauce. To do this, take kefir, sour cream, press the garlic through a press. Combine ingredients and mix.
- It's time to assemble our lasagna. Take a baking dish. Pour a little sauce at the very bottom, then put 2 lasagna sheets, chicken fillet on top of them, then a vegetable mixture with champignons, pour over the sauce.
- Repeat the layout several times (lasagna sheet6 chicken, vegetables and sauce) On top you need to sprinkle our lasagna with grated Parmesan.
- Heat the oven to 180 degrees and bake for 30 minutes. Bon appetit!
Reminder for those who are on a diet
To reduce the calorie content of lasagna, you can use a little less bechamel.
The trick with minced meat is mentioned above. Also, sometimes they replace the filling with a less fatty one - they mix chicken with vegetables and mushrooms, it turns out even tastier. The calorie content of lasagna with minced poultry is also significantly lower.
Bechamel can also be substituted. For example, mixing low-fat sour cream with kefir and garlic. This will help reduce the calories in the lasagna.
If there are two or three layers of the dish, then the energy value of one serving will become more modest.
Calorie content of lasagna and energy value of the classic recipe:*
- calories - 200;
- proteins - 10 g;
- fats - 7 g;
- carbohydrates - 17 g;
*approximate energy value and calorie content of lasagna per 100 grams.
And immediately a spoiler: in classic lasagna – 230 kcal per 100 g, vegetable – 163 kcal, and in “pp” – 70 kcal.
Vegetable lasagna recipe
The lasagna obtained from this recipe is tasty and juicy, and since it does not contain meat, it is also low in calories! Ingredients:
- 6 sheets of lasagna;
- 1 sweet red pepper;
- 1 onion;
- 1 zucchini;
- 300g thick tomato sauce;
- 100g mozzarella;
- 4 leaves of fresh basil.
Cooking process:
- To begin, chop all the vegetables very finely. Heat a frying pan and fry the onion in olive oil for 5-7 minutes. Then add the pepper, mix well and fry for another 3 minutes. Lastly, add the zucchini. Fry for 5-7 minutes.
- While the vegetables are roasting, grate the mozzarella on a coarse grater.
- Take a square or rectangular shape. The bottom should be coated with a thin layer of tomato sauce. Place the first layer of lasagna, then a layer of tomato paste, our fried vegetables, sprinkle generously with cheese. To prevent the lasagne from falling apart, lay out the next layer in a different direction, for example, the first layer is horizontal, the second layer is vertical, etc. And one more piece of advice: all sheets should be covered with filling or sauce, so feel free to break off the protruding edges.
- Next, we continue to assemble our structure, sheets, sauce, vegetables, cheese. Our lasagna should be topped with cheese and basil leaves.
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Send our lasagna to bake for 45 minutes. Take out the finished dish, let it sit for 10 minutes and you can serve! Bon appetit!
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Lasagna is a famous Italian layered casserole, where the frame is made up of layers of dough (pasta), interspersed with meat, vegetable, mushroom or cream sauce. Grated cheese is used as a binder, which cements all layers into a single dish. Like many other dishes that are common by birth (pizza, different types of pasta and dressings for it, etc.), lasagna met the task of preparing the most nutritious, healthy and, of course, tasty food with minimal labor, time and money. I'm going. It was much later that butter, creamy bechamel sauce, expensive mature cheeses and other ingredients appeared in the recipe, which, without adding anything special to the taste, seriously increased the cost and fat content of the dish, while simultaneously reducing its nutritional value and usefulness. Today we will prepare a very easy (in every sense), healthy, tasty and very inexpensive version of this popular dish - light dietary lasagne without bechamel sauce “two pennies for happiness” or in Italian “Da due soldi di felicità”.
We will need:
For the phyllo dough:
- water at room temperature – 200 ml;
- egg – 1 pc.;
- salt – 0.5 tsp;
- vegetable oil – 1 tbsp;
- vodka – 1 tbsp;
- premium flour – 500 gr.
For the meat filling:
- mixed minced meat (beef + pork) – 600 g;
- vegetable oil – 1 tbsp;
- white table wine – 70 ml;
- garlic – 3 cloves or 20 g;
- salt, a mixture of peppers, dried basil, grated nutmeg, other spices - to taste.
For the vegetable sauce:
- vegetable oil – 1 tbsp;
- onion – 160 gr;
- carrots – 150 rg;
- petiole celery – 100 g;
- tomato puree – 50 g;
- tomatoes – 150 gr;
- bell pepper – 120 gr.
In our easy lasagna “Da due soldi” we will be guided by the “plate rule”, according to which the dish should contain no more than a quarter of carbohydrate products (pasta), a quarter of protein (minced meat) and half, or even more, of vegetables (fiber, vitamins). And it is advisable to consume as little fat as possible during the cooking process, that is, use healthier types of culinary processing - poaching, sautéing, baking.
Instead of ready-made paste, we use it, which can be economically rolled out into very thin, almost transparent pieces. We will exclude bechamel sauce from the recipe as a phenomenon, leaving only the smell of nutmeg.
In sunny Italy, tomatoes, peppers and other high-quality vegetables for sauce are available all year round and cost pennies; we will be forced to use freezing out of season, but believe me, the taste and benefits will not decrease. It’s better to take reliable and good-quality preparations than to take risks with the purchase of unknown where and how grown overseas vegetables that do not spoil for months, because even bacteria and fungi are afraid of eating them.
And a few words about oil. In all Italian recipes, olive oil is used not at all because of its indescribable taste, dietary and other healing properties, it is simply more widespread there and costs less, about the same as sunflower oil in our country. So, calmly replace expensive imported well-promoted brands with a domestic product - it will be both cheaper and healthier!
It may seem that preparing the numerous ingredients for lasagna takes an unreasonably long time. In fact, everything happens almost simultaneously: while the dough is maturing in the refrigerator, we will simultaneously prepare meat and vegetable sauces in two frying pans.
How to Make Lasagna Sheets
We start by kneading the dough. You can knead by hand, or in a dough mixer, but the easiest way is to use a bread machine. Pour water, vegetable oil, egg and vodka into a container (can be replaced with salad vinegar or lemon juice), add salt and flour, and after 15-20 minutes, without getting your hands dirty, you get a ball of beautiful, well-kneaded dough. All we have to do is wrap it in cling film and send it to rest in the refrigerator for the fiber to mature.
Minced lasagna filling
Heat a thick-bottomed frying pan thoroughly, lightly grease it with vegetable oil and lay out the minced meat. Under such conditions, the minced pork will quickly begin to melt the fat in which the meat will be fried.
When the minced meat sets, that is, changes color and stops releasing juice, season it. First add finely chopped garlic. Then salt the contents of the frying pan, season with nutmeg, dried (or finely chopped fresh) basil and a mixture of peppers.
Pour in the wine, stir, and heat for just a couple of minutes so that the alcohol has time to evaporate, leaving behind the taste and aroma. If we were preparing lasagne from sheets of dry dough, at this point we would add broth to the meat sauce for juiciness.
Vegetable lasagna filling
While the frying pan is heating up with a tablespoon of vegetable oil, chop the onion into half rings, pour it into the oil and sauté until lightly “glazed”.
Add carrots grated on a coarse grater (you can use a “Korean” grater) and petiole celery cut into small cubes to the onion. It is advisable to note here that the set of possible components of vegetable sauce for lasagna is by no means exhausted by our list today. We can use anything that comes to hand and seems like “suitable company”: eggplant, chard, green beans, young corn, zucchini, leeks, etc. and so on. You just need to follow the order of laying, so that the vegetables that take the longest to cook go first to heat treatment.
When the first portion of vegetables has been stewed to semi-softness, the tomato, tomatoes and sweet peppers are sent into the frying pan - in our case, all this is frozen. Mix the future sauce, cover with a lid and let simmer for a few minutes over medium heat. When the cherry tomatoes are softened, flatten them with a spatula, add salt to the sauce, add sugar to taste and be sure to season with dry or fresh basil. In Italian cuisine, tomatoes and basil are almost inseparable, like Siamese twins.
Grate the cheese (hard, preferably slightly stale) on a coarse or medium grater.
How to assemble lasagna without béchamel sauce
Both types of lasagna filling and dough are ready. All you have to do is turn on the oven to warm up - and we are ready to assemble the lasagna. By the way, in our lasagna we use only half of the prepared dough. You can bake it with the rest. Filo dough is also great for this kind of baking.
Our easy lasagna will be three-layered, that is, 3 sheets of dough, on top of which there is also a filling. Roll out the first sheet large enough to cover the bottom of the mold and sides, and still have a little “moulding allowance” left. This approach is more typical for traditional Russian layer pies such as kurnik or kulebyak, but careful shaping will not spoil the lasagna. The very elastic phyllo dough allowed us to roll it out so thin that the pattern of the cutting board can almost be seen through it.
Lightly grease the pan with vegetable oil to make the finished lasagna easier to remove.
Line the tray with a large sheet of phyllo dough, carefully spread the folds into the corners, leaving the excess dough hanging out.
Spread a third of the meat filling.
Spread moist and juicy vegetable sauce on top of the minced meat.
Lightly sprinkle the layer of vegetable sauce with grated cheese - not too much, just for gluing.
We cover the formed “first floor” with a second, smaller sap. We straighten the dough, lightly knead it and begin to lay out the filling in the already known sequence. We will have to do this operation twice more.
Excess dough can simply be cut off with a knife or kitchen scissors, or you can carefully bend it inward, then our filling is guaranteed not to spread or spread anywhere. To prevent these dough petals from drying out during baking, you can lightly grease them with milk or low-fat sour cream, and shortly before they are ready, lightly sprinkle them with grated cheese - this is just for beauty.
The method of forming lasagna “a la a half-open pie” with high sides prevents the filling from spreading, retains moisture inside the product and allows the dough to bake well with less fatty juice - this is another way to reduce calorie content.