Almost 100-layer lasagne

Don't bother counting. There are 70 layers here, not the 100 that were planned. That's what my friend Tom tells me anyway. And he was in charge of keeping track. Of course, he was drinking at the time.

We certainly had fun trying to recreate the 100-layer lasagne from Del Posto restaurant in New York. Eating it wasn't such a hardship either, but that's another story.

We need to get something out of the way before moving on. The hundred-layer lasagne isn't made with 100 pasta sheets. It's made with 50 "layers" of pasta and another 50 of sauce. I know. Sounds like cheating to me too.

Anyhow, we went with super-thin pasta sheets, the No. 1 setting on my pasta machine. The sheets are around a 6-inch square. Rather than using a lasagne pan we went with a round Dutch oven, the idea being that we'd need room around the assembled tower to position utensils for lifting it out when it was done. (This reasoning proved horribly flawed but I'll get to that in a minute.)

The sauces are a combination of Bolognese and béchamel.

Everything was going pretty well for a while, I at the pasta machine, Tom at the layering station. I don't know what number of layers we're on at this point, but you can see that things are stacking up nicely.

Except that we're not as smart as we look. As the tower grew larger the weight of it wound up forcing the pasta sheets downward and outward. This might have been avoided by using skewers to keep things in place, but now is not the time to be pondering such things. What's done is done, no?

In the end this is what we wound up with, a round Dutch oven-shaped lasagne that required sculpting to mimic the square version that it was meant to be.

I'm hoping for better luck the next time Tom and I get an idea like this. If there is a next time.

Happy New Year everybody!