Inside Out Lasagne (creamy pasta plus your favourite savoury sauce)

If you’re anything like me, you love lasagne. I thought I’d tried all the major variations until I stumbled upon something deliciously different in a little restaurant in Venice.

This approach turns lasagne inside out, separating the meat sauce from the pasta and bechamel sauce. The result is a mouth-watering contrast of textures – rich, savoury sauce and dense, creamy pasta.

Important: this recipe is only for the pasta and cheesy sauce. To complete your Inside Out Lasagne, you’ll also need a suitable amount of your favourite meat (or vegetable) sauce to serve on top – Bolognese, marinara, beef stew, etc.

What is Inside Out Lasagne?

You might’ve heard of lasagne bianco, or a white lasagne. It’s a very simple type of lasagne, consisting of layers of lasagne pasta, bechamel sauce and cheese, typically parmesan.

White lasagne is a deliciously creamy dish typically served in small portions as an appetizer. Sometimes it has vegetables added to enhance the flavour (especially mushrooms), but it’s intended to be a simple creamy starter that heroes the pasta and the cheesy bechamel (aka mornay sauce). It’s wonderful, but it lacks the complexity of a classic meat lasagne, and isn’t most people’s idea of a main meal.

Enter the Inside Out Lasagne. Bringing together a white lasagne and your favourite meat sauce, you get the combination of flavours you expect from your classic lasagne, but with a completely different set of textures. Each bite offers a dense, creamy “cake” of pasta, swimming in the rich, savoury complexity of the meat sauce. It’s hard to describe well, but trust me – it’s amazing!

I’ve never seen a recipe for a white lasagne quite like the one like I had in Venice, so I set about creating one myself. After many attempts I managed to recreate it two ways:

• this version, which is closest to what I enjoyed in Venice – Inside Out Lasagne with cheesy bechamel sauce.
• a quick and easy version – Inside Out Lasagne with ricotta.

But because of how it’s served, it’s even more versatile than that. You can serve almost anything you want on top of the lasagne.

What to serve it with?

The lasagne I enjoyed in Venice was topped with a typical Italian meat sauce – slow-cooked meat, tomatoes, red wine and not much more. A Bolognese sauce is probably the most popular example, and I strongly recommend you try an Inside Out Lasagne with your favourite spaghetti sauce or lasagne meat sauce recipe at least once.

But don’t stop there! This lasagne pairs beautifully with many different saucy dishes. It works well in place of traditional pasta (like spaghetti or penne), mashed potatoes and more. Some of my favourite pairings are with:

• Bolognese sauce
• Any rich beef stew, like Boeuf Bourguignon
• Chicken parmesan, with plenty of marinara or good tomato sauce
• Meatballs or meatloaf with tomato sauce
• Beef stroganoff
• Sausages and gravy

And you don’t have to use meat. You can make a delicious vegetarian Inside Out Lasagne with a saucy, richly flavoured vegetable dish, like:

• Ratatouille
• A good quality marinara or homemade tomato sauce
• Lentil stews

and many more – let your imagination run wild!

How do you make Inside Out Lasagne?

In this post I don’t provide you with a recipe for what to put on top, because I’m sure you’ve already got a favourite Bolognese sauce, beef stew or something else entirely to try with it. If you don’t, I’ve linked to some great recipes at the bottom of the page.

Beyond what you put on top, there are two fundamental choices you need to make for your Inside Out Lasagne:

1. The pasta – dried or fresh?
2. The cheese sauce – bechamel or ricotta?

Fresh or dried lasagne pasta?

Dried lasagne sheets really need to be pre-cooked for this type of lasagne. Fresh pasta, on the other hand, can be cooked in the lasagne, in the oven.

Most of the time I go for dried lasagne because I always have some handy in the cupboard. I also prefer it’s denser texture compared to the thinner fresh lasagne pasta sheets.

Bechamel or ricotta mixture?

A traditional northern Italian lasagne is made with bechamel sauce and, for me at least, bechamel creates the best Inside Out Lasagne. It’s smoother, creamier and richer.

But a bechamel takes time to cook, so if you’re short on time, or simply prefer ricotta, I have a separate recipe for Inside Out Lasagne with Ricotta.

Making an Inside Out Lasagne

I’ll go over the process broadly here, but for specific ingredient amounts and detailed instructions please scroll down to the recipe card.

There are several steps to making an Inside Out Lasagne:

1. Cook your lasagne pasta in boiling water.
2. Make a roux of flour and butter.
3. Gradually add milk to make a bechamel sauce. As an option, you can upgrade your milk by first infusing it with aromatics (which I highly recommend).
4. Carefully add parmesan cheese to create a mornay sauce.
5. Build your lasagne with layers of sauce and pasta.
6. Oven bake your lasagne to heat it through and meld it all together.
7. Serve with a generous scoop of your favourite meat or vegetable main on top.

You can change the order of some of these steps though. You can make your bechamel first, or even at the same time as you cook your lasagne pasta if you’re feeling adventurous.

What you need

For the simplest version, the ingredient list is short:

• Butter
• All purpose flour
• a pinch of nutmeg
• Milk
• Grated parmesan cheese
• Dried or fresh lasagne pasta
• and of course your favourite pasta sauce, stew or other dish to serve on top (preferably a saucy one). If you’re not sure what to try, Bolognese sauce is a great place to start.

If you want to make your bechamel sauce even better, you’ll need a few more ingredients:

• An onion, peeled and quartered
• Whole cloves
• Whole black peppercorns
• Dried bay leaves

Cook your lasagne sheets (20 to 60 minutes, depending on batch size)

This is the fiddliest part of the recipe, but it’s really important, especially with dried lasagne pasta.

With a classic meat lasagne the pasta can cook in the oven in your lasagne. This works because there’s so much more liquid and fat in a meat lasagne to soften, heat and cook the pasta sheets.

I’ve tried several different approaches to cooking an Inside Out Lasagne this way, but with dried pasta you just can’t get it tender enough. Not even close, at least for my taste. I even tried cooking it for as long as an hour, and the pasta was closer to ideal, but the sauce dried out and split, ruining the velvety creaminess.

If you’re using dried lasagne sheets, I strongly recommend cooking your lasagne pasta first, unless you like VERY firm pasta (borderline crunchy).

If you’re using fresh lasagne pasta you can skip this step, but if you like your pasta really tender I’d still recommend you give the sheets a blanch in boiling water for at least one or two minutes.

How to cook lasagne pasta

I find cooking lasagne sheets much easier in a large skillet. Being shallow, it allows you much better access to the pasta once it’s in the water. It does however limit how many sheets you can cook at once. If you want to batch them up more, you’ll need a wide deep pot.

Whichever way you go, you want the pan or pot to be significantly wider than the length of your pasta sheets, because they will typically grow in size by at least a quarter as they cook. 

Lasagne pasta is very prone to sticking together while cooking, especially when it first goes in the water. If you are cooking more than one sheet at a time you need to keep separating them frequently for the first three to four minutes they’re in the water. This is much more difficult to manage when you have six or eight sheets in a deep pot than it is when you have two or three in a skillet.

I highly recommend using a timer too. Lasagne sheets are much harder to test for doneness than something like penne or spaghetti, because you can’t just scoop one out and pop it in your mouth.

Directions for dried cooking lasagne pasta in boiling water

1. Bring plenty of salted water to the boil in a large skillet or large, wide saucepan.
2. Add one or more lasagne sheets to the boiling water.
3. Move the sheets about frequently for the first three to four minutes, ensuring they are not sticking together. I usually do this by grabbing the bottom piece with tongs and dragging it on top of the others.
4. Continue to cook the pasta until done to your liking, checking every couple of minutes to make sure they are not sticking together. Note that they will soften a little more in the oven, but not significantly. I find that 12 to 13 minutes is ideal for most dried lasagne sheets.
5. Remove the cooked pasta sheets from the water one by one, laying them out on a clean tea towel to cool and dry. I find the best way to remove the floppy sheets from the water without tearing them is using a pair of tongs to grab a corner and a wide spatula or even better a wide slotted spoon to support the sheet as you lift it out.
6. Allow the sheets to cool enough to handle if you’re making your lasagne straight away, or you can leave them on the tea towel for up to two hours if you need more time.

Directions for blanching fresh lasagne pasta

The directions for fresh lasagne are much the same as with dried pasta. The biggest difference, apart from the much shorter cooking time, is that fresh sheets are significantly more fragile than dried, so take care when handling them, including when they’re in the boiling water.

1. Bring plenty of salted water to the boil in a large skillet or large, wide saucepan.
2. Add one or more lasagne sheets to the boiling water.
3. Cook the pasta for 1 to 2 minutes, moving them about frequently to ensure they are not sticking together.
4. Carefully remove the cooked pasta sheets from the water one by one, laying them out on a clean tea towel to cool and dry. Remember that they are much more fragile than the thicker dried sheets, so handle them gently.
5. Allow the sheets to cool enough to handle if making your lasagne straight away, or you can leave them for up to two hours if you need more time.

Infuse your milk (optional – 15 to 20 minutes)

To take your lasagne to the next level, you can infuse the milk with aromatics before combining it into a bechamel sauce. This step is optional, but I highly recommend taking the time to do so. It really does enhance the flavour. And not just of Inside Out Lasagne – it’s definitely worth doing for a classic meat lasagne too, or any dish you use a bechamel sauce in, even mac & cheese.

1. Add the quartered onion, cloves, peppercorns and bay leaves together with the milk to a medium saucepan (you want it no more than 3/4 full). 
2. Bring the mixture slowly to a simmer over medium-low heat, stirring often to prevent the milk from congealing on the bottom of the pan. Do not allow the milk to boil.
3. Gently simmer the mixture for 10 minutes, stirring frequently, to allow the flavours to infuse the milk. Make sure to maintain only a gentle simmer – you want almost no movement (from bubbles breaking) at the surface of the milk.
4. Remove the pan from the heat. Using tongs or a slotted spoon, remove the vegetables and spices from the milk and discard.

If you need to pause here, you can allow the milk to cool. Note that your milk doesn’t have to be cold or even cool to make your bechamel. As long as you introduce the milk slowly as directed below, any temperature milk will work.

Make your roux (5 to 10 minutes)

A classic roux is made with equal amounts of fat and flour by weight, but it doesn’t have to be exact, and because butter is about 15% water, using the same amount by volume allows for the water to boil off.

1. In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, melt the butter and allow it to gently bubble for a couple of minutes, stirring often. This allows much of the water in the butter to boil off.
2. Add the flour and nutmeg to the butter, and stir well to combine. I find that a small whisk is the best tool for this job.
3. Cook the butter and flour mixture over medium-low heat for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring frequently. I make sure not to cook it for too long, as I prefer a white or at most a blond roux for this dish. The goal is to cook it long enough to remove the raw flour smell/taste without allowing it to develop any colour.

If you want you can pause here. Remove the roux from the heat if you’re going to do that. Otherwise leave the roux on the heat and move to the next step – making your bechamel.

Make your bechamel sauce (10 – 15 minutes)

Depending on how confident you are making a bechamel this step can take more or less time than I’ve suggested. I’ll explain the process below, but for more detail you can check out my post on how to make the perfect bechamel sauce.

The key is not to rush. To make the bechamel sauce you gradually combine the milk (plain, or infused if you went that way) with the roux. 

1. With the roux on medium-low heat, add about a quarter-cup of your milk to the roux and whisk rapidly to combine. Once it’s combined, continue to stir for another 30 seconds or so before moving to the next step. Depending on how much milk you added, the mixture may clump up into a thick pasty consistency. Don’t worry if that happens – it’s normal. 
2. Add a similar amount more milk, and whisk rapidly to combine. If your roux didn’t clump up with the previous addition it’s very likely it will this time. Again, don’t worry – it’s normal. Continue to stir for another 30 seconds or so.
3. Repeat step two until all of the milk has been added to the sauce.  After the first two or three additions you can start to add a bit more each time, but fight the urge to dump large amounts in at once – that’s a sure-fire way to get a lumpy bechamel sauce. Sipping a glass of wine as your stir in each addition is a great way to enjoy the repetition here.
4. Bring the sauce to a low simmer, stirring very frequently to prevent the milk from congealing (and ultimately burning) on the bottom. Once it is simmering (not boiling!), lower the heat and keep stirring frequently for five to ten minutes until the sauce thickens a little and will coat the back of a spoon. Note that depending on your pan, your stove and the heat setting you use, it can take five or even ten minutes to bring the mixture to a simmer.

Upgrade your bechamel (5 minutes)

To give the sauce a more complex taste and even creamier texture, we add parmesan cheese, making it a mornay sauce. If you’re a big fan of cheese, feel free to add more than I suggest, as well as different types of cheese (mozzarella is a great choice). Whichever way you go, make sure you follow the directions below to prevent the cheese from seizing and leaving you with a gritty sauce.

1. Remove the bechamel from the heat and allow it to cool for a few minutes. If it’s too hot, your cheese can seize up when you add it.
2. Add a small amount of parmesan cheese and stir rapidly to incorporate it into the sauce. Don’t move onto the next step until the cheese has been fully combined into the sauce. There should be no lumps or strands of cheese visible – only a silky smooth sauce.
3. Repeat step two until all of your cheese is incorporated. If you’re adding a lot of cheese you may need to put the sauce back on low heat to prevent the additions from cooling it down too much. If it gets too cool, the cheese will no longer melt into the sauce, leaving it lumpy.
4. Set the sauce aside until you’re ready to put the lasagne together.

Construct your lasagne (5 minutes)

Whether you’re using fresh or dried pasta, the process of building your lasagne is the same.

1. Choose your lasagne dish. Because the cooked lasagne sheets (and uncooked fresh ones) can easily be cut to size, you can be creative here. Choose a smaller dish for a deeper lasagne with many layers, or a wide dish for a flatter lasagne. Keep in mind that the pasta, although cooked, will still expand a little in the oven. And a really deep lasagne will take longer to cook too.

2. If required, cut your lasagne pasta sheets to size to suit your dish. I typically do this while they’re on the tea towel with a pizza cutter. Just be sure you don’t use too much pressure – you only want to cut the soft pasta, not the tea towel!

3. Spread a thin layer of your bechamel sauce on the bottom of the dish.

4. Top with a single layer of pasta. If you need more than one sheet to cover the layer (in a large dish for example), make sure the pasta sheets don’t overlap – butt them up against each other instead.

5. Spread a good layer of your bechamel on top of the pasta, ensuring you fully and generously cover it.

6. Repeat Step 4 and Step 5 until you run out of pasta, finishing with a layer of sauce.

7. Cover the baking dish tightly with foil.

Cooking your lasagne (30 minutes)

Even though your pasta is cooked, your lasagne still needs some time in the oven to fully integrate the sauce with the pasta. It also needs to be brought back up to serving temperature because the pasta sheets cool very quickly.

1. Preheat your oven to 350F (180C).
2. Cover the lasagne and cook for 30 minutes, or until thoroughly heated through.
3. Remove from the oven and rest for 5 minutes before serving.

To serve

You can cut the lasagne in the baking dish and carefully remove pieces with a spatula, but if you’re serving up most or all of it I find it easier to lift the whole lasagne out onto a cutting board with a large spatula. Then you can cut it more cleanly, as well as get under individual pieces more easily.

Then simply plate it up and top it with your preferred main – Bolognese sauce, beef stew, etc.

Have some fun with it!

You don’t need to serve it in boring rectangular slabs either. The lasagne can be quite easily cut into simple shapes with cookie cutters. Circles and stars work really well. And I’m sure you can come up with a suitable shape for a special Valentine’s Day meal 😉.

Storage and Reheating

Once cooked, your Inside Out Lasagne will last well (tightly covered) in the fridge for several days. It’s best if it’s kept without your Bolognese or other sauce on it, and you can reheat it in the following ways:

• In the microwave on about 500W (half power) for 7 to 10 minutes depending on your microwave and how deep your lasagne is. Half power ensures you heat it through slowly rather than overcooking the outside and leaving the middle cold.
• In a pre-heated oven at 350°F (180°C) for 30 minutes. Make sure you cover the dish with foil to prevent the lasagne from drying out too much.

Recipes to try with your Inside Out Lasagne

As you can imagine the possibilities are almost endless when it comes to choosing a dish to complete your Inside Out Lasagne, but here are some great recipes to try.

• Bolognese Sauce from Gimme Some Oven
• Kenji’s Beef Stew on Serious Eats
• Ratatouille from Recipe Tin Eats
• Ciao Florentina’s Marinara Sauce
• Devilled Sausages from Don’t Go Bacon My Heart
• Healthy Recipe’s Meatballs in Tomato Sauce
• Lentil Mushroom Stew from Minimalist Baker
• Foodie Crush’s Roasted Mushroom Beef Stroganoff
• Chicken Parmesan from Inspired Taste
• The Pasta Project’s Tuscan Wild Boar (Pork) Ragu