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Rocco: Hey everybody, I'm Rocco DiSpirito.
In my new book, Now Eat This! Italian,
I make our favorite Italian-American classics all under 350 calories,
and I came to Italy to learn the original techniques
from the very best cooks in the world, Italian mamas.
Here's how I did it.
(bottle popping)
(lively music)
We are in Piano Di Sorrento with Lucia Ercolano.
She is a maestro of all things culinary.
She runs this beautiful house called Casa Alexia.
You can actually come here and learn how to cook from the woman herself.
Today she's going to teach me how to make traditional lasagna bolognese,
the old school way.
This is tomato sauce.
Marinara has some garlic in it and oregano.
Fresh pasta, this pasta is extremely thin by the way.
It just serves as a way to layer all these wonderful flavors.
We have tomato sauce and this is a meat sauce, right?
This is bechamel which is a sauce based on whole milk.
(jazz music)
You have enough mozzarella cheese
Lucia: Cheese, meat.
Burro tutto.
Lucia: Burro no.
Rocco: I don't know I'm going to do to make this lasagna healthy.
(jazz music)
We're dealing with a lot of calories here.
Lasagna is really very caloric, lots of fat.
It's going to be a really tough challenge for me
to figure out how to make this on my own.
Okay, the lasagna's been in the oven for about 15 minutes.
We're going to remove the foil, take a look.
(lively music)
It's ready.
(jazz music)
Yeah, wow, it's right.
Rocco: Bouno!
[unintelligible]
which means now I'm going to make mine.
Okay Lucia, it's my turn.
My lasagna bolognese almost as same as yours in terms of ingredients.
I just made them all a little bit lighter.
What I did guys, is I made a super low fat bolognese sauce
with 96% lean beef and canned tomatoes.
And I made a white sauce.
My version of bechamel is made with skim milk and arrowroot.
Arrowroot is a wildly available thickener.
All you have to do is make a cold slurry of it.
boil this milk and when this powder is melted
and completely absorbed by the milk, you add it to the boil mix.
See how that is right now?
This is the most important step.
If you don't do this you'll end up with big lumps of arrowroot in your sauce.
Then all you do is bring that milk to boil
add a Parmesan cheese and you got something that is pretty close
to original bechamel with lots of great cheese flavor.
My pasta is not fresh pasta.
It's actually no-boil, all-wheat organic pasta.
When I say no-boil I mean you don't have to cook it
and you don't have to do anything to it.
Makes it very simple.
I start off with 2 pieces of whole wheat lasagna noodles that are no boil.
I add a layer of the red sauce, white sauce, cheese.
I keep doing that then I do a layer of red sauce, white sauce, zucchini
and that's what I'll do now and I use 2 layers of zucchini
to eliminate 2 layers of pasta because in terms of calories,
after I have taken all the fat, the most calories come from the pasta.
What you have to do is just make sure
the sauces you use have enough water in them
so that the pasta will absorb water as it cooks and I have done that for you.
The cool thing about zucchini is you can cook it on the microwave.
As a matter of fact, this entire dish is going to be cooked in the microwave.
It's really cool.
Okay, now we're going to do another layer of red sauce
white sauce and parmigiano.
One more layer of pasta and you want to just crosshatch it.
Then another final layer of red sauce, white sauce and parm.
Then believe it or not,
this whole thing is going to get wrapped up and put into the microwave.
It is flawless in the microwave.
You're going to be amazed the first time you do this.
15 minutes in the microwave.
Time to take it out.
(lively music)
Wow, that looks amazing.
Beautiful, perfect!
(lively music)
Time for the big tasting moment.
This is very good.
Here's a really good news.
The original version 1170 calories, 68 grams of fat
then now this version only 307 calories, 9.5 grams of fat.
And know you'll want to eat this lasagna
but now you can eat this lasagna.
(lively music)
Thanks from the inspiration I got from Lucia Ercolano.
Grazie mille.
(lively music)