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Welcome to the Chop Chop Podcast.
I'm Stella Maiden, Harry's new co-host.
And I'm Harry Rosenblum.
Our mission at Chop Chop Family is to enrich the lives of families by inspiring and teaching them to cook and eat real food together.
Stella, it's so great to have you with me on the show.
Today we're going to dig into lasagna.
What does lasagna make you think of?
For me, I think of Garfield the Cat, who famously loves lasagna and hates Mondays.
Me too.
In my family, lasagna is one of my mom's favorite dishes to make and one of my favorites to eat.
My mom actually uses vegan ricotta and vegan parmesan in her lasagna, and it tastes great.
So there are still ways to make a cheesy-tasting lasagna without the cheese.
I love lasagna, and of course now I'm hungry.
It's such a comforting dish.
Lasagna as a word refers to the wide flat sheets of pasta, as well as the whole dish that we were talking about when we used the word lasagna.
Lasagna is a very adaptable recipe, but in most cases it is alternating layers of wide, flat lasagna noodles, tomato sauce with or without meat, ricotta cheese, bechamel sauce, all topped with mozzarella cheese.
It is usually layered in a deep pan and baked until the cheese on top is melted and browned and the edges are just starting to get a little crispy.
Harry, do you like a centerpiece or a corner piece?
I like a corner piece because I like the little crispy bits.
The Maillard reaction where the cheese and pasta brown makes it extra delicious.
Stella, here's a question that my kids and I were discussing recently.
If you have two pieces of lasagna on a plate and you put one on top of the other, is it still two pieces of lasagna or just one really tall piece of lasagna?
I do think it is just one tall piece of lasagna.
What do you think?
I agree.
I think if I had two pieces on a plate and I stacked them up, I would think of it as one really tall piece.
However, if I had like five or six pieces of lasagna and I tried to make like a lasagna skyscraper, I feel like I couldn't still call it one piece.
That's fair.
It's like if the slices can stay stacked on top of each other, then it's one big piece.
If they're falling over, we can't call it one big piece anymore.
Why did the orange cry?
Because someone heard it's peeling.
Welcome to the kitchen playground.
As you've probably noticed, not all cheese melts the same.
Lasagna has at least two, sometimes more kinds of cheese.
The ricotta in the middle is a very soft and almost crumbly cheese, while the mozzarella on top is really stretchy and stringy.
Cheese is made up of tiny proteins.
Kind of looks like tiny little boxes surrounded by bits of fat and water.
When the cheese heats up, the fat turns from a solid to a liquid.
Then the proteins loosen up, which makes cheese flow like a thick liquid.
As cheese gets older, it loses water through evaporation.
Cheese with less water doesn't melt well because its proteins cling together very tightly.
So it requires a lot more heat to melt.
To see this in action, pick a few of your favorite cheeses. one aged and another that isn't.
We recommend Parmesan and mozzarella.
Make a grilled cheese or quesadilla with each type of cheese and see how each of the cheeses has melted.
And then cut it in half and try to stretch the cheese and see how long you can get it to stretch.
Which one stretched more?
The hard-aged Parmesan or the softer mozzarella?
Which one did you like the taste of better?
I got the chance to try this at home with my son, Frank.
Let's listen to how it went.
All right, now we're going to do a little cheese pull test.
Cheese pull!
We have two quesadillas here, one made with hard cheese and one made with softer cheese.
The first one has Parmesan and Gouda.
Gouda.
And the second one has a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar.
Which one do you think is going to have a better pull, Frank?
I think it's going to be the soft.
Really?
Let's check it out.
Here's the hard.
Let's take a look.
How's our pull?
Like no pull at all.
Not really.
All right.
Here's the soft one.
Way better pull.
Oh man, I got like more than a foot.
Keeps going.
Two feet.
We're up to three feet.
Three and a half feet.
Soft wins.
Yes!
Having done this experiment, I know that the mozzarella stretches more than the parmesan.
This is due to the fact that when hard cheese like Parmesan is made, the curds are pressed together and the molecules, which is the tiny little pieces of cheese, are pushed together and they face in all sorts of different directions.
When mozzarella is made, the curds are mixed and stretched so that all the molecules line up in a straight line.
So when you melt it, those straight lines become very obvious and give you an awesome cheese pull.
Thanks for listening to the Chop Chop Podcast.
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Go to chopchopfamily.substack.com and join the conversation.
This podcast is written produced, edited and hosted by Harry Rosenblum and Stella Maiden, with engineering by Matt Patterson.
Sally Samson is the founder of Chop Chop Family and writes the substack.
Shout out to Frank and Lola.
Thanks for adding your voices to our show.
Music in this episode by Lisa Hammer and the Marion Circle Drum Brigade.
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Thanks for listening.
