Vegan Lasagna

Vegan Lasagna. 100% Plant Based! Not even an grandma would never ever notice any difference between the classic recipe and this vegan one! Same texture, same taste, extra yummy, extra Italian!

Deciding to exclude animal foods from your diet does not mean eating strange or super-healthy things, or on the contrary, all prepackaged foods. Simply, just learn how to prepare our usual meals by replacing some ingredients with other natural ones coming from the plant kingdom. 

There are people who choose a 100% plant-based diet for healthy or for ecological reasons, or choose to limit animal products to reduce the impact on the planet: just think that intensive farming pollutes more than cars and  motorcycles all together, producing 50% of gas emissions in the entire World, plus animals are subjected to enormous and unnecessary suffering. 

It will take just a little effort, and once used to it you’ll be totally free from animal products in your diet. Experiment, learn, be creative! That way you can enjoy even more trying out new ingredients and products you never heard about before if you’re not already into vegan cooking. 

Luckily nowadays all the products I’ll be using for this recipe can be easily found in supermarkets such as texturized soy and nutritional yeast and they are also pretty cheap.

Ingredients for 4/5 people:

WHAT YOU NEED

For the Bolognese sauce (Ragù)

• 1 Liter of tomato sauce 
• 1 small to medium celery stick
• 1 medium to small carrot
• 1 medium to small onion
• 2 tablespoons of tomato paste
• red wine to blend (around 1/2 cup)
• texturized soy about 180 g
• a lot of extra virgin olive oil
• salt and pepper
• some bay leaves

For the Soy Bechamel

• 1 L of unsweetened soy milk
• 7-8 or more spoons of food yeast flakes (it is not baking yeast)
• 100 g extra virgin olive oil
• 50 g corn starch
• 60 g of rice starch (flour)
• some water at room Temperature
• nutmeg to taste
• salt and pepper

WHAT TO DO

To ease the process i suggest you to buy lasagna sheets without egg or even gluten free ones. Start by making the ragù by boiling the texturized soy for a short time and when rehydrated, drain and squeeze out the excess of water. Sauteè chopped onion, celery and carrot with plenty of extra virgin olive oil season with pepper and salt, then put the texturized and irrorate with wine until golden brown (not burnt!) Eventually add EVO oil.

At this point, put in the tomato sauce and paste and a little water to clean the tomato sauce glass , season with salt and pepper, cook at low heat with some bay leaves inside then you will remove when It’ll be ready. If you use Mutti brand then cook it for about 20-30 minutes, instead if you use the other brands cook for 3 hours stirring occasionally. 

Now prepare the bechamel: bring soy milk to a boil and then add nutritional yeast, oil, salt, nutmeg and stir well.  Dissolve the corn and rice starch in a little water at room temperature and pour it in the boiling soy milk while stirring with a whisk until it thickens. To make lasagna, it is better that bechamel usually remains slightly liquid and not too thick, if necessary lengthen it later with water. Season with salt and nutritional yeast as needed.

In a large baking porcelain casserole make layers using bechamel and ragù with lasagna pasta sheets on top and so on till you reach the top, or until you’ve reached at least 6-7 layers. At least, put a lots of béchamel, sprinkle olive oil, and bake at 180 C for around 30 minutes, take it out once cooked and let it to warm down a little bit. 

Your lasagna is finally ready! Let us know what’s your outcome and remember to tag our page @kaataa_get_closer in your photos! See you next week for another amazing recipe!