easy gluten-free vegan lasagna

gluten-free vegan lasagna

I was exasperated the other day that I had to wait in for a courier that never came.  I set out to make lasagna but had no eggs, and couldn't go out to buy any.....so here is a vegan version which turns out to be much better than my usual lasagna.  This is so much better that I have ordered an electric pasta roller for my Kenwood food mixer so that I can make loads for my sister.  I tried rolling the pasta in my old pasta machine, which I have used for polymer clay, and it rolled very easily.  I threw that batch away (speckled blue and orange..) but it did at least allow me to be sure that a normal pasta roller would be helpful.

I made the lasagna with tapioca gel and what has now become my standard flour.  I put the flour and the gel in the food mixer and let it do all the hard work.  When the dough was soft I let it rest, wrapped in plastic, in the fridge for a while, and then rolled it thinly.  I tested the wet rolling - between dampened clingfilm, and dry rolling with flour, and found the dry rolling worked fine and made the resulting thin sheets easier to handle.

I then pre-cooked the pasta for a few minutes in boiling water and made two lasagnas.  One we ate for lunch, the other has been frozen to see how the lasagna copes with being frozen as a pre-prepared meal.

I also made a tiny lasagna with some of this dough that I had made yesterday, pre-cooked in water and then dried.  Layered with a simple tomato sauce and covered in cheese (dough is vegan - use how you want) and baked - it worked very well.  The layers of pasta stayed distinct, had a smooth soft texture, and tasted good.  The long-term hope is to be able to make neat pre-cooked lasagna sheets so that they can be made in advance and used as a convenience food by people who don't like cooking.

tapioca gel - 10g tapioca flour, 100ml water, stirred together and cooked until clear.
150g flour - 40% urid, 40% tapioca, 20% polenta.

If any UK readers would like to try this flour mix if they would let me know - I'd like to get some feedback from others about this mixture. I think it is better than any of the other flours on the market and doesn't need xanthum gum.  I now use it for cakes, pastry, cookies, pasta and bread.

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reheated in microwave from frozen this pasta is still good

Lasagna

I made ravioli, which I wrote about in the last post.  I had a little pasta left over so I thought I would find out how it worked as lasagna.

I made thin sheets of the dough - made from tapioca gel and urid and tapioca flours, by pressing between damp layers of cling-film.  I wanted to know if this needed to be pre-cooked or not so I did two tiny lasagnas, layered simply with the tomato sauce left over from a previous meal, and just a little cheese on the top.  I used lactose-free cheese for the texture and a tiny bit of Parmesan (I can cope with a little dairy) for some flavour as the lactose free cheese doesn't have much taste at all.

For the first lasagna I simply interleaved sauce and sheets of the pasta.  For the second I pre-cooked the past sheets for two minutes in boiling water, and then layered it with sauce.  The photos don't really look very much like lasagna as this was a functional test and not a properly balanced layering of pasta and suaces.

 I baked both at 180C for twenty minutes, until the cheese on top was bubbling and brown.

After leaving these to cool for a few minutes we tested them.  I knew which was which as I had put a ring of foil around the handle of the dish that had the pre-cooked lasagna.

Tolerant taster did not know which was which.  He like both pretty much the same.  I thought the textures of both were good.  The sheets of pasta had stayed distinctive and were smooth and yielding to the teeth.  In the past I have found gf pasta mushes into the layers of sauce in a disappointing way.

non-precooked lasagna

precooked lasagna

I found that the lasagna made from the pasta that had not been pre-cooked tasted of raw tapioca flour.  I found it rather unpleasant and quite dominating, even though the sauce was a highly flavoured one with chili.  Even with a repeat test with a specific request to pay attention to the taste Tolerant Taster didn't notice this, so I am clearly more sensitive to the flavour.  

I will make this again but I will pre-cook the lasagna.  It may be that with longer cooking the flavour of the non-precooked lasagna would change, but I wouldn't want to be risking over-cooking the sauces just to be sure.

 I haven't tested how this responds to being chilled and reheated and frozen and reheated - the samples I made today were so small that there isn't really enough left over to do this.  However, I am confident that this lasagna recipe would be happily eaten by people who eat wheat all the time.

I also need to test whether this pasta can be dried and used later, or frozen after pre-cooking in sheets for future use.  I always like to find out if foods can be converted from 'make-from'scratch' to 'convenience' foods.

lasagna and crispbread

Lasagna made with gluten free pasta tends to form a mush, and is very poor when kept and eaten later. This is a shame as it used to be one of my standby foods when I needed to feed large numbers of people but I didn’t know when they would arrive or they were going to turn up in the middle of the night (the kids after clubbing.).

I made some great crispbreads this week, and just to see how far I could take my new dough, made from urid lentils, quinoa and polenta, I had rolled them so thin I could see through them – the small amount of tapioca gel makes the dough very easy to handle.

It occurred to me that they might work well layered with tomato and cheese and used as lasagna. Astonishingly I appear to have no tinned tomatoes or cartons of passata in the house, but I did have milk and cheese. A quick cheese sauce and a small ramekin allowed me to build a tiny layered sort-of lasagna and bake it along with the supper.

First reports are very favourable. The layers were intact, soft but not mushy. A report on how it will be after a few hours will have to wait, but I am charmed by the idea of a snack food morphing into a meal food. I can see if this really works these crispbreads will have to be made in bulk and distributed to others who are mourning the loss of a great standby dish.