Matty Matheson’s Lasagna From Munchies
Lasagna is one of those dishes where you either grew up with your parents baking it from frozen or you had a family recipe that was passed down from generation to generation. Some people have strong opinions about lasagna — if you grew up eating a family recipe, you probably feel like there is only one right way to make lasagna.
When we grew up, lasagna was always heavy on the tomato-flavour with layers of ricotta or cottage cheese. Matty Matheson’s recipe shatters our expectations of lasagna and transforms the dish into something even more gluttonous and heavy than your “traditional” lasagna. It’s heavy on the meat sauce, not super tomatoey, and doesn’t use a cheese whey/curd product — instead he opts for 3 POUNDS OF MOZZARELLA CHEESE. 🧀
This dish will leave you wanting to have a nap after, but Matty claims that it’s guaranteed to get you laid. (So either way, you’re going to bed? 😏)
“If you don’t like lasagna, you’re probably an idiot. You probably vote for people you shouldn’t vote for.”
Lasagna Ingredients:
Canola oil and olive oil
6 cloves of garlic*
1 carrot
1 large yellow onion
4 tablespoons tomato paste
3 tablespoons dried red chilies**
1 litre beef stock
2 cups whole milk
3 large egg yolks***
1 bunch of parsley
1 box of oven ready lasagna noodles
3 pounds of mozzarella cheese****
4 pounds of ground beef
250g Parmesan cheese
Check out the full recipe on Vice. Our ingredient notes and recipe review is below!
*In the video, Matty Matheson uses 6 cloves of garlic, but the recipe on Vice says one head of garlic. The takeaway here is: use as much garlic as you want.
**We have a whole section talking about this and it’s super important to read! Lest your lasagna become too spicy to eat…
***In the video, Matty uses 3 egg yolks, but the recipe on Vice says to use 4. This probably doesn’t matter too much — just add 3 egg yolks and see if your sauce has the same consistency as what Matty had in the video. If not, add another.
****The Vice recipe says to use shredded mozzarella, but Matty just slices slabs of mozzarella and uses them to layer. You can do either.
Making The Sauce
This sauce was a first for us. Up until now, our lasagnas had been made with generic tomato sauce from a can or jar. Turns out the Italians do it slightly differently with a beef ragu sauce and bechamel sauce. Matty Matheson has his own take on lasagna and uses a bolognese sauce.
Where in a traditional bolognese sauce there is usually a mixture of beef and pork (ground beef or veal and pancetta is a winning combination), Matty axes the pork aspect entirely and focuses on beef solely and disregards almost all of the tomato aspect.
“This is the way that Italians should make their lasagna.”
Now, in order to make the meat sauce like Matty does, you need to brown your beef. So put some canola oil into a big pot over high heat and start browning the beef in batches.
🧀 Mediocre Tip: Don’t put all the beef into the pot at once — this will cause the beef to boil in it’s own liquid. You can still brown it this way, but it takes forever as all the water that is released has to evaporate, and even then it’s never quite right. Better to just brown the beef in batches.
While the beef is browning, you should be heating the olive oil in a separate pot and frying the garlic in it. In the video Matty uses a ton of olive oil to fry the garlic in. It appears to be at least an inch deep. So yeah, go ahead and deep fry some garlic. Once the garlic has cooked for perhaps a minute or so, add in the carrot and onion and let those cook until they’ve softened and the onions have begun to turn a light brown.
At this point, you should add in the tomato paste, mix it, and let it cook for several minutes to get rid of the harshness of the tomato paste.
Now it’s time to add the chili flakes. For the love of god, read our section about the chili flakes, and be very careful here.
Once the chili flakes are in, add the veggies to the beef and pour in the beef stock. Let the sauce come up to a simmer and keep it on the heat until the liquid has reduced down to just below the level of the meat. Make sure to stir occasionally so nothing burns. (This should take 15 minutes or so.)
Pre-reduction Meat Sauce
Once the sauce has reduced, add in half the milk, stir, and again let the sauce come to a simmer until it has reduced a bit more. Add the other half of the milk and let the sauce reduce down for a final time.
If you’ve done this correctly you should have a very thick meaty sauce — more meat than sauce really. If you think the sauce is a bit too soupy still, throw it back on the heat and let it reduce a bit more.
The final steps before assembly are to add three egg yolks into the sauce and stir them in, and to taste the sauce to see if it needs any salt or pepper.
Lasagna Assembly
Once you have your sauce ready to go, parsley chopped, mozzarella cheese sliced, and parmesan shredded, you’re ready to assemble your lasagna! Preheat your oven to 350°C and start building your lasagna.
$$$$$
You’ll want to use a 9x13 dish and start by smoothing out a layer of sauce on the bottom so nothing sticks and your lasagna comes out of the pan easily. The next steps are: noodle, meat sauce, cheese — and repeat.
Matty recommends adding a layer of parsley in the middle of the lasagna. Do this, but remember to save some parsley so you can top your lasagna once it’s out of the oven.
Once you’ve done as many layers as your dish will allow, top your lasagna with the Parmesan cheese. Your top two layers should be meat sauce followed by Parmesan, so your noodles cook properly.
Pre-oven lasagna.
Put your dish on a baking tray to catch any spillage and drips that might happen during the baking process, and bake for 30-35 minutes.
🧀 Mediocre Tip: Let your lasagna rest when it comes out of the oven! If you don’t and cut into it right away, you’ll just end up with a sloppy mess instead of a nice piece with well-defined layers. Matty addresses this in his video, and we didn’t listen. We were hungry and dived right in — the result is a not-so-nice looking piece of lasagna, but still dang tasty.
In the end, your lasagna should look like it’s straight out of a Garfield comic (or better).
The final product.
Mistakes to Avoid
We’re called Mediocre Chef for a reason. Don’t make the same mistakes we did!
➡️ Don’t Add 3 Tablespoons of Chili Flakes/Pepperoncini
When we made this recipe, we did a bad thing.
A really bad thing.
A thing that ruined the whole lasagna because it ended up so damn spicy. 🌶️
Our mouths were on fire. We wondered where we went wrong. Sweat dripped off our face and into our lasagna. It was terrible. insert dumpster fire emoji here
We realized that if we were confused, other people trying to make this recipe might be confused too. And we don’t want anyone else to have the same experience we did — so hopefully this section of the post will save you.
Our confusion came from this:
In the video, Matty says to use “a little bit of the dried pepperoncini”. This is a spice that his father-in-law makes, and obviously not everyone has an awesome father-in-law who gives you homemade spices, so he follows up by saying “you can buy dried chilis”. In the video, he haphazardly shakes his jar of dried pepperoncini into the pot, and doesn’t provide a measurement. We think this could be 2 tablespoons? But we also could be totally wrong.
The recipe on Vice by Matty says to use “3 tablespoons dried red chilies” in the ingredients list, and the recipe directions provide directions on when to add the dried chili flakes.
So, where we went wrong is: we blindly followed the written recipe. However, we’re both big babies when it comes to spice, and 3 tablespoons of dried red pepper flakes was way too much.
The lesson here is: always taste your food! Add, taste, adjust. Don’t just dump in 3 tablespoons of red chili flakes — you’re going to have a bad time like we did.
We recommend adding ½ tablespoon at a time to your sauce, tasting, and adding more if you want it to be spicier. The second time we made this, we used 1 tablespoon of pepperoncini that Brittany bought while in Italy, and that gave a pleasant heat to the dish.
➡️ Don’t Use a Pan That’s Too Big
We used a 11x14 roasting pan, because we felt that our 9x13 dish was too shallow, and wouldn’t be able to hold as many layers as Matty’s lasagna did.
However, that meant we had to be more skimpy on the sauce layers, and we didn’t have much sauce left for the top layer the second time we made this lasagna (oops).
(The first time we made this in a 9x13 casserole dish and it worked out perfectly. We did not have this same dish available the second time we made this.)
➡️ Don’t Just Top With Parmesan
We’re sorry, Matty. But just topping with just Parmesan doesn’t cut it. We recommend adding grated mozzarella on top as well, which melts much nicer.
Love Matty Matheson?
Did you know that he has not one but two cookbooks? We own Matty Matheson: A Cookbook, but somehow missed that he released another cookbook called Matty Matheson: Home Style Cookery: A Home Cookbook. (Very descriptive titles, Matty.) If you want to get out of your comfort zone, pick up one of his cookbooks!
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Making Lasagna… In This Economy?
Yea, maybe not. Shit is expensive. Here is the breakdown if you wanna make it. The total cost of ingredients for us was $64.65, and it gave us 4kg of lasagna. Comparing that to two other frozen lasagnas we get:
| Lasagna | Price Per Kilogram |
|---|---|
| PC Meat Lasagna Club Pack | $5.72 |
| Costco Meat Lasagna | $7.49 |
| Matty Matheson | $16.16 |
This recipe costs more than double a Costco lasagna, and almost triple a President’s Choice lasagna in terms of price per kilogram. Yikes.
You might be thinking… $64.65 for lasagna ingredients, really? For this lasagna, yes. The culprits: 4lbs of ground beef, 3lbs of mozzarella, and 200g of parmesan. 💰 We have receipts.
(Prices as of February 28, 2023)
What Should You Make With Lasagna?
Whether you decide to make this lasagna, or decide to opt for the frozen lasagna after reading this post, here is what you can pair with lasagna:
Garlic Bread (learn how to make the best garlic bread)
Caesar salad (a classic)
Caprese salad (something fresh to balance out the heaviness)
Roasted veggies (think brussel sprouts, broccoli, some sorta green veg)
Our Mediocre Thoughts
👨🍳 Trevor: I’d like to start out by stating, for the record, that this lasagna did not do as described, i.e. it did not help me get laid in any sense, except in the sense that my GI tract got laid out by the amount of red chili flakes and cheese in this monstrosity. For real.
Matty, I love you. Your no-nonsense approach to cooking brings great joy to my life (and we’re both Canadian), but my god, there were way too many red pepper flakes. It was, in a word, overpowering. I could barely taste the beef (which is a good thing as I am not a huge fan of ground beef — the texture gives me the heebie-jeebies) and the carrot was barely perceptible. I suppose the onus was on us to season to taste, but damn.
In my opinion it was, okay. Nothing to write home about really. And I will agree with Brittany’s — this lasagna was missing the tomatoey goodness that separates regular lasagna, from, well, mediocre lasagna.
Update: It turns out the flavour of the lasagna is quite nice when you’re not fighting for your life each bite. I would probably reduce the amount of ground beef and add some tomato or more stock to make it more sauce-like. Third time’s the charm?
👩🍳 Brittany: Me and Matty can agree on one thing — if you don’t like lasagna, you’re an idiot. (Or maybe you’re lactose intolerant or gluten free, but there are gluten free lasagna noodles now. Dairy free cheese sucks though.)
Unfortunately, me and Matty can’t be friends because he doesn’t like things too tomatoey. I fucking love tomatoes. He claims that if it’s too tomatoey it becomes soupy. You must be doing something wrong. I’m sorry Matty, tomatoey lasagna is delicious. (This meaty lasagna was still good though!) If I make this again, I will be adding some crushed tomatoes to the sauce.
I was excited to try this super meaty, super cheesy lasagna, but as Trevor pointed out in his review above, HOLY SHIT IT WAS SPICY. As noted earlier, this was our mistake. I’m sure this lasagna tastes great if your mouth isn’t on fire — red chili flakes are a force to be reckoned with. I look forward to making this again in the future, with less spice next time.
Update: We made this a second time, and can confirm that it tastes good when you can actually taste something other than fire. Using less chili flakes is key. I still stand by my tomato comment.
Our Final Review
Taste: 3 bags of flaming hot Cheetos out of 5 🌶️🌶️
Presentation: 3 thicc bois out of 5 🍽️🍽️🍽️
Affordability: 1 American healthcare system out of 5 💰
We have the hindsight now to think twice when a recipe says “3 tablespoons dried red chilies”. After making it again with 1 tablespoon of pepperoncini, we can confirm that this is a decent lasagna recipe if you love meat and cheese.
From a presentation perspective, it looks great when it comes out of the oven. We’ve always found that getting that first piece of lasagna was an event, but it turns out that if you have patience and wait for your lasagna to cool, it does come out in a nice solid, non-soupy, square. Add some parsley on top to make it look fancy, and you have yourself a nice looking piece of lasagna.
If you want a budget-friendly recipe, this is not for you. You might think that you’d save money by not having to buy ricotta cheese like many conventional lasagna recipes call for, but NOPE — that money is spent on mozzarella and an absurd amount of ground beef.
If you’re looking for a cheesy, beefy, heart attack guaranteed to wreck your colon, this recipe is for you. With a few minor adjustments, this recipe could probably be tamed a bit, but until then we’d rather not have to resort to begging our parents for money just to make a lasagna. We can barely afford our avocados and kale as is. 🥑
Want to make this monstrosity of a lasagna? Follow along with Matty Matheson here:
What’s your favourite lasagna recipe? Share the lasagna love and let us know in the comments below!