Beef Lasagne

Beef Lasagne is one of those hearty meals you can prepare for those days when you need an extra dose of comfort.

To make a good beef lasagne you need good beef. And here we have used Rum Jungle Free-Range Ground Beef provided to us by one of our partners Blackgold Foods. The beef browns really nicely giving our lasagne a really deep beefy flavour. The beef is also hormone and antibiotic free and 80 percent lean.

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

For the meat sauce

• 1 large onion
• 2 garlic cloves
• 250g Rum Jungle Free-Range Ground Beef
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• ½ can peeled tomato
• 2 tsp tomato paste
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ tsp chilli powder
• ½ tsp sugar
• 1 tsp dried rosemary

For the white sauce

• 500ml full cream milk
• 50g unsalted butter
• ¼ tsp black pepper powder
• 3 ½ tbsp flour
• 1/3 tsp salt

For assembling the lasagna

• 6 sheets oven ready lasagna (these don’t need precooking)
• 175g shredded mozzarella cheese
• 50g shredded cheddar cheese

Instructions:

1. Dice the onion and finely chop the garlic.
2. Heat a large sauce pan. Add the Rum Jungle Free-Range Ground Beef and cook on high heat for 6 minutes or until reddish brown. You’ll have to keep redistributing the contents in the pan for even cooking. Once cooked remove to a plate.
3. To the same pan, add 2 tbsp olive oil and heat it up (the pan will have some fat released from the beef too). Then add the garlic and fry on medium heat for 45 seconds or until you can smell the garlic. Then add the onion and fry for 5 minutes or until red and caramelized.
4. Add the beef back into the pan and stir fry on high heat with the onion and garlic for around 30 seconds. Remove everything in the pan to a plate.
5. Add the peeled tomatoes to the same pan and smash the tomatoes against the pot using a spatula or large spoon. Then let it cook on low heat for 2 minutes or until you can see just a quiver of bubbles forming inside the pan.
6. Then add the tomato paste, mix well and cook for 30 seconds.
7. Add salt, chilli powder, dried rosemary, sugar and the cooked beef to the pot and mix to combine. Let it cook on medium heat for 30 seconds. That’s it for the sauce.
8. To make the white sauce first heat up the milk in a pot. Don’t let it bubble; heat it to the point where bubbles start to form and then set it aside.
9. Melt the butter in a small pot over medium heat and then add the flour and cook while stirring constantly until it starts bubbling. This will take less than a minute.
10. Add the milk (it should still be hot) and continue stirring for 2 minutes or until you get a thick sauce. Quickly add in the salt and pepper, and give it one final good mix (the sauce will continue to thicken when you switch off the stove).
11. Preheat the oven at 190 degrees Celsius.
12. Now for assembling the lasagna. Take a 6 by 8 inch tray. First take 5 tbsp of the white sauce and spread it on the bottom of the tray.
13. Then place 3 Lasagne sheets on top of it (2 lengthwise and 1 horizontal. We had to break some sheets to make it fit and cover the bottom entirely).
14. Then spread half of your meat sauce on top of the lasagne sheets.
15. Then spread half of the white sauce on top of the meat sauce and top that with half of the mozzarella cheese and all of the cheddar cheese.
16. Repeat steps 13 to 15 but this time when adding the cheese you’ll only be adding mozzarella.
17. Place the tray on the middle rack of the preheated oven and bake for 40 minutes at 190 degrees Celsius or until the top looks brown. When done, remove from the oven and wait 10 minutes before digging in so that the layers can settle down.