Saving a near-total lasagna disaster with a box grater

Last Saturday I forgot I had a lasagna in the oven at 400 degrees and ran out for groceries. Came back 40 minutes later to the edges blacker than my cast iron skillet and the whole thing welded to the pan. Instead of tossing it, I let it cool, flipped it onto a cutting board, and scraped the burnt layer off with a box grater. The middle were actually still saucy and decent, so I chopped them up and made a lazy baked ziti that my kid actually liked. Anyone else ever salvage something that looked completely dead on the outside?

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1 Comment

hayden_nelson859d ago

Honestly I gotta disagree with the whole salvage thing here. Once that cheese and sauce burn into the pan like that, the whole tray has a smoky bitter taste that soaks into everything even the parts that look fine. I know you said the middle was still saucy but your taste buds are probably just relieved it wasn't total ash, not that it was actually good. A box grater is a clever trick for sure, I'll give you that, but scraping burnt crust off a lasagna is like trying to save a burnt steak by cutting off the char, the damage is already done underneath. The baked ziti thing sounds like you made a whole new dish that just happened to have old lasagna parts in it, which is basically admitting the original was a loss. I'd have just tossed it and ordered a pizza, honestly, the cleanup alone isn't worth the effort of pretending you saved dinner.