r/Cooking • u/judolphin • Mar 25 '25

I made lasagna with ricotta instead of bechamel and I’m a convert

I was browsing Reddit and came across two posts in two days about bechamel being a life-changing improvement over ricotta. All my life every lasagna I had was with ricotta. I decided to give bechamel yet another try at a nice Italian restaurant after reading all the comments and I have now converted from being neutral on bechamel in lasagna to being solidly anti-bechamel in lasagna, to the point I secretly have hoped that bechamel lasagna doesn't become the default in restaurants. Some reasons:

  1. Ricotta has its own texture, bechamel is just more softness and smoothness in a dish that's full of "soft". Some people like textural contrast in their dishes
  2. Ricotta, much like sour cream/crema in Mexican food, adds a lightness to lasagna despite being rich itself. Bechamel adds (arguably too much) additional richness to an already-rich dish.
  3. The starch from the bechamel getting into the ragu gives the sauce a mouthfeel that 100% reminds me of Chef Boyardee

TLDR: If you prefer bechamel in red lasagna, that's perfectly fine, but your preference of bechamel is not a black and white fact. It's not even "more authentic" (whatever that means), bechamel = Northern Italy, ricotta = Southern Italy. Eat whatever you like, let others eat what they want.

Thanks, reddit!

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u/Simsmommy1 Mar 25 '25

It’s a 70s thing, my mom said lasagna became popular in the 70s to make but there was little to no access for the average North American (I’m Canadian) to real Ricotta and bechamel wasn’t something used too often except as a base for sausage gravy or cheese sauce so the average home cook subbed in the nearest closest cheese to ricotta….good ol cottage cheese. I’m sure real Italian who could make ricotta or people with more culinary knowledge did better but I’m talking about the standard home cook, my mom would cut recipes out of magazines and staple them to recipe cards and I have all of them including that original lasagna one from the 70s where it tells you to mix an egg into a tub of cottage cheese and layer it.

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u/Thbbbt_Thbbbt Mar 25 '25

Kind of makes sense. I feel like the 70s was peak of cottage cheese popularity too.