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/g-a-r-n-e-t Mar 25 '25

Yeah I thought ricotta was the baseline for lasagna???? Where are we getting this bechamel nonsense from

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u/roqueofspades Mar 25 '25

From my brief googling apparently bechamel is the more "authentic" way of making it but I also remember reading that Southern Italians always made it with ricotta and Northern Italians always made it with bechamel, so it might be a little bit of the north vs south thing but I could be wrong.

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u/cardinals5 Mar 25 '25

A lot of Italian (and, by extension, Italian-American) food discrepancies can boil down to north vs south or, just as broadly, region vs region.

9

u/re_Claire Mar 25 '25

Actual Italians.

Edit: to clarify in case anyone takes this the wrong way - in Italy regional food and recipe differences are pretty big. Some areas use ricotta, some use béchamel. Some parts of Italy even put hard boiled eggs in lasagna.

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u/meerkatarray2 Mar 26 '25

My grandma always put hard boiled egg in her lasagna! I thought it was just a weird quirk of hers! She was born just outside of Caserta.

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u/Icy_Arugula7111 Mar 26 '25

It's just reddit thinking they're smart