Vegan Lasagne

Hello friends,

Today's offering is a lovely vegan lasagne, which uses soya mince and plenty of vegetables for the sauce, and also features a vegan bechamel (white) sauce. I've never tried the bechamel sauce vegan-style before, but it went well - I can think of some improvements for next time, though!

Ingredients

We have:

• Vegan soya mince (about half a bag)
• 3 small onions
• half a courgette
• 1 medium green pepper
• 1.5 sticks of celery, peeled
• 1 small tomato
• 1 medium carrot
• 3 sundried tomatoes
• 6 garlic-stuffed olives
• 1 carton passata
• Dried mixed herbs
• Salt & pepper
• Unsweetened soya milk
• Plain flour
• Olive oil
• Vegetable oil
• Pasta sheets (which I forgot to picture!)

Serves 4

So the recipe consists for 2 parts, really. That's the mincey tomato sauce, and the becamel sauce, which will eventually be layered up together between pasta sheets to make the lasagne.

Tomato sauce

This part is quite easy, it's just throwing stuff together and cooking it!

Ready for the pan

1. Chop up the courgette, onions, celery, pepper, carrot, olives and sundried tomatoes into small pieces.
2. Over a medium heat in a large pan, heat a spot of vegetable oil. Throw in your chopped ingredients. Stir.
3. After 5 mins or so when the veggies are warm and coated in oil, add the soya mince. Stir from time to time.
4. When all ingredients are soft, add the passata. Stir in and bring to the boil, then cover and simmer for around 10 mins. Season to taste with salt, pepper and dried mixed herbs (actually I used soy sauce instead of salt - try it, you won't regret it!).

My cooked ingredients, before adding the passata

Easy, right? If you're not a fan of fake meat, you can easily use lentils instead and it's just as good. Or, just use vegetables (but I would recommend throwing in chickpeas for protein).

Bechamel Sauce

I found this simple recipe on the internet, but I'm sorry to say I can't remember where, otherwise I would reference it! 

The recipe didn't work perfectly for me, but I'll give it to you as I found it, then I'll tell you how I would change it.

1. On a low heat, warm up a quarter cup (sorry about American measurements, but I quite like them!) of olive oil.
2. Add 2 tablespoons of plain flour, and whisk to dissolve.
3. When the mixture starts to bubble, add 2.5 cups of soy milk. Whisk until thick.

That all sounds really easy, but it didn't quite float my boat. Firstly, my sauce didn't thicken very well, so I added 4 tbsp more flour at the end (bringing my total to 6 tbsp), which ended up being too much! If I was doing this recipe again, I would use 4 tbsp flour in total at the start. Also, I prefer the traditional method of adding the milk gradually bit by bit, rather than just throwing it all in. Finally, I like to season the sauce at the end. Those would be my amendments. Other than that, it's a great recipe, uncomplicated and effective.

I'd like to try it with some cheese melted into the sauce at the end, but the flavour/meltability of vegan cheese is hit-and-miss. Maybe someone can recommend a good one to me?

Put it all together

Now it's the fun part! I used pasta sheets which don't need precooking, but make sure you follow the advice on the box.

1. Coat the bottom of a flat ovenproof dish with as thin a layer as possible of the tomato sauce. 
2. Line this tomato sauce layer with pasta sheets, being careful not to overlap them if they aren't precooked, otherwise the overlapped parts will be chewy!
3. Cover the pasta sheets in a layer of bechamel sauce. 
4. Repeat until you run out of space/ingredients! I like to finish with bechamel sauce on top.
5. For decoration, slice a tomato and put the slices on top of the final layer of bechamel sauce.
6. Bake in the oven (I used gas mark 8).

Ready for the oven

Lasagne layers!

The Result

After 10 - 15 mins in the oven

Served up "pub-style" with roasted potatoes and a fresh side salad, yum!

As with almost everything I cook, I don't use a hard-and-fast recipe. I use whatever vegetables I have and think would be nice. Unfortunately, I ran out of garlic, which is usually a lasagne staple ingredient for me! Apart from that, it's up to you what to use. I also like to serve up my lasagne with homemade garlic bread, which is likely to become a future recipe on this blog, because it's one of my favourites!

I hope you find this useful. In the quest for exciting and tasty food with no ethical compromise, I think this is a firm winner!

Yours,

Callum