Back in 2017 when I developed BA’s Best Lasagna, ingredient cost wasn’t a primary concern. It’s a large-format, celebratory dish that weighs enough to make you question whether you are “activating your core” when lifting it out of the oven. Most versions require a lot of time and effort, and my recipe does too. After all, BA’s Best is all about making definitive versions of iconic dishes, not necessarily the easiest or most affordable.
But recently, amidst a deluge of reporting around inflation and food prices, I started to look into costs for some of our most popular recipes and was staggered. Buying every ingredient needed for my lasagna would cost you about $125 in 2026. It isn’t even the most rarified version of lasagna out there. It consists of a slow-simmered meat ragù, a Parmesan-heavy béchamel (technically a mornay, if you must), and many layers of store-bought noodles.
How the heck does that add up to over a hundred bucks? Well, there’s three pounds of meat, plus pancetta, wine, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, butter, milk, olive oil, lots of cheese, and more. So I spent some time in the Test Kitchen to consider what an inflation-friendly dish might look like. Not a bait-and-switch version that removes all the meat or turns it into baked ziti, but something equally showstopping that can still feed a crowd—and costs less than half the price.
Here’s how I did it: Cut the number
Here’s how I did it:
Cut the number of ingredients
I nixed the white wine, tomato paste, pancetta, carrots, celery, butter, Parmesan, chicken broth, ground pork, nutmeg, and cayenne pepper. They all offer something to the ragù, but not enough to justify their cost. Even inexpensive ingredients like carrots often have to be bought as a full pound or bunch, and while the pro-rated cost of nutmeg might be just a few cents per pinch, it is hard to justify spending $10 on a jar if you don’t already have it.
Trust me, nobody is going to say your lasagna doesn’t have enough nutmeg. Only introduce new ingredients if they’re inexpensive
The handful of ingredients I introduced—like lentils, pepperoni, hot sauce, and cheddar cheese—are relatively cheap and widely available. Lentils did a great job of bulking out a pound of meat (as well as being quite common in Italian cooking), while pepperoni doubled down on umami and added a pop of heat.
Even the least expensive styles of cheddar are more than capable of reinforcing a béchamel with assertive sharpness and creamy body. Make the ingredients work even harder
I stretched the ground beef as far as it could go, flavorwise, by giving it the deepest possible sear. The purpose of the butter in the original recipe is to make a roux to thicken the bèchamel; I used olive oil instead, invoking the oil-based roux of Cajun cooking.
I needed oil to sear the meat
I needed oil to sear the meat and grease the baking dish, so it managed to work in three places in the updated version. The original also requires two boxes of lasagna noodles to create six layers of pasta. Does a lasagna need six layers? It’s probably a law in some hill town in Emilia-Romagna, but not in New York City. One box was enough. It can be scary to stray from exact ingredients and instructions, and make a recipe adapt to you instead of the other way around.
But why not give it a go? No version of a dish is ever absolute, and I personally have a hard time sticking to recipes all the time. Even my own. Subscribe to our Substack From the Test Kitchen for more behind-the-scenes stories and well-seasoned opinions from Chris.
Source: www.bonappetit.com
