Honestly, I thought I had blogged about this recipe before now, but apparently I only complained in chat. I really like Emeril’s “Chicken, Mushroom, and Spinach Alfredo Lasagna,” and it’s easy enough to make (more or less), but Emeril’s recipe writing is nothing like “Cook’s Illustrated”.

Ingredients

• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1 pound button mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 1 cup finely chopped yellow onion

That’s one medium sized onion weighing about 8 ounces.

• 3 tablespoons minced garlic

It takes about three medium sized cloves of garlic to make one tablespoon, so this is 8-9 cloves of garlic.

• ½ cup all-purpose flour
• 7 cups milk

Since he doesn’t say what kind, you can use whatever kind you have. I use skim milk and it works fine.

• 2 teaspoons kosher salt
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• ¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 pound spinach, stemmed, washed, blanched and roughly chopped

Whoa. Back the bam truck up.

What Emeril glances over as a single ingredient line is, for some cooks, almost an entire recipe in itself. You’re supposed to start with a pound of spinach, cut the stems off it, and wash it in a sink full of water to get rid of any remaining dirt, then spin it dry in a salad spinner. (You can skip this step if you’re using pre-washed bagged spinach, but since that comes in 9-ounce bags around here, you’d need two of them.)

Once you’ve done that, you’re supposed to have a big pot full of boiling water ready, optionally salted water. You plunge the spinach into it, let it cook for about 30 seconds until it turns very bright green, then remove the spinach with a spider (or drain the entire pot through a colander), and then put the hot spinach directly into a big bowl full of ice water. That “shocks” the spinach and stops the cooking, but sets the color. After it’s been in the ice water for 30-60 seconds (until it all feels cool to the touch), you need to drain it again, and squeeze as much liquid out of it as possible. Then you roughly chop it. This page illustrates this second part of the process.

Emeril brushes by this like it was unwrapping a stick of butter because he’s a restaurant chef. In a professional kitchen, one of the cooks washes and blanches the spinach each day so they have it ready to add to whatever dishes they need. In a home kitchen, it’s boiling a huge pot of water and dirtying that pot plus a big bowl, plus about 20 minutes of time depending on how long your stove takes to boil several quarts of water.

Why go through such a rigamarole? Blanching the spinach sets its bright green color. If you skip this step—and I do, make no mistake—then the cooked spinach in the resulting lasagna still tastes great, but it bears the dark, dreary green of frozen spinach. I’ll take that trade-off over using a third big pan in this recipe plus half the sink and a giant bowl of ice water. For a home cook, that’s just wasteful.

I usually use a pound of pre-washed baby spinach that I pick up at the warehouse club for $4, since a pound of pre-washed spinach at the grocery store would cost at least $6, and the local stores don’t always have bundled unwashed spinach. (If it’s not something you serve fried, it’s not a year-round item in the local produce aisles.)

Anyway, back to Emeril:

• 3 cups grated Parmesan

If you measure the grated Parmesan by volume, this will work. For sodium reasons, I measure it by weight. The traditional measurement is that one ounce of grated Parmesan (or, even better for your sodium intake, real Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese) is ½ cup. That would make this measurement “6 ounces of grated Parmesan cheese.”

However, later on, he calls for using “¼ cup” of the cheese between the layers, and I find it hard to use ½ ounce of cheese thinly enough to sprinkle over a layer. When I made this tonight, I had to use 8 ounces of cheese to make it work. However, I was using an Italian cheese mix that has just 180mg of sodium per ounce, so that’s only 180mg of sodium from the cheese for a large piece of the lasagna that’s an eighth of the entire pan. That’s doable.

• 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for coating casserole dish
• 2 pounds boneless skinless chicken breast
• 1 tablespoon Essence, recipe follows

You can go read the recipe at Food Network to get the bammage proportions. I made it with salt substitute and keep it in a glass jar.

• 1 pound oven-ready lasagna sheets

Note that most oven-ready lasagna products are 15 ounces to a box, so you may need slightly more than one box.

• 1 tablespoon butter, cut into 8 pieces

Directions

Melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the mushrooms and cook, stirring often until the mushrooms are browned and most of the liquid has evaporated, about 5 to 7 minutes. …

I make this in a 7-quart dutch oven, similar to the one Emeril used on the TV episode where he makes this recipe. Over medium heat, it takes me at least 15 minutes to get the full pound of thinly sliced mushrooms browned and to see most of the liquid evaporate.

… Add the onions and garlic to the pan and saute until soft and translucent, 3 to 4 minutes. Add the flour and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, to make a light roux, about 2 minutes. Whisking constantly, slowly add the milk and continue to cook, stirring occasionally until thickened, 5 minutes. …

This doesn’t thicken at all in 5 minutes for me. It takes 8-10 minutes to get it up to a simmer, and then 3-5 minutes to see the thickening happen. I think part of the problem is that “medium heat” on Emeril’s stove is somehow a lot different than on mine.

These times might be right if I had the burners on medium-high, but not on medium. I prefer to use the lower heat and take the extra time—that is, now that I know it will take the extra time. The first time I made this recipe, I expected it to take the times that Emeril had listed, and I was pretty pissed when it took an extra hour.

Add 1 ½ teaspoons of the salt, pepper, nutmeg, spinach and 1 ½ cups of the Parmesan and cook, stirring, until thickened, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat. Place a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the béchamel sauce until ready to assemble the lasagna.

This last instruction is another restaurant remnant—if you make the sauce well ahead of time, you don’t want it to form a “skin” on the top as it cools, so the plastic wrap makes sense. In a home kitchen, you’re probably going to use the sauce not long after you make it, and this plastic wrap thing is entirely unnecessary.

This concludes “step one” of Emeril’s three steps. Yeesh.

Set a large, 12-inch saute pan over medium heat and add the olive oil. Season the chicken with the Essence and remaining ½ teaspoon of kosher salt and place in the hot pan. Sear the chicken, stirring occasionally, until golden brown and cooked through, about 4 to 5 minutes. Transfer to a plate to cool and set aside. When cool, cut into bite size pieces.

There’s so much wrong here I have to itemize.

1. DO THIS FIRST. If you have to wait until the cooked chicken has cooled to cut it up, why on Earth would you do this last? Do this first, and let it cool whie you’re making the béchamel sauce. I mean, good lord, that’s just common sense.

2. I don’t know what kind of chicken Emeril gets from his restaurant suppliers (or the Food Network kitchens), but in my local supermarkets, a two-pound package of boneless skinless chicken breasts is mostly gigantic breasts that won’t be anywhere near cooked in five minutes, as well as a few tiny ones that may well cook in that time. In my hot pan over medium heat, the chicken takes about 20 minutes to cook.

3. That’s partly because unless your sauté pan is bigger than mine (it’s nice how he describes it as both “large” and “12-inch”), you can’t fit two pounds of chicken including big breasts into one pan and cook them in one batch. I usually have to do it in at least two batches. Now, I admit that my pan is an “everyday pan” with sloping sides, and not a straight-sided saute pan, but I can’t make them fit into a 12-inch straight-sided pan either.

4. What the hell does “stirring occasionally” mean for whole chicken breasts? You’re trying to brown them! What in God’s name are you trying to say??

5. “Cooked through” is obvious to Emeril, but not to everyone. He can tell when chicken is done by touching it, because meat gets firmer to the touch as it gets more and more done. I have to use an instant-read thermometer. You don’t have to cook the chicken to 160°F here, because it will cook more in the oven (the lasagna gets so hot that you have to let it rest 20 minutes before cutting into it), but you want it to get to at least 150-155°F.

Given all this, I would probably tell you that if you already know how you like to cook boneless skinless chicken breasts, just season them with Emeril’s bammage and cook them that way, then let them cool and cut them into bite-size pieces. You want the pieces small because big stew-like chunks will keep the lasagna from setting. I cut the breast lengthwise into five or six strips, then cut the strips crosswise into cubes. If it’s one of the bigger breasts, I halve it laterally first. I do this by holding the breast on its side with tongs and using my chef’s knife to slice it in two through its length.

Preheat the oven to 375°F.

Again, do this earlier. The next step is assembling the lasagna, and you want the oven ready to go when you’re done. Start pre-heating it before you make the sauce, especially if you cook the chicken first.

Coat a 9 by 13 by 3-inch casserole with olive oil, and spread about ½ cup of the béchamel sauce on the bottom of the dish. …

This really screwed me the first time or two I made this recipe. I have a ladle that holds a standard ½ cup, so I thought Emeril meant one ladle full. I also tried using half of a liquid measuring cup, and a ½ cup dry measuring cup.

All three used far too little sauce, not really enough even to rehydate the no-boil noodles. I knew this was the case because, at the end, I had nearly half of the recipe of sauce still left in the saucepan!

So for the rest of this, every time Emeril gives a quantity of sauce, you should almost double it; that is, when he says ¾ cup sauce, use three ladles that are not quite full to the brim.

… Lay 3 sheets of pasta across the bottom of the dish and spread ¾ cup of the béchamel sauce over the pasta. Sprinkle ¼ of the chicken over the béchamel sauce, then sprinkle with ¼ cup of the remaining Parmesan. Lay another 3 sheets of pasta over the chicken. Repeat 2 additional times with the remaining béchamel sauce, chicken, Parmesan, and pasta, ending with a layer of pasta covered with béchamel sauce.

He means “repeat 3 additional times.” If you use ¼ of the chicken on each layer, but you build one layer and then “repeat 2 additional times,” you’ve left behind ¼ of the chicken, and would only need 1½ pounds of chicken.

If you use a 3-inch deep pan, you’ll easily have enough room. I build this in a standard Pyrex 2-inch pan, and even that works fine.

… Sprinkle the remaining ½ cup of Parmesan over the béchamel sauce and scatter the butter pieces over the top.

Given that we’ve got over a quart of béchamel sauce built upon a roux that includes an entire stick of butter, I don’t see what you get by adding more butter pieces on top. I spray little butter-flavor cooking spray over the top to help it brown. Or, more often, I don’t. It’s just fine without it.

Place the casserole on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and bake, uncovered, until bubbly and well browned, about 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before serving.

Note: You may need slightly less than the entire package of lasagna noodles, depending on the pan used for the casserole. Also, you may be able to fit more than 3 pieces of pasta in each layer, depending. The pasta can be broken into smaller pieces to fill in the gaps.

Three sheets of no-boil noodles leave gaps in a 9-by-13 inch pan, but since these noodles expand significantly during baking (they absorb the extra liquid in the sauce), you don’t really need to have edge-to-edge pasta. Three sheets per layer with a little space between them is just fine.

That’s why the first few times I made this recipe, even though it is delicious, I wanted to see Emeril bent over at a frat party with twenty drunken fraternity guys wielding paddles and saying “BAM! BAM! BAM!”

Here’s my revised version, given what I’ve learned in making it a few times.

Ingredients

Sauce:

• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
• 1 pound button mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped fine
• 9 medium cloves of garlic, minced fine or pressed through a garlic press
• ½ cup all-purpose flour
• 7 cups milk
• 1½ teaspoons kosher salt, or ¾ teaspoons table salt (or salt substitute)
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• ¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 pound spinach, stemmed, washed, blanched and roughly chopped
• 3 cups (6-8 ounces) grated Parmesan cheese (preferably Parmigiano-Reggiano), divided equally in two parts

Chicken:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 pounds boneless skinless chicken breast
• 1 tablespoon Essence, recipe here

Lasagna:

• Olive oil to coat the pan
• 18 oven-ready lasagna sheets (about 1 pound; may be more than one box)
• 1 tablespoon butter, cut into 8 pieces, or cooking spray (optional)

Directions

1. Sauté the chicken. Pat the chicken dry on both sides with paper towels. Season one side of the chicken with half of the Essence and ¼ teaspoon of kosher salt (or 1/8 teaspoon of table salt or salt substitute).

2. Set a 12-inch saute pan over medium heat. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and heat until shimmering but not smoking, about 2 minutes. Place the chicken, seasoned side down, into the hot pan. Sprinkle the unseasoned side of the chicken with the remaining Essence and ¼ teaspoon of kosher salt (or 1/8 teaspoon of table salt or salt substitute) while it cooks.

3. Cook until golden brown, 8 to 10 minutes, turning chicken once halfway through cooking. Do not crowd the pan; cook the chicken in batches if your pan isn’t big enough to hold it all. When done, the chicken should look cooked throughout and register at least 150°F to 155°F on an instant-read thermometer. Try not to let the temperature exceed 160°F.

4. Transfer cooked chicken to a clean plate. When cooled, cut larger breasts in half laterally (hold each breast on its side with tongs on the cutting board and slice through the length). Cut larger breast halves or smaller breast pieces lengthwise into 5-7 strips, then crosswise into cubes. Transfer cooked chicken cubes to a medium bowl and set aside.

5. Preheat oven to 375°F.

6. Make the sauce. Place a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan or dutch oven over medium heat. Add the butter and cook until melted, about 2-3 minutes.

7. When foaming subsides, add the mushrooms. Cook, stirring often, until the mushrooms are browned and most of the liquid has evaporated, 5 to 15 minutes, depending on your stove and the water content of the mushrooms.

8. Add the onions and garlic to the pan. Cook, stirring often, until soft and translucent, 3 to 4 minutes.

9. Sprinkle the flour over the onion and mushroom mixture. Cook, stirring contantly with a wooden spoon, until all flour has been incorporated and cooked into a light roux, about 2 minutes.

10. Add the milk slowly, whisking constantly to create a smooth texture. Increase heat to just below medium-high. Stir occasionally as mixture comes to a simmer, about 5-8 minutes. Cook for another 2-3 minutes, stirring occasionally, until slightly thickened.

11. Add salt (or equivalent), pepper, nutmeg, spinach, and half of the cheese. Cook, stirring frequently, until thickened, about 2 minutes. Remove from heat. If not using immediately, place a piece of plastic wrap directly on the surface of the béchamel sauce until ready to assemble the lasagna.

12. Assemble the lasagna. Lightly coat a 9-inch by 13-inch by 3-inch casserole with olive oil or cooking spray. Spread a scant cup of the béchamel sauce (2-3 ladles full) evenly on the bottom of the dish. Lay 3 sheets of pasta across the bottom of the dish.

13. Spread 1 generous cup (about 3 ladles full) of the béchamel sauce over the pasta. Sprinkle ¼ of the chicken evenly over the béchamel sauce, then sprinkle with ¼ cup (¼ to ½ ounce) of the Parmesan. Lay another 3 sheets of pasta over the chicken.

14. Repeat the previous step 3 additional times with the remaining béchamel sauce, chicken, Parmesan, and pasta.

15. Pour the remaining béchamel sauce evenly over the top of the lasagna. Sprinkle the remaining ½ cup of Parmesan over the béchamel sauce. Optionally, scatter the eight pieces of butter over the top, or lightly spray with cooking spray.

16. Place the casserole on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and bake, uncovered, until bubbly and well browned, about 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before serving.

Note: Don’t use a heavy hand with the cheese while assembling the lasagna, but make sure you have at least ½ cup (1 ounce) of cheese left to sprinkle over the top.

I probably used too many steps; “Cook’s Illustrated” would probably only have 4-5 steps, combining more of the steps into single steps, like my steps 2-3, 6-8, and 9-11. I’m new at this, so I prefer to be clearer.

This is the procedure I followed tonight, and here’s the result. (Click on the picture for a full-size version, but it’s an iPhone picture, so don’t expect much food porn here.)

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