Few ingredients capture the fresh, optimistic flavors of summer as beautifully as basil, which offers an invigorating vibrancy that few garden herbs can match. Grab a bunch and bring it home to make pesto, which you’ll use in this satisfying baked lasagna.
Besides its buoyant flavor, a good basil pesto should offer a lively emerald hue. To ensure maximum greenness (and to keep the blended pesto from going brown), you’ll blanch the basil for just a few seconds in boiling water before quickly drying it. This locks in the bright color, which stands up even when the leaves are blended with toasted pine nuts, garlic, salt, and a very carefully measured amount of olive oil.
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Weeknight cooking inspiration, curated and written by longtime ATK author and editor (and avid home cook) Jack Bishop.
The result is a smooth, deep-green mixture that’s slightly thicker than, say, the pesto you’d toss with spaghetti—just the right consistency for the filling.
Making lasagna generally involves alternating layers of noodles and sauce with a flavorful, creamy filling. While ricotta is one common route, we chose easy-to-make béchamel sauce here, a basic building block in many baked pasta dishes (think macaroni and cheese). It offers a smooth, satisfying creaminess without blocking basil’s punch. And rather than layering the béchamel and pesto separately, you’ll simply combine them, along with some Parmesan and lemon zest, into a single sauce that spreads easily and evenly over the noodles.
After testing no-boil noodles against the traditional sheets, we chose the tried-and-true traditional option for this recipe. The sheets are tender yet provide a pleasant chew, and they’re also sturdy enough to ensure neat servings. After boiling the noodles, spray them with a small amount of oil to prevent sticking and then let them cool on a baking sheet to await construction.
Key Steps
Melt butter, whisk in flour, and cook, whisking constantly, until thoroughly combined. Whisk in milk and bring to a boil. Cook until thickened.
To preserve the basil’s color, add basil and salt to boiling water and cook for 5 to 10 seconds, just until the leaves are bright green.
Make pesto with the blanched basil and then combine the pesto and béchamel to create a single sauce that is easy to layer with the noodles.
Start the layering with sauce on the bottom and then alternate noodles and sauce, ending with sauce.
Layer, layer, and layer again: first some pesto-béchamel sauce, then some noodles, then sauce, then noodles, and so on until you’ve filled your dish. After a final sprinkle of Parmesan and pine nuts, the lasagna is ready for the oven, where it will bake until the edges bubble with promise.
And now, the hard part: waiting patiently for the lasagna to cool slightly and set up. This will take 45 long minutes, as you pace your kitchen inhaling the extraordinary aromas. But your patience pays off when you slice perfect stratified squares of this endless-summer supper.
