Bonnie BDay Lasagna

I made lasagna for Bonnie's birthday dinner here at the house. Can be quite a task by any measure, but considering that I made my own sauce, brined and roasted chicken breasts (it was a chicken-spinach lasagna), steamed the spinach, used pre-cook noodles, and refrigerated the lasagna 24 hrs in advance, I must have invested eight hours in the thing. Here's what I learned:

1. Consulting Ze Internets told me that I should heat the sucker to an internal temp of 160-170 degrees. Makes sense from a bacterial standpoint, but also probably has a lot to do with cheese meltage. In any event, it turned out to be a good measure. I pushed the thing to 165 and it was just right. However, it took over two hours to get there from the fridge. Threw my timing all to hell because I had planned for about 45 minutes. Oops!
2. My ideal lasagna has a firm, solid body, without being overly dense. When it falls apart on the plate (or on its way to the plate), or leaves a puddle of liquid at the bottom of the tray - well, that sucks. In an effort to avoid that fate, I did a little experiment with my spinach. I wanted the spinach to have the freshest, brightest possible flavor, but that to be balanced against the amount of water that those little leaves contain. I decided early on to opt for steaming the leaves rather than putting them in raw, but wasn't sure how much water savings that would get me - if any. In order to find out the answer I devised an experiment. I weighed all the spinach raw on my digital kitchen scale, then steamed it briefly (enough to go just beyond wilted) and weighed it again. I expected maybe a slight decrease in mass, or possibly even a slight increase, but was surprised by the results I saw. The initial weight was 231g and the final was 130g. Over 100g of water loss. That's 44% of the total original weight lost. I was careful to make sure every leaf made it to the second weighing, so I expect those numbers are accurate. Cool!
3. Despite my spinach strategy, the lasagna had a bit of a case of water-bottom when I served it. I attribute this to two things. First, I could have reduced the tomato sauce a bit more, making it thicker and less apt to contribute moisture. Second, due to the extended time it took to heat the beast up, I was forced to serve it right away - when normally I would have elected to let it stand for a bit. Perhaps some of the liquid would have been re-absorbed in that time.
4. I made a small practice lasagna for lunch one day because I wanted to experiment with the chicken component - which I've never used in lasagna before. My first instinct was to take tender chicken breast and tear it up into largish stringy strips, like in some Mexican food. This proved to be precisely the wrong strategy. The cohesion of the fibers of th chicken, though tender, impeded cutting and contributed to the lasagna disintegrating under the fork. For the final lasagna, I chose instead to cut the breasts against the grain (at about 3/8") and broke up those slices into bite-sized pieces. This I mixed with a small amount of prepared ricotta and grated mozzarella and formed into a single layer between noodles. This worked out okay - next time no ricotta, only mozzarella.

So anyway, fairly happy with the result, but next time - better.