Vegan Lasagna

This vegan lasagna is packed with veggies, flavourful and creamy without a shred of fake vegan cheese or tofu!

Of all the variant ways you can piddle vegan dish, the curd ricotta one has to be the last. It's so macroscopic! It tastes nothing similar ricotta and everything suchlike tofu bathed in herb sauce, ewww!

Cashews are a modify deciding for making a cheesy sauce. They're majuscule for the potato and carrot-based vegan mac and cheeseflower recipes, and I ordinarily use cashews as acetify remove like for these vegan pierogi. The difficulty with cashews? They're pricy!

The answer dead came to me after making the recording for my Nation spinach croquettes a duad of weeks ago: béchamel! I could use many or less the said stuff for my croquettes but a bit creamier and thread it into a vegan dish!

Not that there's anything groundbreaking roughly using a béchamel sauce in pasta; discolour dish is already a action that the Italians human been doing since, I don't couple, forever. I upright realized that by making the béchamel sauce with olive oil and plant-based concentrate instead of butter and cow's milk, then adding nutritional leavening, makes a deliciously creamy and cheesy vegan sauce that you won't get from curd ricotta!

Prep Time 40 min

Cook Time 40 min

Total Time 1 hr, 50

Ingredients

6 tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 large onion, diced
4 cloves of garlic, minced
600 grams (21 oz) button mushrooms, chopped (use the stems too)
2 carrots, diced
1 zucchini, diced
400 grams (14 oz) frozen spinach, thawed according to the package directions and squeezed
2 teaspoons salt, divided
Pepper, to taste
2 cups (480 ml) unsweetened plant milk (I used soy)
1 cup (240 ml) vegetable stock
½ cup (75 grams) flour
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
3 cups (700 ml / about a jar and a half) marinara sauce
Lasagna noodles

Instructions

Heat a large pan over medium-high heat and add 2 tablespoons of the oil, the onion and garlic and fry until soft. Add the mushrooms and fry until browned (work in batches if they don’t all fit in your pan at once). Add the carrot and zucchini and fry a couple more minutes until soft. Finally add the thawed spinach, 1 ½ teaspoons of salt and pepper to taste.
Preheat the oven to 200° C / 400° F.
Combine the plant milk and stock in a bowl. Add the remaining 4 tablespoons of oil to a pan over medium heat and sift in the flour. Stir well. Cook for 5 - 10 minutes, stirring from time to time, until the flour begins to brown and gives off a nutty smell. Add one ladleful of the plant milk-stock mixture and whisk really well until evaporated. Continue adding the liquid one ladleful at a time and always stirring until you get a creamy sauce. If you’re unlucky and get some lumps, pass the sauce through a fine mesh strainer. Finally, stir in the nutritional yeast and remaining ½ teaspoon of salt.
In a 28 x 18 x 5 cm (11 x 7 x 2 inch) baking pan, place a layer of marinara sauce, followed by a layer of the béchamel, followed by a layer of lasagna noodles (I put the noodles in uncooked) . Then another layer of marinara, half of your veggie filling, the béchamel and more noodles. Continue with more layers. Finish the top with a layer of marinara and a layer of béchamel. Mix them together a bit so that the colour looks more like cheese.
Cover with tin foil and bake for 30 minutes. Then uncover and bake for a further 10 minutes, or until the top begins to brown in places and looks like cheese. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for at least 30 minutes before cutting and serving.