The 10 Best Celebrity Chef Tips You Need For Mouthwatering Lasagna

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Lasagna is the ultimate comfort food. Cheesy, gooey, saucy, and oh so delicious, who can resist the dish's drool-worthy appeal? But with all of the prep work and steps that go into making lasagna, achieving perfect results isn't always guaranteed. Translation: There are a number of common lasagna-cooking mistakes throughout the process that are capable of taking your dish from delectable to disappointing. Because the mistakes are universal, even the best of the best are prone to them — including your favorite celebrity chefs. Fortunately, many have tips to not only avoid these mishaps, but take your lasagna to the next level and ensure it comes out of the oven just right every single time.

After consulting a collection of celebrity chefs' websites and social media platforms, I rounded up some of the very best tips you need to make mouthwatering lasagna. Follow in the footsteps of Giada De Laurentiis, Rachael Ray, Ina Garten, Gordon Ramsay, and more, and your homemade lasagna will soon rival the best of the best. Well, at least that's the idea. Who better to give us lasagna tips, after all?

In its ideal form, lasagna should be dense, cheesy, gooey, and while not quite solid, easily maintain its layered structure when slicing and serving. However, one of the most common issues people encounter is a watery lasagna. Whether it's because you didn't properly drain your noodles before building the dish, used too much ricotta cheese, or something else, Gordon Ramsay divulged a fantastic three-part tip to help you avoid the dreaded watery lasagna moving forward: Use dry pasta sheets, sprinkle browned flour over the veggies, and properly thicken your sauce with lots of cheese before layering your lasagna.

Revealed during an interview with The Kitchn, the first part of Ramsay's tip is simple: Don't pre-cook the noodles. Instead, he uses dry sheets so they can soak up lots of sauce and extra liquid. Easy. The next part involves browning two to three tablespoons of flour on a tray in the oven. Then, he dusts the veggies destined for the dish with it, leading to a thicker, more held-together result in the end. Finally, Ramsay makes his lasagna with bechamel sauce, not a straight-up mix of cheeses with egg, as some people do. When going this route, he recommends adding plenty of cheese to your bechamel sauce to maintain its thickness. Employ all three of Ramsay's tips, and you too can kiss watery lasagna goodbye for good.

Let's face it: Lasagna is a labor of love, and as such, it isn't one of those dishes that comes together quickly. There's lots of prep work to be done, and that takes time. However, Ina Garten offers up an ingenious tip to help us all save a bit of time and avoid a mushy clump of stuck-together noodles: Instead of cooking the noodles in boiling water, simply pre-soak them in hot water for about 20 minutes before assembling your lasagna.

Boiling water to make pasta is the tried and true method we all rely on. However, when it comes to lasagna noodles, it's easy to overcook them and wind up with noodles that annoying cling to one another. Ugh. Ina Garten's tip, revealed in a Food Network recipe, prevents both of these issues while simultaneously minimizing prep time. It couldn't be simpler, either. Instead of turning on the stove, fill a large bowl or pot with hot water from the tap and leave your lasagna noodles to soak in it for 20 minutes. After that, take the pasta out of the water and place it on parchment paper until you're ready to assemble your lasagna. Easy-peasy. It sure beats using no-boil noodles, too, which, while a great idea, often become mushy regardless.

Nobody wants dry noodles in a lasagna. An extra cheesy, gooey — and dare I say, juicy — texture is what great lasagna is all about. A crispy top is great, too, but the middle and bottom layers should be far from dry and crunchy. Despite our best efforts, though, if we don't use enough sauce or cheese, or simply prep the noodles incorrectly, dry, flavorless pasta is looming in the shadows to take you and your carefully crafted lasagna down. But fear not: Mary Berry's noodle tip, shared from 2015's "The Complete Aga Cookbook," will help you avoid this unfortunate blunder. Instead of popping her assembled lasagnas into the oven straight away, she leaves them to rest for at least six hours before baking. You should, too. 

Mary Berry recommends covering your assembled lasagna and leaving it to rest in the fridge for six hours or more before baking, so the noodles have plenty of time to absorb sauce (both bechamel and marinara). In turn, this extra step leads to more flavorful, perfectly tender noodles. Yum! Best of all, her method works wonderfully with straight-up dried pasta sheets. There's no need to pre-boil them first. Plus, this allows you to prepare the meal in the morning or even the night before, so it's easy to pop it into the oven whenever you are ready.

Ree Drummond, aka The Pioneer Woman, prides herself on creating simple recipes made with everyday ingredients, and her lasagna is no exception to the rule. However, she does have one pro tip that takes her lasagna to the next level, at least if you can handle a bit of heat. What is it? Well, in addition to ground beef, she also incorporates plenty of hot breakfast sausage into her recipe, so her lasagna has a bit of a kick.

Ree Drummond's Best Lasagna Recipe Ever calls for 1½ pounds of ground beef and one pound of hot breakfast sausage to get the right blend of savory and spicy flavors. After browning in a skillet with minced garlic, she also says, "You might consider draining off about half the fat. I like to leave some in there, though, because it tastes better and because I'm a naughty girl. Just please don't be a health nut and drain it all, for Pete's sake." Okay, we see you, Drummond. She also notes in her recipe that if spicy isn't your thing, you can swap out the hot breakfast sausage for mild or Italian sausage. Either way, the combination of sausage and ground beef leads to mouthwatering results. 

A classic lasagna consists of pasta, cheese, and sauce — either red, bechamel, or both. Most traditional lasagnas also include ground beef or another kind of meat, but that doesn't always have to be the case. While a classic lasagna recipe is already tasty enough to make most start drooling, the dish is also open to a world of different interpretations, aka all kinds of unique ingredients. For example, Bobby Flay occasionally likes to get creative with his lasagna, and one of the ways he does that is by making a completely vegetarian version, featuring roasted cauliflower bechamel sauce.

In an Instagram post, Flay explains how he does it. While there are many steps, the bechamel sauce starts with him roasting cauliflower as per usual, on a pan with salt and olive oil. Then, he melts equal parts butter and flour together on the stove while also scalding milk in a separate pan. When the milk starts to bubble around the edges, Flay adds it to the flour and butter mixture and whisks until it starts to thicken. Next, he adds lots of fontina, ricotta, and Parmesan cheeses. Because of the cauliflower's extra moisture, sauce thickness is vital to avoid a watery final product. When that's all done, he purees the roasted cauliflower into the cheesy bechamel sauce, and it's all set. Talk about a great alternative if you're cooking for a non-meat crowd, or if you're just looking to switch things up a bit.

While Rachael Ray has many lasagna tips, her recommendation to infuse lasagna with lots of bold flavors stood out as one of her very best. The first way she imparts flavor is with a bit of wine. If you know anything about the iconic cook, you know she loves her wine, so this isn't too surprising. Still, using it in your lasagna sauce, as she does in her Tuscan Meat Sauce Lasagna recipe, is a complete game-changer in the flavor department.

Additionally, in an Instagram post, Rachael Ray also recommends enhancing the flavors in red sauce destined for lasagna by adding a Parmesan cheese rind to the pot while the sauce cooks. When you do, all of the other ingredients are infused with the cheese's umami flavor that won't go unnoticed. Are you drooling yet? We are. So, the next time you grab a wedge of Parmesan cheese from the store, take Ray's recommendation and make sure to select a chunk with the rind on it. Then, after you've got as much Parmesan off as you can, store the rind in the freezer until you need it to impart flavor into a sauce. Your dinner guests will thank you.

Ree Drummond knows meaty lasagna is a true delight, but sometimes you want a lighter option that doesn't come with quite so many carbs. When the craving for lasagna hits but you want to keep things on the lighter side, she recommends opting for a veggie-heavy lasagna instead, and that's exactly what you get with her Zucchini Lasagna recipe.

Here, Drummond swaps out the noodles for thinly sliced zucchini and opts for a mix of cooked spinach and mushrooms over a classic blend of ground meats. For prepping the zucchini, she recommends cutting thin, lengthwise strips, laying them on a paper towel, and sprinkling them with salt to remove excess moisture. After about 10 minutes, she pats the zucchini dry and roasts it for approximately 10 minutes. While the zucchini roasts, she sautés spinach and mushrooms together to create a mix that's so hearty you won't even miss the meat found in a traditional lasagna recipe. She also whips up a mix of cheeses, seasonings, and eggs to give the dish all the cheesy goodness it deserves. Once all three elements — the cheese mix, veggie mix, and roasted zucchini strips — are ready, layer like you would a normal lasagna, and you're all set.

Giada De Laurentiis is arguably one of the most iconic celebrity chefs in the realm of Italian cuisine, at least here in the States, so you better believe she has her lasagna game on lock. And you know what? She doesn't always construct it the old-fashioned way, either. In fact, one of her most ingenious tips involves making an entire tray of sheet pan lasagna so that every bite gives you some of the crispy goodness found on the top layer of your everyday lasagna recipe. Tell me more.

In a 2022 YouTube video, Giada De Laurentiis explains that she starts by mixing ricotta cheese with sauteed spinach, red pepper flakes, and garlic. Then, she sets it aside and browns Italian sausage with diced onions. When that's ready, she combines it with marinara and adds cut-up lasagna noodles to the mix. Next, she spreads a thin layer of the noodles, meat, and sauce mixture onto a sheet pan, adds dollops of the cheese and spinach mixture on top, and covers the entire thing with more shredded cheese before tossing it into the oven. After baking, she pulls out a deliciously crispy, cheesy sheet pan lasagna that'll have you rethinking the recipe from start to finish. Delish!

Celebrity chef Michael Symon grew up eating his mom's lasagna every Wednesday night, and he'll be the first to tell you she did things just right. In fact, he still employs many of the recipe secrets his mom once used in his lasagna today. While all of his mother's tips pay off in a big way, one of the best recommendations she taught him involves covering lasagna with foil for the initial part of the baking process, and then removing it for the final 10 minutes it is in the oven.

Many chefs and home cooks alike simply toss an assembled lasagna into the oven without covering it first. In an interview with Food & Wine, Symon explains his mother's tip for removing the foil gives the cheese and sauce on top time to brown and crisp up beautifully. Since many of us love the extra crispy layer on top of a lasagna, this seems like a no-brainer. Plus, it couldn't be simpler, so no excuses. Use this tip from Symon and his mom the next time you make lasagna, and you'll be glad you did. We can almost hear the crunch already.

While this next tip can be found across many celebrity chef platforms, Giada De Laurentiis is the only one we need to confirm for us to be staunch believers in its validity. Besides, she believes in it so much that she even offered it up as a tip to royalty. As she told Prince William back in 2011, according to PopSugar, it's crucial to let your cooked lasagna rest before cutting into it.

After all the time it took to prep and cook your lasagna, paired with the fact that drool-worthy aromas are undoubtedly wafting through the air by the time it comes out of the oven, it can be challenging not to dive right in. However, according to De Laurentiis, this would be a mistake. Just like a steak, she recommends leaving your lasagna to rest so all of the moisture from the scalding hot sauce and cheese gets absorbed into the noodles. About 10 to 15 minutes should do the trick. In addition to ensuring the moisture is thoroughly absorbed, resting your lasagna ensures the beautiful layers stay intact once you slice into them. So, be patient, our lasagna-making friend. Make sure to wait 10 to 15 minutes before slicing your carefully crafted lasagna, and you'll be miles ahead of every other amateur home cook around.