Cottage Cheese Lasagna

Cottage cheese is a fighter. It makes you pick sides—you’re either all in or you’re up in arms. If you grew up seeing cottage cheese as something dietetic, this cottage cheese lasagna might rock your beliefs. The quintessential curds and whey make a handsome stand-in for the ricotta cheese used in a lot of homemade lasagna recipes. Thanks to its defined small curds, cottage cheese stays moist instead of turning chalky as ricotta is prone to do after an extended cooking time.

To round out the cheese layer, I mix in super-melter Fontina cheese (spring for an aged Fontina for even richer flavor) and nutty, savory Parmesan cheese. Yes, this lasagna eschews shredded mozzarella cheese, but I promise you won’t miss it.

A combo of Italian sausage and ground beef provides an ideal balance of flavor and texture to the meat sauce. Save the lean ground beef for another time. The resulting fat from an 80% blend is just enough to enrich the pasta sauce, making it possible to use cans of crushed tomatoes instead of pricier store-bought spaghetti sauce or marinara sauce. If you don’t eat beef or pork, feel free to swap in ground turkey and turkey sausage, but you might need an extra drizzle of olive oil to make up for the lost fat.

A generous amount of Worcestershire sauce and tomato paste brings intense depth and long-cooked flavor to the tomato sauce that is—surprise!—barely cooked. Retaining moisture in the sauce is key since the extra liquid gets soaked up by the uncooked lasagna noodles as the casserole bakes. That’s right, this cottage cheese lasagna ensures perfectly al dente pasta without the need to boil noodles.

Between the cottage cheese mixture and the no-cook noodles, this might not be your nonna’s traditional lasagna (we’ve got BA’s Best Lasagna for that), but it’s absolutely one the whole family will enjoy, whether they think they like cottage cheese or not.