After a long and draining work week, working during the weekend was especially unappealing. But when there’s work to do, you just have to do it. Luckily, being in the city on a weekend meant that I could catch up with C who usually works a tad too far from the city for us to catch up over lunch during the week.
I love lasagna. I love it so much that I have to force myself to eat it only once a month to stay healthy. But ever since H told me about the lasagna pie ($5.80) at Micks Bakehouse, I’ve been meaning to try it. I mean, you can rarely go wrong with pie pastry, so a lasagna pie sounded really good.
And I finally did, and it had a gorgeous golden brown sesame-speckled crust. C was curious whether they’d made the lasagna pie by wrapping frozen lasagna up in pie pastry. I don’t think they did – the bottom layer of the mince looks and tastes a lot like your normal meat pie innards (a dark brown), whereas normal lasagna mince is more of a spaghetti bolognese red. On top of the meat pie mince, they laid a sheet of lasagna pasta, before a layer of lasagna mince and a drizzle of bechamel sauce.
Although the pie was decent, I don’t think lasagna works as a pie. With a lasagna pie, you lose the texture of the pasta that you normally get when you eat lasagna. Especially with this rendition, the flavour of normal mince for the base layer dominates, the bechamel sauce was barely there, and the mozarella cheese was completely missing – you lose the beautiful saucy, cheesy, tomatoy flavours that make a lasagna so tasty.
C was onto something when she suggested wrapping up frozen lasagna in pie pastry – that would’ve made it a true lasagna pie!
Mick’s Bakehouse is located at Westfield Sydney, Level 5, 188 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW 2000.