There are so many shortcuts to prepping meals and I feel like lasagna shortcuts are the basic example.  Recently my mother has been using noodles that don’t require cooking prior to baking called “Oven Ready”.  It’s been working very well for her classic lasagna.

So, I’ve now tried to use these noodles twice.  Keep reading for how I made the lasagnas and how they each turned out.  I’ll also compare them to using the classic lasagna noodle boiled prior to baking.

Easy ways to make lasagnas quicker

No matter what style of lasagna you’re eating, all meats need to be cooked prior to assembling into a lasagna.  This is why it’s so beneficial to cook meats up to freeze on another day so you can come back and make lasagna from the stock.

In my case, the lasagna is a chicken spinach lasagna.  The recipe that I’ve been following has no sauce.  This seems to be the core problem with trying to use oven-ready noodles.

When I make this lasagna with regular noodles and fresh meat, I find it comes out plenty oily.  It gets covered with tin for 35 minutes and BAM! You have a wonderful dinner.

The Lasagna Shortcut product:

In contrast, when I made the first oven-ready noodles lasagna I had broken pieces in there.  I forgot to cover it.  My top layer was basically just grated parmesan cheese.  After 30 minutes corners were burnt and all but the center noodle showed no signs of weakening.

Round Two:

I still had one lasagna’s worth of those noodles so this time I made one with traditional lasagna noodles and another with the no-pre-cooking noodles.  I remembered to cover both this time.  I was a bit late getting the noodles cooked for the second one so I layered the first one.  Noodle first, filling, noodle, filling, noodle, cheese.  Cover.  Bake for 30 minutes.

The second one was ready by the 20-minute mark.  When the 30 minutes were up on the first one, I pulled it out and decided I needed to better cover the top layer of noodle, so I added mozzarella.  Then I placed it back in for the 20 minutes that the second lasagna needed.

This time I pulled both out to take a look.  The traditional lasagna was done but could use browning.  The new lasagna was showing signs of finally breaking down the noodles.  They both went back in for 5 minutes.  At the end of that time, I pulled out the traditional lasagna and returned the new one to the oven.  After 10 minutes more, I decided to peek underneath to see if the bottom noodles were getting cooked at all.  It was not.  I flipped the entire thing over and added cheese to the now top coating down the sides a bit.

After the next 5 minutes passed, I had already finished eating my traditional lasagna.  I was getting tired of babysitting this new lasagna.  I’d put away the leftovers of the first one by then as well.  I pulled the new one out and shoved a fork in it.  It wasn’t perfect but it wouldn’t cut my mount, so I pulled it out.  Total elapsed time of 50 minutes later (and I may have forgotten some), I now had a lasagna to divvy up for leftovers.

The Results:

The new lasagna had to pull all its moisture from the cheese which didn’t cook the noodles quickly.  The first time, when I cooked it uncovered, it burnt and the noodles were just as hard as when I put them in.  The second time it took 50 minutes to soften them enough to eat.  Eventually, I just couldn’t wait on them any longer.  The rest of the lasagna was dry and tasted entirely like mozzarella at that point.

The good news is, that there are many recipes that use a cream-based sauce for a chicken spinach lasagna that would probably work very well.  If pre-cooking the noodles was a deal-breaker, I would try one of these.  For one that only has a bit of lemon juice and cheese, don’t use these noodles.  If there’s a sauce in the lasagna, go for it.