Meat Sauce Alternative - Quorn Mince Easy Triple Layer Lasagne

Hey guys!

I wanted to continue with my Veganuary guide on meat alternatives and either focus on the flavours that make things meaty, or the products I like that you can buy today in supermarkets. For this one I’m using my classic Quorn which I break up into mince. I never really mention this step because you can get regionally different products in that brand, you can get a lot of vegan mince in our international super markets but the vegan basics they do here are actually the bigger pieces. So for a mince, I break them up from a chicken cube into a breaded texture. The normal mince has egg protein in it as well as micro protein so it’s totally up to you what you prefer. I’m not the vegan police, go with your gut - literally.

I use it all the time but in this recipe which is a hearty lasagne, it’s more so about the flavour of the gravy based sauce that makes it even more insane. I’ve combined both red lentils with the mince and it has a totally different texture to the meatball style recipe I added from Linda McCartney mince. For these seven recipes, they’re not designed to be a full on recipe as much as a guide on how to choose plant based alternatives. If I have enough requests I will pop the full recipes up!

So with a lasagne, on the outside it looks sort of like the Moussaka recipe as in it’s a baked, layered delicious yummy thing, with a creamy sauce. But the flavours are totally different, in a lasagne you use more robust and ‘dirty’ like flavours, it’s more thinner layers I guess and it’s not necessarily with any root vegetables. Now how I do it anyway, but you’ll see that the sauce is more of a brown than a red. So what I have done with this recipe is basically started with celerky, carrots, red onions. You build into the flavours with sage, WC sauce, garlic, thyme.

Then you introduce red wine, some vegan stock, tomato purée and if you like chopped tomatoes. I had roasted some tomatoes that I used in a layer and it was super delicious. Then you add lentils and flour to thicken the texture and you slow cook it until you have an amazing, rich, more deeper flavoured base.

I have loads of recipes about how to make a white sauce, you just need to check out anything that looks cheesey here to find out how to do that vegan. But the assembly process was straight forward. One layer roasted tomatoes, one layer the meaty sauce. In between each layer is the lasagne, which you pre soak and finally, finish with a white sauce.

This takes about 40 minutes to cook, I sometimes give it up to an hour depending on how big the dish is but it’s totally up to you, and these serve more of a guide as to what type of meat alternative I use where. The reason why I like this mix of Quorn and lentils, is it has more of a gravy like texture and isn’t as squeaky, which I find with some of the more meaty like alternatives. Jack fruit for example, has a meaty elastic texture to it when cooked. For this dish, I want something smoother and it to be warming, delicious and thickems.

So this is the final dish, and as you can see the top should look baked and golden. As always, if you would like me to add a full recipe of ingredients up, and not my recommendations let me know! I had some salad and some gorgeous bread, which was carb central but went down a treat.