Courgette Lasagne

Start with the pasta sheets. Fresh egg pasta, the kind you buy as sheets rather than dried lasagne plates, cooks almost instantly — under a minute in boiling water — because it's thin and already has egg's protein holding it together. Some say you should skip boiling altogether and let the sheets soften in the oven from the sauce's moisture — that works with dried pasta made for it, but egg sheets this thin will stay chalky in the middle if you don't give them that brief dunk first. Dry them on a towel afterwards, not because tradition says so, but because wet pasta going into the dish adds water you don't want — you've only just fought to get the courgettes dry.

The garlic is there for the oil, not for itself. One clove, fried until it turns golden and perfumes the olive oil, then taken out — leave it in and by the time the dish is assembled and baked, that clove has gone from fragrant to bitter and sulphurous, the way garlic always does once it's pushed past golden into brown. Olive oil here can be any oil with no smell of its own that can take the heat of a quick fry — a neutral vegetable or sunflower oil works if olive oil isn't to hand, though you lose a little of the background flavour it leaves in the courgettes.

Stracciatella is the wet, shredded inside of burrata — soft curd and cream, no rind, nothing to melt down from solid. It's there to melt into pockets of richness between layers, different in texture from the smooth béchamel around it — one is sauce, one is curd breaking apart in the heat. If you can't get it, fresh mozzarella torn into shreds and mixed with a spoon of cream gets you close; ricotta loosened with a little cream is a second option, though it won't stretch the same way. Grana padano or parmesan is the salty, savoury backbone — a hard, aged cheese that's mostly flavour and little moisture, which is exactly why it goes into the béchamel and on top rather than as a wet layer: it seasons and browns, it doesn't melt into a puddle. Any hard aged grating cheese does the same job; a milder cheddar will change the flavour but won't ruin the structure.

The béchamel itself is just fat, flour, and milk — a roux that thickens liquid because flour's starch swells and traps the milk around it once it's heated enough. Cold milk added to a hot roux, stirred as it goes, stops lumps forming — pour it in too fast or too hot and the flour seizes into clumps before it can distribute evenly. The twenty minutes it needs on the heat isn't arbitrary waiting; it's the time for that raw-flour taste to cook out, which is also why nutmeg goes in near the end rather than the start — it's a top note, not something that needs the full cooking time to make its point.

200°C in a domestic oven is hot enough to colour the top layer of cheese and béchamel before the inside has any chance to dry out, and thirty minutes is your lower bound — stop watching the clock and watch the top instead: when it's gone from pale and wet-looking to freckled gold-brown, with a few darker spots where the cheese has caught, it's done. Pull it any earlier and the top stays flabby and pale, which is the usual complaint people have about vegetable lasagnes being "sad" — not the courgette's fault, the oven's.

Last thing, and it's the one everybody skips: the twelve minutes of rest after the oven. Straight out, the béchamel is still loose from heat, still moving. Cutting then means every slice collapses sideways. Let it sit, uncovered or loosely under a plate rather than sealed under foil — sealing it traps steam that will soften the top you just spent thirty minutes browning — and the sauce firms up enough to hold a slice together when the knife goes through. That rest isn't optional politeness. It's the difference between a lasagne you can lift onto a plate and one you have to spoon out.