This vegan lasagna is packed with veggies, flavourful and creamy without a shred of fake vegan cheese or tofu!

Of all the different ways you can make vegan lasagna, the tofu ricotta one has to be the worst. It’s so gross! It tastes nothing like ricotta and everything like tofu bathed in tomato sauce, ewww!

Cashews are a better option for making a cheesy sauce.

They’re great for the potato and carrot-based vegan mac and cheese recipes, and I usually use cashews as sour cream like for these vegan pierogi .

The problem with cashews? They’re expensive!

The solution suddenly came to me after making the video for my Spanish spinach croquettes a couple of weeks ago: béchamel!

I could use more or less the same filling for my croquettes but a bit creamier and pile it into a vegan lasagna!

Not that there’s anything innovative about using a béchamel sauce in lasagna; white lasagna is already a thing that the Italians have been doing since, I don’t know, forever.

I just realized that by making the béchamel sauce with olive oil and plant-based milk instead of butter and cow’s milk, then adding nutritional yeast, makes a deliciously creamy and cheesy vegan sauce that you won’t get from tofu ricotta!

The other amazing thing about this vegan béchamel sauce is that it gratinates!

(So my spell check is telling me that gratinate is not a real word (pretty sure it is); what I mean is that the top of your lasagna goes brown and crispy like cheese would do but without the need for any fake, processed vegan cheese product! Win!)

Lasagna is notorious for being super difficult and time consuming to make.

Yes and no. I’m not gonna lie, this isn’t a quick 30-minute dinner.

For this recipe you’re going to make a veggie-packed filling and a creamy béchamel sauce from scratch.

The good new though: they’re both super easy! (And if you’re really hard core about making everything from scratch, make your own marinara sauce too. I decided not to in order to save a bit of time!)

The filling is easy: simply fry up your favourite veggies.

I’ve always liked mushroom and spinach lasagna, plus I added diced carrot and zucchini this time. You can change this up according to what you like or have on hand.

For the vegan béchamel you’re going to start with a roux.

This is just a fancy name for oil and flour cooked for a few minutes until beginning to brown. This is to cook out the raw flour flavour.

Then add plant milk a ladleful at a time, stirring to prevent lumps, until it’s thick and creamy.

Occasionally béchamel can be a bit finicky and clump anyway; no worries if it happens to you, simply pass it through a fine mesh strainer once it’s done.

Pile it all together with your lasagna noodles and pop it in the oven.

The baking and cooling is the most time-consuming part of this recipe. Let me tell you, it’s sooooo hard to leave it sitting there to cool and not dive in right away!

But be warned: it will slide apart if you don’t give it time to set!

Wanna see how vegan lasagna is made? Watch the video and share it on Facebook :