Put your dish on a baking tray to catch any spillage and drips that might happen during the baking process, and bake for 30-35 minutes.

🧀 Mediocre Tip: Let your lasagna rest when it comes out of the oven! If you don’t and cut into it right away, you’ll just end up with a sloppy mess instead of a nice piece with well-defined layers. Matty addresses this in his video, and we didn’t listen. We were hungry and dived right in — the result is a not-so-nice looking piece of lasagna, but still dang tasty.

In the end, your lasagna should look like it’s straight out of a Garfield comic (or better).

Chili Pepper Confusion

When we made this recipe, we did a bad thing.

A really bad thing.

A thing that ruined the whole lasagna because it ended up so damn spicy. 🌶️

Our mouths were on fire. We wondered where we went wrong. Sweat dripped off our face and into our lasagna. It was terrible. (That may have been an exaggeration but…)

We realized that if we were confused, other people trying to make this recipe might be confused too. And we don’t want anyone else to have the same experience we did — so hopefully this section of the post will save you.

Our confusion came from this:

In the video, Matty says to use “ a little bit of the dried pepperoncini ”. This is a spice that his father-in-law makes, and obviously not everyone has an awesome father-in-law who gives you homemade spices, so he follows up by saying “ you can buy dried chilis ”. In the video, he haphazardly shakes his jar of dried pepperoncini into the pot, and doesn’t provide a measurement. We think this could be 2 tablespoons? But we also could be totally wrong.

The recipe on Vice by Matty says to use “3 tablespoons dried red chilies” in the ingredients list, and the recipe directions provide directions on when to add the dried chili flakes.

So, where we went wrong is: we blindly followed the written recipe, as we couldn’t find dried pepperoncini and assumed that dried red chilies meant dried red pepper flakes. However, we are both big babies when it comes to spice, and 3 tablespoons of dried red pepper flakes was way too much.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Scoville of red pepper flakes ranges from 30,000 to 50,000, while pepperoncini is just 100 to 500 SHU. If you’re unfamiliar with Scoville, it’s the level of hotness, and the difference in heat between those two things is pretty big! 🌶️ There are a lot of different types of red chilies — some are mild, some are hot, and Matty doesn’t give a clear alternative for his dried pepperoncini.

The lesson here is: always taste your food! Add, taste, adjust. Don’t just dump in 3 tablespoons of red chili flakes — you’re going to have a bad time like we did. Another lesson could be: if you’re unsure, Google!