Veganuary Recipe: Vegan Lasagna

This blogpost is also available in German / auf Deutsch

Yummmmm – today is the day: I am sharing one of my absolute FAVORITE dishes: vegan lasagna! Veganizing lasagna is not as hard as you might think. It’s super easy actually with my vegan cheese sauce recipes, which I posted here and here. With these you can replace the creamy ingredients. Instead of minced meat you can use minced soy, lentils, or minced sunflower seed “meat”.

I always wing my lasagna recipe, but the result is always amazing and we finish the whole dish in one day! I cook it a bit different each time, so I recommend experimenting with my recipe as well. Maybe you prefer more or different vegetables in the lasagna, smoother cheese sauces and / or more herbs. In any case, I cooked my last lasagna like this:

You need:

• 1 onion chopped small
• 1 carrot chopped small
• 1/2 cup or 100g red lentils
• 1/2 cup or 120ml vegetable broth
• about 1-2 cups or 240-480ml of water
• 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 1 small zucchini cut small
• about 300 grams of mushrooms cut small
• 1-3 cloves of garlic minced
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• Herbs to taste (such as oregano, basil, etc.)
• Salt pepper
• Vegan “cheese” sauce (either my cashew recipe just a little bit more liquidy, or my almond recipe, also more liquidy, – I always wing it but I think I had about 250 – 300ml of cheese sauce, and I prefer almond sauce. When I am “fancy”, I use cashew sauce for between the layers and almond sauce for the top.)
• Lasagna sheets (you can also try lasagna sheets made of wholegrain or lentils – they also taste great!)

How to:

Fry the onion in a large pan, then add the carrot pieces relatively quickly, add some water and fry / simmer until the pieces of onion are glassy.

Then I add the lentils as well as the broth and gradually more water. You can always add more water later, even in the later steps.

When the water has boiled a bit away, add the canned tomatoes and rinse the cans with a little bit of water and add the tomato paste.

Then add the zucchini to the pan and a little later the mushrooms and the garlic.

I season the sauce with soy sauce, herbs, salt and pepper and let it simmer until the carrots and the lentils are soft and the sauce gets a little thicker. As I said, you can always add water if needed.

Then comes the layering part in the lasagna dish:

1. Add a thin layer of tomato sauce
2. lasagna sheets
3. Some cheese sauce on the sheets
4. tomato sauce
5. lasagna sheets
6. cheese sauce
7. tomato sauce
8. etc.

-> You finish the lasagna with a thin layer of tomato sauce and use about 2/3 of the cheese sauce. Then it goes into the oven for 45 minutes at 200 degrees (or depending on the package instructions of your lasagna sheets).

Around 5-10 minutes before the end of the baking time, I pour the rest of the vegan cheese sauce on top. Make sure not to do this too early since this will result in the cheese sauce getting too dry. Sometimes I save even more cheese sauce to pour it over the lasagna just before serving. Garnish the finished lasagna with fresh basil, nutritional yeast and oregano!

I hope my instructions were ok! As I said, I do it a little bit different every time, sometimes with more cheese sauce, sometimes with less, sometimes with more mushrooms, sometimes with spinach. Just try it out! When I use minced soy, I use much less water. More water was needed for this version to cook the lentils! Bon Apetit!