A white lasagna — lasagna bianca, built on béchamel rather than tomato sauce — is an altogether different animal from the red-sauced version most people picture when they think of lasagna. Where a classic lasagna al forno is bold, robust, and tomato-forward, a white lasagna is delicate, rich, and deeply savoury in a quieter way: the flavour is built from layers of creamy sauce, earthy mushrooms, wilted spinach, and pasta, all melding together in the oven into something that is simultaneously comforting and refined. It is the kind of dish that feels appropriate at a weeknight dinner and equally at home on a table set for a special occasion. This vegan spinach and mushroom white lasagna achieves that character in full. The béchamel is made with oat milk, vegan block butter, and a full measure of nutritional yeast and Dijon, producing a sauce that is genuinely creamy and savoury with none of the flatness that plagues dairy-free white sauces made without attention to flavour depth. The filling is a combination of wilted spinach — thoroughly squeezed dry, as a wet spinach filling is one of the most common causes of a waterlogged lasagna — and sautéed mixed mushrooms that have been cooked until deeply golden and concentrated, with garlic, thyme, and a splash of white wine or vegetable stock to deglaze the pan and lift every bit of colour from the base. The top is finished with a generous scatter of vegan mozzarella block (grated at home, not pre-grated) and vegan parmesan-style cheese that browns to a spectacular, bubbly golden crust in the final phase of baking. This vegan spinach and mushroom white lasagna is 100% plant-based, dairy-free, and egg-free. It serves 6. It is ready in 1 hour 20 minutes. It is the centrepiece dish — the one that comes to the table whole and gets gasped at before it is even served.
The technique is the separate-build-and-dry-layer method. The two failure modes of a home-baked lasagna — of any style, but particularly of a white lasagna where there is no tomato sauce to mask textural inconsistencies — are a waterlogged dish in which the layers have dissolved into a wet, undifferentiated mass, and an unevenly cooked dish in which the pasta sheets at the centre are still hard while the edges are over-baked and the sauce at the base has dried. Both failures stem from the same root problem: the uncontrolled water content of the ingredients going into the dish. Spinach releases enormous quantities of water during cooking — a 200g bag of raw spinach may release 100–120ml of liquid during the wilting process; if this liquid is not removed before the spinach enters the lasagna, it dilutes the béchamel and prevents the pasta sheets from absorbing the sauce evenly during baking, producing exactly the wet, sloppy texture that turns a potentially beautiful lasagna into a disappointment. Mushrooms present the same challenge: raw mushrooms added directly to a lasagna release their water in the oven, again diluting the sauce and producing a wet filling. The separate-build-and-dry-layer method treats every filling component as a separate preparation problem to be solved before assembly. Stage one — dry the spinach: the spinach is wilted in a hot pan, transferred immediately to a colander, and pressed under the back of a spoon (or squeezed in a clean tea towel once cool enough to handle) until no further liquid runs out; the pressed spinach should be half or less of its wilted volume and feel almost dry to the touch. Stage two — concentrate the mushrooms: the mushrooms are cooked over high heat in batches in a wide pan — not crowded, which causes steaming rather than browning — until they are deeply golden and reduced to approximately one-third of their raw volume; all of their water has been driven off and their flavour is concentrated and intensely savoury. Stage three — rest the béchamel: the béchamel is made and allowed to cool for 5–10 minutes before assembly, which thickens it slightly and ensures it spreads evenly between the pasta layers rather than pooling at the base of the dish. With all three components prepared and controlled, assembly is straightforward and the baked result is a lasagna in which the layers hold their structure, the pasta is evenly cooked throughout, and the sauce is creamy and cohesive rather than watery.
This recipe serves 6.
Recipe Information
| Prep Time | Cook (Components) | Assemble | Bake Time | Total Time | Servings | Calories |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 mins | 25 mins | 10 mins | 45 mins | ~1 hr 40 mins | 6 | ~480 kcal |
Ingredients
For the Spinach Filling
- 400g (14oz) fresh baby spinach — or 200g frozen spinach, fully thawed and squeezed very dry; fresh spinach wilts down dramatically, which is expected
- 1 tsp olive oil
- 2 cloves garlic, finely minced
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg — the classic spinach companion in a white lasagna; do not omit
- ½ tsp fine salt
- ¼ tsp ground black pepper
For the Mushroom Filling
- 600g (21oz) mixed mushrooms — chestnut, portobello, shiitake, or a combination; chestnut mushrooms form a reliable base; a portion of shiitake adds excellent umami depth; clean with a damp cloth, not washed under water (washing mushrooms causes them to absorb water and steam rather than brown in the pan)
- 2 tbsp olive oil
- 3 cloves garlic, finely minced
- 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves (or ½ tsp dried thyme)
- 80ml (⅓ cup) dry white wine or good-quality vegetable stock — for deglazing; the wine adds a complexity that stock does not quite replicate, but both work well
- 1 tbsp soy sauce or tamari — added with the deglaze liquid; adds umami depth and a deeper golden colour to the mushrooms
- Salt and black pepper to taste
For the Vegan Béchamel
- 60g (4 tbsp) vegan block butter — block butter for a richer, more stable roux; tub-style spread contains more water and produces a thinner, less glossy béchamel
- 60g (½ cup) plain flour (all-purpose flour)
- 900ml (3¾ cups) unsweetened oat milk — oat milk produces the most neutral, creamy béchamel of all plant milks; soy milk also works well
- 4 tbsp nutritional yeast — essential for savoury depth in a dairy-free béchamel
- 1 tbsp Dijon mustard — adds complexity and a slight sharpness that mimics the flavour profile of a traditional béchamel made with good-quality dairy
- 1 tsp fine salt
- ½ tsp white pepper
- ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
For Assembly
- 12–15 dried lasagna sheets — standard dried lasagna sheets; no-boil/oven-ready sheets can be used but standard dried sheets produce a slightly better texture; if using standard sheets, cook in salted boiling water for 2 minutes less than the packet’s al dente time (they will finish cooking in the oven)
- 150g (5½oz) vegan mozzarella block — Violife or similar firm vegan mozzarella block, grated at home; do not use pre-grated vegan mozzarella (anti-caking agents prevent melting); do not use fresh mozzarella-style balls (too high in water content)
- 50g (1¾oz) vegan parmesan-style cheese, finely grated — Violife Prosociano or similar; provides the flavour and golden-brown colour on the top crust
- 2 tbsp vegan block butter, cut into small pieces — dotted over the top before baking; helps the cheese topping brown evenly
Instructions
- Prepare the spinach — dry-layer stage. Heat the olive oil in a wide pan over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add the fresh spinach in large handfuls, turning with tongs as each handful wilts to make room for the next. Once all the spinach is wilted (2–3 minutes total), add the nutmeg, salt, and pepper, stir briefly, and transfer immediately to a colander set over a bowl. Press the spinach firmly with the back of a large spoon to extract as much liquid as possible. When cool enough to handle, gather the spinach in a clean tea towel and squeeze firmly until no more liquid runs out. The spinach should feel almost dry and be a compact mass. Set aside.
- Prepare the mushrooms — concentrate stage. Slice or roughly chop the mushrooms into pieces of similar size (approximately 1–2cm). Heat 1 tablespoon of the olive oil in a wide pan over high heat until very hot. Add half the mushrooms in a single layer — do not crowd the pan. Cook without stirring for 2–3 minutes until deeply golden underneath, then turn and cook for a further 2 minutes. The mushrooms should be golden and reduced, not grey and steaming. Transfer to a plate. Repeat with the remaining olive oil and mushrooms. Return all the mushrooms to the pan over medium-high heat. Add the garlic and thyme and cook for 60 seconds. Add the white wine (or stock) and soy sauce and cook, scraping up any browned bits from the base of the pan, until the liquid has almost entirely evaporated — approximately 2 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Remove from heat and set aside.
- Make the béchamel — rest stage. Melt the vegan block butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour and whisk constantly for 2 minutes to cook out the raw flour taste — the roux should be smooth and slightly golden. Remove from heat and add the oat milk in a slow, steady stream, whisking constantly to prevent lumps. Return to medium heat and whisk continuously until the sauce comes to a gentle simmer and thickens to a consistency that coats the back of a spoon — approximately 6–8 minutes. Add the nutritional yeast, Dijon mustard, salt, white pepper, and nutmeg. Whisk to combine. Remove from heat and allow to cool and thicken for 5–10 minutes before assembly.
- Par-cook the pasta (if using standard dried sheets). Cook the lasagna sheets in a large pan of well-salted boiling water for 2 minutes less than the packet’s al dente time. Drain and lay flat on a lightly oiled surface to prevent sticking.
- Preheat the oven to 190°C fan / 200°C conventional / 375°F. Lightly oil a deep baking dish (approximately 30cm × 20cm × 7cm — the depth is important; a shallow dish does not accommodate four full layers).
- Assemble. Spread a thin layer of béchamel over the base of the dish (this prevents the bottom pasta sheets from sticking). Lay 3–4 lasagna sheets over the béchamel in a single layer, overlapping slightly. Spread one-third of the remaining béchamel over the pasta sheets. Scatter half the spinach evenly over the béchamel. Top with half the mushrooms. Add another layer of lasagna sheets. Spread half the remaining béchamel. Scatter the remaining spinach and the remaining mushrooms. Add a final layer of lasagna sheets. Pour and spread the remaining béchamel evenly over the top layer — it should cover every part of the pasta. Scatter the grated vegan mozzarella evenly over the surface. Scatter the vegan parmesan-style cheese over the mozzarella. Dot the small pieces of vegan block butter over the cheese topping.
- Bake. Cover the dish tightly with foil and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for a further 15 minutes until the cheese topping is deeply golden and bubbling and the lasagna is cooked through (a sharp knife inserted into the centre should meet no resistance from the pasta). If the top is not golden enough after 45 minutes, switch to the grill/broiler for the final 2–3 minutes.
- Rest. Leave to rest for 15 minutes before cutting and serving. This is not optional — a lasagna cut immediately out of the oven collapses and floods the plate; the 15-minute rest allows the béchamel to thicken and the layers to set into the defined, sliceable structure that makes a lasagna worth presenting at the table.
Pro Tips
- Squeeze the spinach until it seems excessive — the amount of liquid that a bag of fresh spinach releases during wilting is genuinely astonishing, and the instinct is to stop squeezing when it appears dry. The standard for a lasagna filling is drier than “appears dry” — keep squeezing until absolutely nothing more comes out. A lasagna filling that seems almost too dry when you put it in the dish will be perfectly moist in the final baked result; a filling that seems just right at assembly will make the lasagna wet.
- High heat, uncrowded mushrooms — the transformation of raw mushrooms to deeply golden, flavour-concentrated mushrooms happens only above a certain temperature, and that temperature is not maintained when the pan is crowded; crowded mushrooms release their water, which drops the pan temperature below browning threshold, and the mushrooms steam in their own liquid rather than browning. Use the widest pan available, cook in two or three batches, and do not turn the mushrooms until they have had at least 2 full minutes of undisturbed contact with the pan surface.
- The béchamel rest thickens the sauce — a freshly made béchamel is thinner than the same sauce 5–10 minutes later, after its starch has fully gelatinised in the residual heat; spreading a slightly thicker, cooled béchamel between the pasta layers produces more even coverage and prevents the sauce from running to the edges of the dish and leaving the centre dry.
- Rest before cutting — every recipe for lasagna includes this instruction and it is ignored roughly half the time. The consequence of cutting too early is not just a messy slice; it is a fundamentally different dish — the béchamel in an unrested lasagna is too liquid to hold the layers in position, so the slice collapses and the result on the plate is a pool of sauce with layers of pasta and filling floating in it rather than the defined, layered cross-section that is the point of the dish. Fifteen minutes of rest costs nothing and produces a completely different result.
Pasta Bianca: The White Sauce Tradition in Italian and Northern European Cooking
The white lasagna on which this recipe is based belongs to a distinct tradition in Italian pasta cookery — the pasta bianca, or white pasta, that is most strongly associated with the northern Italian regions of Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and Veneto, where butter and cream rather than olive oil and tomato have historically been the dominant cooking fats and sauce bases. This north-south divide in Italian cooking runs deep and is rooted in agricultural and climatic geography: the Po Valley, Italy’s great agricultural plain running across the north, has historically supported dairy farming and wheat cultivation on a scale that made butter, cream, and fresh egg pasta the foundational ingredients of northern Italian cuisine; the south, with its olive trees, sun-dried tomatoes, and harder durum wheat, developed an entirely different culinary vocabulary. The béchamel itself — the white sauce at the heart of this lasagna — carries its own complex cultural history: it appears in Italian cooking under the name “besciamella” and has been a staple of northern Italian pasta dishes for at least three centuries, though the sauce’s origin is frequently and erroneously attributed exclusively to French cuisine. The classical French “sauce béchamel,” named either for the Marquis de Béchamel (a 17th-century financier and steward to Louis XIV) or for the royal kitchen that developed and codified it under his name, is likely a parallel evolution of the same basic technique — fat, flour, and dairy liquid cooked together into a smooth, pourable sauce — that was also being developed in Italian, Spanish, and other European court kitchens during the same period. The lasagna itself, as a pasta form, has its roots in the Emilia-Romagna region and in particular in the city of Bologna, where “lasagne verdi al forno” — green (spinach-tinted) lasagna sheets layered with ragù bolognese and béchamel and baked — is considered the canonical form of the dish. The spinach and béchamel combination in this recipe is therefore not merely convenient but historically grounded: spinach-tinted pasta with white sauce is how the people of Bologna have been eating their lasagna for at least 500 years.
Flavor Variations
- Roasted Butternut Squash and Sage White Lasagna: Replace the mushroom filling with 600g of butternut squash, diced into 1.5cm cubes, tossed with olive oil, salt, and pepper and roasted at 200°C fan for 25 minutes until golden and tender. Fry 8–10 fresh sage leaves in vegan block butter until crisp and use to garnish the finished lasagna. Stir ½ teaspoon of ground sage into the béchamel. The squash version is sweeter, more autumnal in character, and particularly beautiful — the orange squash and white béchamel produce a striking visual contrast.
- Artichoke and Sun-Dried Tomato White Lasagna: Replace the spinach with 2 tins (400g each) of artichoke hearts in brine, drained and roughly chopped, sautéed briefly with garlic and seasoning. Add 100g of drained, roughly chopped sun-dried tomatoes (in oil) to the mushroom filling. The artichoke version is more complex and slightly more acidic in flavour than the spinach version — the brine from the artichokes and the sweetness of the sun-dried tomatoes create a more assertive, Mediterranean-inflected white lasagna.
- Spinach, Mushroom, and Walnut White Lasagna: Add 100g of roughly chopped toasted walnuts to the mushroom filling at the end of cooking. The walnuts add a meaty, slightly bitter counterpoint to the creaminess of the béchamel and the earthiness of the mushrooms, as well as additional texture in the finished bake. Toast the walnuts in a dry pan for 4–5 minutes before adding.
Nutritional Highlights (Per Serving — Based on 6 Servings)
| Calories | Protein | Carbs | Fiber | Fat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~480 kcal | 17g | 58g | 6g | 20g |
Storage
- Refrigerator: Store cooled lasagna covered in the baking dish or in a sealed container for up to 4 days. The lasagna firms significantly when cold, making it easier to portion cleanly from the refrigerator than when freshly baked.
- Reheating (individual portions): Reheat in the microwave, covered loosely, with a splash of oat milk for 3–4 minutes until steaming throughout. The splash of oat milk prevents the béchamel from drying out during reheating.
- Reheating (whole dish): Cover with foil and bake at 180°C fan for 30–35 minutes until heated through. Remove the foil for the final 5 minutes to re-crisp the cheese topping.
- Freezer: This lasagna freezes very well. Cool completely, then freeze in the baking dish (wrapped tightly in cling film and foil) or in individual portions in sealed containers. Store for up to 3 months. Defrost overnight in the refrigerator and reheat as above.
- Make-ahead: Assemble the lasagna up to 24 hours in advance, cover tightly with cling film, and refrigerate unbaked. Bake directly from the refrigerator, adding 10–15 minutes to the foil-covered bake time. This is an excellent strategy for entertaining — the lasagna can be fully prepared the day before and simply put in the oven when guests arrive.
Frequently Asked Questions
My white lasagna came out watery — what happened?
Waterlogged lasagna is almost always caused by insufficient drying of the spinach, insufficient browning of the mushrooms (which means they released their water in the oven rather than before), or both. Go back through the steps: the squeezed spinach should feel almost dry before it goes into the dish; the mushrooms should be deeply golden, noticeably reduced in volume, and visibly dry (not wet or shiny with liquid) before assembly. A thin béchamel that was not sufficiently cooked can also contribute — the béchamel should coat the back of a spoon and hold a clear line when a finger is drawn through it.
Can I use no-boil lasagna sheets?
Yes — no-boil (oven-ready) lasagna sheets can be used directly without par-cooking. Increase the béchamel quantity slightly (add an extra 100ml of oat milk to the sauce) as no-boil sheets absorb more liquid during baking than par-cooked standard sheets. Ensure the béchamel covers the pasta sheets fully in each layer, as any exposed no-boil sheet edges will remain hard.
Can I make this gluten-free?
Yes — use certified gluten-free lasagna sheets (Barilla gluten-free works well), replace the plain flour in the béchamel with an equal quantity of a 1:1 gluten-free plain flour blend (or potato starch for a very smooth béchamel), and use tamari in place of soy sauce. All other ingredients are naturally gluten-free.
How do I stop the top layer of pasta from drying out?
The top pasta layer dries if it is not fully covered by béchamel. Make sure the final béchamel layer covers every part of the top pasta sheet all the way to the edges of the dish, and cover the dish tightly with foil for the first phase of baking — the foil traps steam and keeps the top layer moist until the cheese is added and the uncovered browning phase begins.
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