What Exactly Is The Lasagna Fritta At Olive Garden?
At Olive Garden, you have two options when it comes to lasagna: the Lasagna Classico and the Lasagna Fritta. The Lasagna Classico, as you can probably guess, is a classic lasagna made with mozzarella, meat sauce, and lasagna noodles. However, Olive Garden's Lasagna Fritta is a bit different from what you might expect from a traditional lasagna. For starters, the Lasagna Fritta is part of the appetizer menu, which means the portion size is smaller than the Lasagna Classico. But that's not the only thing that sets it apart.
Unlike a traditional lasagna, the sauce, cheese, and pasta in the Lasagna Fritta isn't layered. Instead the dish consists of individual rolled-up lasagna noodles filled with a beef and sausage meat sauce. Lasagna fritta translates to "fried lasagna" in Italian, and as its name suggests, the pasta is breaded with parmesan and fried, making it crispier than its baked counterpart. Olive Garden serves this on a bed of alfredo sauce and tops it with grated parmesan and more meat sauce.
Is Olive Garden's lasagna fritta a traditional Italian dish?
When you eat at Olive Garden, it's generally understood that you're not getting authentic Italian food, and as a quick Google search will confirm, it's no different when you order the Lasagna Fritta. A handful of Italian cooks online have shared their own interpretation of fried lasagna, but none seem to resemble what Olive Garden serves, nor do they claim to be traditional Italian recipes.
While Olive Garden's Lasagna Fritta may not be an authentic Italian dish, Olive Garden claims that it's at least Italian-inspired, and this claim actually seems to check out. According to Nation's Restaurant News, which covered the launch of the menu addition in 2009, Lasagna Fritta was created after Olive Garden's culinary team visited Veneto, Italy to study the region's street food. Venice, one of the major cities in Veneto, is known for its fried cicchetti, or small bites such as fried cheese, fried meatballs, and fried shrimp. Fried lasagna isn't one of the traditional varieties of cicchetti, but it does make sense that Olive Garden would create its own version to put on the appetizer menu.
How Olive Garden makes its lasagna fritta
Because of how popular the menu item is, it's fairly easy to find copycat recipes for Olive Garden's lasagna fritta on the web. The majority of them suggest an approach that includes coating the rolled and filled lasagna with beaten eggs, then dredging it with breadcrumbs and grated cheese before pan-frying. But although this method seems to yield results similar to the real deal, it isn't how Olive Garden really makes them.
As a self-identified former Olive Garden employee revealed in a Reddit AMA, Olive Garden's appetizers, including the "frittas" (assumedly referring to both the lasagna fritta and the stuffed ziti fritta), come frozen. This likely means that the dish is pre-made, then simply reheated before a customer orders it. If you'd much rather enjoy a fresh lasagna, you're better off ordering Olive Garden's Lasagna Classico instead, which the restaurant itself has previously confirmed is made from scratch.