What in the heck do you mean you put buffalo sauce in a lasagna?! I can imagine the barrage of comments already. I took on a challenge to make three unconventional lasagnas inspired by hot appetizer dips. Buffalo chicken was the first one I thought to create and man was it fun to make! A beautiful layered entree with a cheesy ricotta and buffalo sauce filled with crispy breaded buffalo-tossed chicken strips then glazed over with a blue and cheddar cheese sauce. It’s a masterpiece in fusioning classic bar food in a traditional Italian lasagna.

All lasagnas take time because it’s all about creating the best components first, then assembling it. The total prep time for this recipe is 30 minutes with a bake time of 40 minutes. I made three lasagnas, filmed a video, and conducted a taste test all in one 6-hour day. Remember that baking lasagna is possible if you give yourself time. It can be magical if you play around with different fillings, sauces, and toppings.

If you’ve made lasagna before you can understand that it’s just components layered with pasta, so making it buffalo-style just requires buffalo-style components. Starting off with a ricotta filling that gets mixed together with buffalo sauce, cream cheese, and green onion. This filling takes the job of both filling and sauce with the acidic element from the buffalo. It’s a key component in balancing the lasagna with the heavy breaded chicken and cheese sauce elements. It also provides the cream cheese element that reminds us of the best buffalo chicken dips. The flavor is mildly buffalo, but just enough to flavor the ricotta.

The next step is cooking and chopping up some breaded chicken. I went back and forth about whether to bread and cook these myself to get a better flavor. After weighing the pros and cons, I decided that using a good quality frozen pre-breaded chicken was best. No use in wasting time breading chicken and cooking when we have a whole lasagna to bake. Cutting corners by using good pre-cooked chicken is always the way in long recipes.

Last up is to make the blue cheese and cheddar cheese sauce. Blue cheese can be a bit of a pain to melt into a cheese sauce, so you will most likely end up blending the sauce after it finishes to smooth out the graininess the cheese adds.

As you start to assemble the lasagna, you will start to see the vision I had. The blue cheese element that reminds us of a blue cheese dipping sauce for those buffalo wings, and the buffalo ricotta filling that, with the added cream cheese, reminds us of buffalo chicken dip. The balance of the fillings with the sauce transforms these components into lasagna. Tomato sauce lasagna, who?

The colors of this lasagna are so enticing as it comes out of the oven. It fills the room with the smell of buffalo chicken as you ‘try’ to wait patiently for it to cool slightly. I can see this at the dinner table with a light salad or, sticking with the theme, some carrot and celery sticks. This recipe does a beautiful job of showcasing what lasagna can be, and I’m so excited for the future of lasagna. It’s by far my favorite iteration of lasagna yet!