Ingredients
20 pounds link or bulk Italian sausage, sliced or crumbled
4 1-pound packages mixed frozen pepper strips
3 large onions, chopped
3 gallons spaghetti sauce
4 large carrots, shredded into sauce
16 cups sliced fresh mushrooms
1-1/2 quarts tomato juice
3 tbsp Italian seasoning
2 tbsp salt
1 tbsp pepper
12 pounds rotini (corkscrew) noodles, cooked and drained
5 pounds mozzarella cheese, sliced
8 pounds mozzarella cheese, shredded
Mixed with 1 pound grated parmesan cheese

Instructions
Brown sausage, remove from pan, wilt onions, mushrooms and peppers, drain fat. Mix together the spaghetti sauce, carrots, tomato juice, Italian seasoning, salt and pepper. Grease 8 6-quart or 14 (9x13") baking pans. Layer half of the noodles, all the sliced cheese and half the meat and sauce in pans. Repeat layers of noodles and sauce. Sprinkle shredded mozzarella and Parmesan cheese mix equally over each pan. Cover and bake at 350 degrees F. for 1 hour. Uncover and bake 15 minutes longer or until cheese is melted.

Heads up! If you refrigerate the pans before baking, reduce the baking temp to 325 degrees and increase cooking time another 20-30 minutes.

Coat the cookwell (the removable pan) well with a nonstick spray or shortening (oil does not work well here) and coat with the old fashioned grated type Parmesan that comes in a shaker- you don't want the fancier shredded type for this job.

Layer the lasagna from your favorite recipe into the pan- it needs to be 4 inches deep or less, which means the maximum amount is about what you would put in 4 9x13 pans. Refrigerate covered until ready to bake.

Preheat the roaster with the lid on to 300 degrees for 20 minutes.

Have a can of tomato juice or an equivalent of whole milk for a creamy sauce, available.

Insert the cookwell and cover. Bake until the temp in the middle of the dish is 165 degrees, which takes about 3-4 hours depending on the thickness of the lasagna. Check about every 1 hour to see if it needs liquid added, use the reserved liquid.

You CAN prepare the giant lasagna way ahead and freeze it, by lining the cookwell thouroughly with foil, doing the nonstick spray thing, making the lasagna, freezing it, and popping it out of the pan into an oversize freezer bag. But this is important: if you do it this way, take it out of the freezer three days ahead, nonstck spray and cheese-coat the cookwell, put in the unwrapped lasagna and LET IT THAW covered IN THE REFRIGERATOR 3 DAYS. These giant lasagnas do not do well cooked from frozen in the roaster, though they can be cooked from frozen in the regular oven.

Bake in the PREHEATED roaster at 300 degrees. When it reaches temp, turn down to 180 and keep covered until served.

• Cook just until ‘al dente’, cooked but firm, especially if you will be reheating later.
• Use a tall narrow light weight pot with a lid.
• Allow 1.25 gallons (5 quarts) of water for EACH 1 pound of pasta. Add 1 teaspoon of salt for each pound of pasta.
• Reuse cooking water ONLY once. This means you need to heat new water for the third batch!
• Bring water to a full rolling boil, this takes about 20 minutes for EACH gallon of water in the pot. Remember, you can only reuse the water once before it gets too starchy to cook properly, so figure out how much you need to boil and how long to heat up.
• Add pasta only when the water comes to a rolling boil (+212F). Lower long pasta into the water gradually as it bends. Pour short pasta into boiling water in a steady stream. Stir gently until it comes back to a boil and then occasionally to prevent sticking.
• Start timing when the water returns to a boil.
• Cover the pot to cook the top pasta at the same rate as the bottom.
• “gli spaghetti amano la compagnia” - “Spaghetti loves company”. Begin checking for doneness 2 minutes BEFORE you expect it to be done. Count 8-12 minutes for the first pound, plus about 5 minutes for each additional pound. Drain. Serve at once, or use sauce or butter to prevent it from sticking to itself. Stir to cool; avoid rinsing in cold water unless you are going to use it for pasta salad. Rinsing the pasta makes the sauce watery and keeps the sauce from sticking to the pasta.
• Angel hair pasta and other very thin pastas, you may put in at a rolling boil, clap the lid on and turn off the heat. The residual heat will cook it done in 5-6 minutes.