Ever since there’s been pasta, there’s been baked pasta dishes. I don’t actually know if that’s the case, I just need an opening paragraph for this entry. It just feels like it ought to be true and I don’t really know where I would check to verify that information. I was born in 1987. Maybe someone decided to slather pasta in sauce, add cheese on top, and bake it in the oven for the very first time in 1986. How do you find these things out? Who do you ask? Are there books in the library just about pasta? I don’t know. I just want to eat it, and I want it to taste good.
Here are the things I did to make mine taste good over a couple of iterations. I made this once and it was good, but it was a little too dry at the end, which is why I decided to add a little more moisture. I could have added water and thinned the sauce out, but water doesn’t have any flavor unless you live in a place that does water wrong (shoutout to my aunt who lives in Flint, Michigan, I hope that growth on your neck is getting smaller), and I wanted my liquid additions to bring something to the party. I started a pot of water boiling and started browning the sausage in a large pot. While the meat was browning, I finely diced my onion. My first moisture addition was in the form of a red bell pepper, which I removed the seeds and ribs from and then diced very fine. I added it to the meat pot along with the onion to cook down after the meat was browned. A bell pepper is basically crunchy water with a little flavor added in, and the salt I put on while I cooked it down pulled out a fair bit of moisture that pooled on the bottom of the pan, making it easy to partially remove the browned flavor bits from the meat I’d already cooked there.
Whatever else was still stuck on was easy to deglaze with some liquid and this was a perfect chance to add some more flavor. So I added a cup of beef stock. Actually, I wrote a cup of beef stock in the recipe because I am sure that if you have a single cup of beef stock around, it’ll be really good, and add that little extra something that beef broth just doesn’t have in terms of richness. That said, who ever has a single cup of beef stock around? Maybe if you already made some for soup or something and saved it, sure. But I never do, and I’m not going to open a box of stock just for 8 oz, so I went to my old standby which is a teaspoon of the powdered stuff in a cup of hot water. Food bloggers and YouTubers all over the internet will tell you if you don’t make your own stock from oxtail and vegetables and simmer it for 12 hours on the stove it’s not worth eating. People on the internet are wrong about a lot of things, including this thing. Use what you have on hand.
While all this was going on, my pasta water had started boiling. I salted the water and added the pasta, then went back to the sauce. I added the tomato paste, which I let cook for a minute, then the can of tomatoes, and the basil, and let it cook over medium heat while the pasta cooked. I wanted to pull the pasta way early. Not al dente early. Earlier than that. Like at the point that you could bite through it and technically probably call it food again, but that if you were served it at a restaurant, you would probably send it back because it was still a little crunchy and not pleasurable to eat. That will let the pasta absorb some liquid from the sauce and continue to cook in the oven and be a perfect texture by the time it’s done cooking.
I didn’t drain the pasta, just brought it over with a metal spider, and whatever water happened to come along with it just made my tomato sauce a little thicker and a little glossier. Lovely, just what I wanted. Some people say to add some sugar to the sauce to cut down on the acidity. I didn’t do this. Partially because I happen to like the acidity, and partially because there’s some sweetness in the bell pepper that I think already accomplished this goal.
Finally it was time to layer this thing. I could have put it in a baking dish but to make cleanup easier I’d started the meat in my largest dutch oven and built the sauce in there. Everything was now in that pot so I decided to just bake it in the dutch oven. So I took half of the pasta out and set it aside, added the layered ingredients – ricotta, parmesan, mozzarella, parsley flakes, salt, and pepper, and then put the rest of the pasta and sauce back on top and repeated the cheese layers. Life is too short to do more dishes.
The final result was delightful. The cheese and meat and pasta tasted delicious and there was a rich, deeper flavor carried by the beef broth. I’m very happy with the way this came out!
Baked Ziti
Equipment
- 1 Baking Dish
- 1 Metal Spider
Ingredients
- 1 pound italian sausage
- 1 medium yellow onion diced fine
- 1 large red bell pepper diced fine
- 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 1 clove garlic
- 1 cup beef stock or prepared bouillon
- 2 6-ounce cans tomato paste
- 1 14-ounce can diced tomato
- 1 teaspoon dried basil
- 1 16-ounce package ziti pasta , undercooked
- 16 ounces ricotta cheese
- 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
- 1 pound shredded mozzarella cheese
- 2 tablespoons parsley flakes
- 2 teaspoons salt
- 1/2 teaspoon pepper
Instructions
- Bring water to a boil and preheat oven to 350°.
- Brown sausage and crumble over high heat. Depending on how much fat is in the sausage, there may be enough rendered out of the sausage but, if the pan looks dry, add a tablespoon of olive oil.
- Add onions, bell pepper, and salt, and sauté over medium high heat until vegetables are tender. Add garlic and cook just until fragrant, then deglaze pan with beef bouillon.
- By this time, the water should be boiling. Start the pasta in the boiling water.
- In the pan with the meat and vegetables, add the tomato paste, and cook for a minute until it brightens in color. Reduce the heat, then add the canned tomatoes. Stir frequently and bring to a simmer. Add the dried basil.
- Continue to simmer until the pasta is just finished – pull pasta when it is still undercooked.
- Stir the pasta and a few splashes of the pasta water into the sauce to reach desired consistency.
- Assemble in layers. Start with half of pasta and sauce mixture, half of the ricotta, then top with half the parsley, half the parmesan, and half the mozzarella. Season layer with salt and pepper, then repeat all layers.
- Bake at 350° about 30 minutes.
Make it? Love it?
