Baked Ziti is a dish that easily makes the list of Italian comfort food. Italians call this dish Pasta al Forno. It’s a delicious dish and another example of a versatile italian home style meal. This dish is made many different ways in different italian households.
Baked Ziti is a hearty meal great for a lazy Sunday afternoon when you can just lay back and relax. It’s is also one of those meals that is just as good, if not better, as a reheated leftover.
For those that don’t know, the word Ziti is just the name of a particular type of pasta that looks like a short tube.
You can switch it with almost any other pasta you like without changing the rest of the recipe. In fact, this recipe could just as well be call Baked Pasta. And like many Italian recipes, there are many variations of Baked Ziti involving different add ons, or what some might call “fixings.”
Baked Ziti – How It’s Made
Making Baked Ziti is just a matter of combining a few precooked items. You assemble them into a baking dish in a specific order and bake them in a 400° f oven for 30 to 40 minutes. Super easy!
What you need
You need a large baking pan or baking dish and a sheet of aluminum foil to cover the pan. You’ll also need to boil two or three eggs and you need cooked tomato sauce. Once you have the sauce and the other pre-cooked items ready, it all becomes a matter of assembly. Don’t worry, it’s all very easy and quick. You can find the recipe for the super quick sauce in our previous blog post – Tomato Sauce – A Basic Recipe.
Breaking it down step by step
Get your ingredients together
The quantities and the preparations are described in the recipe instructions below, but basically you’ll need the following.
1 lb. cooked ziti, hard boiled eggs sliced, tomato sauce precooked with mini-meatballs, mozzarella cheese shredded, pecorino romano or parmigiana cheese grated. The cheeses can be purchased already shredded and grated.
Assemble your ingredients
Baked Ziti – Final Notes
The are many variations of this dish. Instead of a plain tomato sauce, you could use a meat sauce (bolognese sauce) or a sauce with small meatballs (like we did here). You could even use larger meatballs if you wanted to. Larger meatballs have a recipe all their own and I’ll post it in a future blog post.
Other variations include using different cheeses like provolone and ricotta. Still more variations include adding chunks or slices of deli meat before the final top layer such as mortadella, prosciutto, salami, capicola, or soppressata. But probably not all at the same time! Sausages are also another add-on that can be used in this dish. Not a meat lover? No problem, just use your favorite veggies instead. I wasn’t kidding when I said this dish was versatile.
What about those mini meatballs?
As I mentioned, the tomato sauce used in this instance had little meatballs in it. To make those mini-meatballs, just take 1/4 – 1/2 lb. of unseasoned ground beef ( you can season it with salt and pepper if you like, your choice), flatten the ground beef on a cutting board, and use a large wet knife to gently divide into small squares. Keep rewetting the knife to keep the meat from sticking. Then with wet hands (keep your hands wet so the beef doesn’t stick to them and keep rewetting them), pick up a small square and with your finger and palm you roll it into a small ball and place on a baking sheet. Repeat the process until you’ve used up the ground beef. Bake in a 400°f preheated oven for 4 – 6 minutes until they are fully browned.
Add them to the tomato sauce, but avoid scooping up the grease from the pan, you don’t want that in the sauce. There is no need to fully cook the min-meatballs. They will continue to cook in the oven when incorporated into the Baked Ziti.
The final result
Are you willing to give this recipe a try? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear about your experience with this dish!
