Fancy Baked Ziti

This baked ziti isn’t the kind your local pizza place makes, with just ziti and sauce and cheese. But it isn’t pretentious, either. It’s a perfect mix of pasta, cheese, and flavor!

It’s not often that I create a ready-to-publish recipe on the first try. I think it happened once before, although I can’t remember what it was. But it happened today.

It probably helped that it was a combination of three recipes, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. But still, I couldn’t believe how perfect it was!

A few weeks ago I listened to an episode of one of my favorite food podcasts—The Recipe with Kenji and Deb—all about baked ziti. Now, if you like either Kenji Lopez-Alt or Deb Perelman, you should check out their podcast. It’s always interesting, and they have some funny arguments (like the best way to cut a grilled cheese sandwich).

I’ve always loved baked ziti, and I make it every once in a while. But I’ve always made it in a really simple (and dare I say bland) way: ziti, plain jarred sauce, ricotta, mozzarella. I don’t know why, it’s just always how I was served it, especially if we got take-out from a pizza place. I thought that’s what baked ziti was!

And it’s not as though I didn’t love it. It was warm, cheesy, and comforting. I never really thought about it much.

But, it was one-note. I would never make another pasta dish that way, I’d be embarrassed!

So, this particular episode of The Recipe was a revelation. Baked ziti with onions? Garlic? Spinach? Fresh herbs??

Their recipes were very different from each other. Deb’s recipe had meat in it, which I skipped, since I’m vegetarian (she says to sub in mushrooms, but I hate mushrooms). It also had sautéed onions and garlic, which I thought would be a great addition, but she also started with canned tomatoes and dried spices instead of a ready-made sauce, and I thought marinara sauce would bring better flavor without more work. Plus, her recipe wasn’t ricotta-centric, and ricotta is a baked ziti deal breaker for me.

The one addition I wavered on was baby spinach. I love spinach, but I was worried that it would affect the indulgent nature of the dish. I don’t look to baked ziti to get my greens! But I decided to try it.

Kenji’s recipe, on the other hand, had jarred sauce (but he suggested Rao’s, way better than what I usually used, so I went with that), heavy cream, and fresh parsley and basil, all things that I thought would improve my dish. But his recipe also used a weird method for the ziti: soaking them in hot water for half an hour, and then cooking them the rest of the way in the oven.

At first I was intrigued by this method, but the more comments I read, the more suspicious I was. It seemed to work perfectly for some people, and was a disaster for others. Besides, if I was going to sautée onions and garlic, I might as well use the pot to cook the ziti first. It didn’t seem like much more trouble than soaking the ziti, and I knew it would be cooked right.

So, I took some things from each recipe, combined them with some things from mine, and created a Frankenstein baked ziti recipe.

And it is AMAZING! Even my husband loved it, and he’s a meateater who always claims that pasta without some kind of meat in it isn’t a main course. But it was his main course tonight!

And I needn’t have worried about the spinach. It was a perfect addition. Just spinach on its own would have been a bit out of place, but with the flavor of the sautéed onions and garlic, it all blended together really well. I will never leave the spinach out.

This is the perfect recipe for a cold winter night, when you want to curl up in front of the TV (I put it together while watching Love, Actually and ate it while watching Elf). And while I haven’t tried assembling it ahead, I’ve done enough make-ahead pasta recipes to know that you could put this together on day one and bake it on day two. I would just bring it out of the fridge an hour ahead to bring it closer to room temperature, and add 10 or 15 minutes to the cooking time if things aren’t hot and bubbly.

A note about the top getting crispy: I like it when some of the pasta on top gets a little crunchy, but not burned. And a few of the pieces of ziti that were sticking up out of the pasta got very crispy, even a little black. So if you don’t like that, spend an extra minute smoothing out the top and making sure that no pieces of pasta are sticking out higher than the rest.

Also, this should be served hot. If you let it cool down, put some foil on the top and heat it back up for 15 or 20 minutes, until the cheese is melty again.

So curl up with a blanket, and enjoy this flavorful baked ziti with a good movie. Merry Christmas!